Vance Heralds New Fraud Crackdowns

News Analysis

Vice President JD Vance vowed on Oct. 8 to shut down a key pipeline immigrant workers use for permanent status.

Flanked at a White House press conference by FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito, and senior adviser to the president Stephen Miller, Vance said the government will block major companies such as Microsoft and Adobe from applying for permanent status for hundreds of thousands of workers in the country on H-1B visas.

“The H-1B visa program is meant to allow companies to bring in really the best of the best from outside the United States of America for positions that are completely impossible to fill with American workers,” Vance said. “Unfortunately, the program has become rife with fraud over the last several years, probably the last several decades.”

According to the vice president, companies such as Microsoft have been firing American workers and replacing them with more foreign workers on H-1B visas, meant for highly skilled workers in specialty occupations such as technology, science, and finance. Last year, the Trump administration added a $100,000 fee per visa, but the executive order is on hold pending litigation. The U.S. government caps the overall number of H-1B visas at 65,000 annually, plus another 20,000 for applicants with a master’s degree or higher from an American university. An H-1B visa holder has it for three years and can extend beyond that. Afterward, companies and their workers may apply for the Labor Department’s Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program. The PERM program is designed to ensure that there are not enough U.S. workers available or qualified to fill that job first.

Vance has previously said he’d rather cancel the entire H-1B visa program, but such an action would require congressional approval. When RCP asked whether the applications were fraudulent or simply legal but not the original intent, Vance said that companies have been lying on applications.

“When you apply for these visa programs, you make a couple of certifications. One of those certifications is that the person that you’re bringing in has a hyper-specialized, hyper-capable skill set,” Vance said. “And that’s clearly not the case if you’re just replacing one American worker with a foreign indentured servant and undercutting their wages in the process. And so the fraud is that they’re making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal.”

The White House’s anti-fraud task force alleges that companies have misused the PERM program to replace American workers instead of supplementing them. Over the past year, Vance and the team have made several announcements shutting down Medicare benefits applications, SNAP, and more. On Oct. 8, Vance said the group has saved $20 billion and secured more than 200 convictions of fraudsters in the past five months.

“Benefits fraud denies Americans their Medicaid and Medicare benefits. SNAP [fraud] takes the food out of the mouths of children. [Commercial driver’s license] fraud denies Americans a safe road,” Ferguson said during the briefing. “Immigration fraud denies the Americans the right to decide who will be citizens, fellow citizens of their country, and this fraud denies Americans their just wage—a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance.”

D’Esposito announced that the inspector general’s office would also investigate student worker visa fraud at nine universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California–Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT.

Vance claimed that Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers last year and replaced them with 6,300 H-1B visa holders and 3,000 green card holders. As part of the Oct. 8 actions, Microsoft and Adobe may no longer apply for PERM status for their H-1B workers. Vance said the move was temporary but did not give a date for lifting the restriction. Sonderling added the suspension to the largest IT outsourcing firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. He told reporters that these companies have requested nearly 3 million foreign workers since 2009. Of that number, though, the companies have received only 230,000 H-1B approvals and 100,000 PERM certifications. Amazon was not included in the list.

Only a few hours later, Trump awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at a summit in Washington. When asked about the timing, Vance said that the visa censure wasn’t personal but that companies would not be shown favoritism.

“Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company,” Vance said. “It’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans. So we’re going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, but we’re also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first.”

Some notable figures have come to the United States on H-1B visas, including Elon Musk and First Lady Melania Trump. (The first lady worked in New York as a model briefly under an H-1B visa and then obtained an EB-1 visa, also nicknamed the “Einstein Visa” for people with extraordinary ability in their fields. Musk arrived from South Africa to the United States on a foreign student visa, then received an H-1B worker visa, before receiving a green card. He became a naturalized American citizen in 2002.)

When asked how the government should decide who gets a specialized visa and whether future Elon Musks might be rejected under the Trump administration’s scrutiny, Vance maintained that the first priority must be for American workers but that the job market is open for foreigners to fill roles that Americans cannot.

“Question number two, very importantly, is this person a truly elite human being?” Vance said. “Are they truly bringing in a special set of skills and abilities and work ethic and competence? Unfortunately, what we see with most H-1Bs is that you’re taking somebody—I’m sure in most cases a decent human being—and they’re using them to replace an American middle class.”

Nevertheless, Republicans have been divided on legal pathways for foreign workers. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican fighting a close reelection battle, told the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies in June that he opposes the annual cap on green cards and will vote for more legal immigration pathways for skilled workers. Meanwhile, Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas proposed a bill on Oct. 5 to increase fines on employers to $250,000 per infraction.

From RealClearPolitics

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.