TOI correspondent from Washington: US Vice President J.D. Vance on Tuesday stressed the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration stance, signaling deep skepticism toward the H-1B visa program while framing national “loyalty” as the ultimate test for immigrants.Speaking at a TurningPointUSA town hall in Georgia, Vance sidestepped a question from an Indian-origin student about the decades-old green card backlog, focusing instead on systemic fraud in the program and cultural expectations of assimilation, rather than offering a policy fix for the estimated 1 million Indians currently stuck in line for permanent residency.
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‘The Great Contributors’: How J.D. Vance balances praise for Indian roots with criticism of H1B visa fraud
The US vice president, who has long described the H-1B program as a tool for “big tech” to suppress American wages – despite receiving funding from big tech companies early in his political career – told the young audience that the system is currently riddled with abuses.
“You can believe that there is a lot of fraud in the H-1B space, while also believing that there are people who came to the United States and enriched this country,” he said, citing his wife, Second Lady Osha Vance, and her parents, as prototypes of successful integration.“Look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants from India… I love my in-laws and they were great contributors to the United States. I also believe that when you become an American citizen, whether you have nine generations of lineage or zero, one of your obligations is to think about the best interest of your country, not the country you come from,” he said.
Expressing anger at a Ukrainian American who pressured him to supply weapons to Ukraine, he said his father-in-law, who moved to the United States and became an American citizen, never told him that he had to make a decision because it was in the best interest of the country he came from. “As prevalent as this attitude is among the new generation of (immigrants), it makes Americans feel welcome,” Vance said. “To be an American is to take care of Americans first, and that is the perspective we have to take in our immigration policy.”
Vance’s in-laws, Radhakrishna “Krish” Chilukuri and Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri, immigrated from Andhra Pradesh, India, in the late 1970s. Krish Chilokuri, a mechanical engineer who studied at IIT Madras, is a lecturer in aerospace engineering at San Diego State University. Dr. Lakshmi Chilokuri is a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego. Both have built distinguished academic careers in California after arriving legally decades ago.While the student’s question concerned law-abiding, high-tax professionals who wait decades for green cards due to country-based quotas, Vance sidestepped the issue, avoiding any promise to raise the cap by 7% per country, which favors smaller countries (such as Nepal and Sri Lanka, whose immigrants obtain residency faster). Instead, he suggested that significantly reducing immigration across the board was the only way to allow the American social fabric to cohere.“The system only works if everyone thinks of themselves as Americans first,” Vance said, effectively ending the exchange without addressing the specific legislative hurdles facing those currently backlogged.The remarks were met with enthusiastic praise from the MAGA wing of the party, which has become more vocal recently about limiting legal immigration. But it has been criticized by critics, some of whom have pointed out that the loyalty test does not seem to apply to American Jews, many of whom lobby publicly and loudly for Israel. As the 2026 midterms approach, Vance’s measured stance reflects the tightrope the Trump administration must walk: satisfying its restrictive base without alienating the technology and business sectors that rely on H-1B talent.
