Vice President JD Vance said Thursday he would support eliminating the H-1B visa program entirely, calling it “completely broken” and accusing employers of exploiting it to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor. The comments, made during an interview aboard Air Force Two, add the vice president’s voice to a growing debate over legal immigration, American jobs, and whether a program created to bring specialized talent into the country has instead become a tool for wage suppression.

The stakes extend beyond politics into the daily lives of American workers and their families. Scripture consistently calls believers to care for the vulnerable and to pursue justice in the marketplace, and a program that critics say displaces qualified American workers in favor of cheaper foreign labor raises real questions about fairness, provision for families, and the integrity of institutions meant to serve the common good.

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From the Daily Wire:

“My view is the H-1B program is completely broken, and I’d be very supportive of just eliminating it,” Vance said. “But while we have it, what we have to do is protect American workers. So I understand people are annoyed. What I would say is tell your congressman to fix this program.”

“If you want to say, ‘I’d like to bring a genius into the United States of America,’ you can have that conversation,” Vance said. “But if you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who’s an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius.”

“Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby,” he told Posobiec. “Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent.”

Vance made the remarks in an interview with conservative influencer Jack Posobiec, telling him the program has been “totally taken advantage of” not just by technology companies but by accounting firms and other employers across multiple industries. He argued that bringing in a small number of highly specialized workers was a legitimate use of the program, but that replacing American employees with lower-paid foreign workers in ordinary professional roles amounted to “destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people.”

The administration’s attempts to rein in what it describes as abuse of the program have run into repeated legal obstacles. A second federal judge blocked enforcement of a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions this week, ruling that federal agencies failed to follow standard rulemaking procedures, after another judge struck down the same fee in June. That fee, created through a presidential proclamation, is separate from a $103,265 fee the Department of Homeland Security proposed in August through the normal regulatory process. The August proposal would apply to every H-1B petition subject to the annual cap, including petitions for workers with advanced degrees from American universities and those seeking to change their status from international student to H-1B worker. A USCIS spokesperson said the fee is meant to recover the government’s costs of adjudicating and vetting immigration petitions. The program itself is capped at 85,000 new visas each year, split between a general pool and one reserved for advanced-degree holders, and demand regularly exceeds that cap by a wide margin; the most recent lottery drew more than 211,000 registrations.

The H-1B debate ultimately centers on a question Scripture speaks to directly: how a nation treats its workers and whether its laws protect the vulnerable from exploitation. Proverbs 22:16 warns that oppressing the poor to enrich oneself leads only to poverty, a principle that applies whether the party doing the oppressing is a foreign worker’s employer or the systems that allow wages to be undercut. Leviticus 19:13 commands that a laborer’s wages not be withheld or delayed, reflecting God’s concern for just compensation. At the same time, Scripture calls believers to welcome the sojourner and treat foreigners fairly, as in Leviticus 19:34. A faithful public policy response should hold both truths together: protecting American workers from fraud and exploitation while treating foreign workers already here with dignity rather than scapegoating them for decisions made by employers and lawmakers.

Let’s pray for American workers whose jobs and wages have been affected by abuse of this program, that they would find just treatment and stable provision for their families. Let’s pray for lawmakers in Congress, that they would set aside the influence of lobbying interests and pursue genuine reform rather than allowing the program’s problems to persist unaddressed. Let’s pray for the judges reviewing these fee disputes, that wisdom and discernment would guide their rulings. And let’s pray for foreign workers currently in the H-1B system, that amid political debate they would not be treated as scapegoats but would be shown the fairness and dignity Scripture calls God’s people to extend to the sojourner.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from the Daily Wire. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore – https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/55238098217/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=190824799).