President Donald Trump’s top deputies are sparring over the H-1B visa program, which is profitable for investors but increasingly toxic among the younger voters needed by the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.

“We’re going to keep using our visa programs,” Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem told Fox News on November 12. “We’re just going to make sure that they have integrity, that we’re actually doing the vetting of the individuals who come into this country, that they want to be here for the right reasons, that they’re not supporters of terrorists and organizations that hate America,” Noem said.

In contrast, Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, downplayed the various visa programs, including H-1B visas, saying they were for temporary niche jobs instead of replacing American white-collar professionals in many technology jobs:

For years — 20, 30 years — we have offshored precision manufacturing jobs. And the President’s point here is, again, we can’t snap our fingers and say, “You’re going to learn how to build ships overnight. We want to bring  [the] semiconductor industry back to the U.S.” … So I think the President’s vision here is to bring in overseas workers where these jobs went, who have the skills, 3, 5, 7, years to train the U.S. workers, then they can go home [and] the U.S. workers fully take over …  Americans can’t have that job [now] because we haven’t built ships in the U.S. for years, we haven’t built semiconductors.

“This idea of overseas partners coming in, teaching American workers, then returning home, that’s a home run,” said Bessent.

In late October, Vice President Vance directly slammed employers’ policy of using H-1B visa workers to slash payroll costs in the United States,

The H-1B visa worker program is touted as a means to import a few genius graduates, but is actually used to import cheap white-collar labor for employers … You want that super genius to stay in the United States of America and not go somewhere else. [But] what [the program] is actually used to do is hire an [foreign] accountant at a 50 percent discount to an American citizen. I don’t think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we’ve got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.

Vance amped up the pro-American message on November 12. It “gives me a great sense of anger because we never should have gotten to the point that we are today! – and it is because of failed leadership.”

The back-and-forth among Trump’s deputies spotlight the toxicity of the unpopular visa programs in American politics — and the intense efforts by pro-visa lobbyists to win over Trump and his deputies, especially those likely to run for the White House in 2028.

Trump exposed the infighting when he partly endorsed the H-1B program during a Tuesday night broadcast with Laura Ingraham. He said:

“If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers,” Ingraham told Trump.

“I agree,” Trump replied to Ingraham’s comment about visa programs suppressing Americans’ salaries.

But Trump then added: “We also do have to bring in talent …. [we] don’t have certain talents and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, “I’m going to put you into a factory … to make missiles.”

Trump’s comments commingled various visa programs, including the L-1 visa training program used by foreign companies investing in U.S. job sites and the H-1B program, which is used to replace American graduates.

His comments prompted a furious response from many of his MAGA supporters online — many of whom cited the damage done by the visa programs to American graduates and their families, and to the GOP’s 2026 chances. “Trump broke everyone’s heart with this line about the American workforce and H-1B’s,” said Mike Cernovich.

“I don’t know who is talking to the president and telling him this nonsense, but it’s obviously someone who has his ear,” responded Rosemary Jenks, the cofounder and Policy Director of the Immigration Accountability Project (IAP). “When [Trump] is face-to-face with the problem, he gets it. He genuinely cares about American workers, but the voices in his [presidential] ear are not pro-American worker — they’re just not.”

“I think that there’s enough wiggle room in the comments for him or his officials to say, ‘You know, we have specific gaps in our labor force that we’re going to have to fill with foreign workers, it’s not clear that H-1B is doing that’ — that kind of thing,” Jenks said.

Jenks continued:

The bottom line is that the administration has actually been doing some good things on the high-tech workforce [issue] … We know that the people in [the Department of Homeland Security] understand the issue, or at least the people at [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services]. We know that the Labor Department has been talking a big game. We know that Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, has been investigating visa fraud and discrimination against American workers …  I think Scott Bessent understands the situation; he has said some amazing things about the impact of immigration on American workers and on the economy. [Transportation Secretary Sean] Duffy has been great.

In September, Trump signed a proclamation that revealed 2.5 million foreign visa workers are holding U.S. jobs, described the H-1B program as a national security threat, and announced a $100,000 fee on the arrival of some H-1B workers in 2026.  “The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program…. has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor … The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.”

“There’s a lot of will right now within this administration to address this problem [within the H-1B program], and a lot of it is new ways of enforcing old laws that are on the books,” Eric Sell, a Justice Department deputy to Dhillon, said on November 10.

“We’re still exploring the best, most efficient way to use the tools that are available to us,” he told a group of American professionals who met in Washington to brief legislators and their staffers about the damage caused by the H-1B program.

Sell told the group, which was organized by Kevin Lynn’s U.S. Tech Workers, that:

Contrary to many prevailing narratives, I don’t think all of the industry disruption is really the result of AI investment, but rather the all-too-common reach for cheap labor. I want to, want to make one thing crystal clear on with you all today, and that is regardless of what’s causing industry and workforce disruption under the leadership of President Trump and his administration, [the] advancements in technology will never be used as an excuse to forget the workers that built this country.  Those who seek to take advantage of America during times of chaotic economic growth will be held accountable — I want to make that absolutely clear.

So one of the hottest topics in Washington, DC right now, I’m sure you’re all aware of this, is the discussion of much-needed reform to our nation’s visa system. And I say much-needed reform because pretty much every meeting I go to on the issue of visa holders and workforce development, this issue comes up, and everyone has a negative reaction to it — at least everyone within the administration has a negative reaction to how it stands right now.

“If you take that progress and disregard the President’s comments from yesterday, it’s all good,” said Jenks, who also noted Trump’s huge success in shutting down nearly all migration across the Southern border.

But Trump, Vance, and other GOP leaders are politicians in a democracy, and so they need to zig-zag between the voters and their profit-maximizing donors. For example, Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of the private equity firm The Blackstone Group, is a major Wall Street donor who has talked with Trump about the visa workers.

“It is essential that we open our borders for those types of highly qualified people,” he said in a 2019 interview: “We’ve educated them, and we haven’t let them stay. This is, this is completely nonsensical …  I look at this just as a practical person and say, “Why would a country ever do this? We should fix this.”

In reality, the H-1B program has been used by India’s government to export and educate millions of college graduates. Many of them are now using their management authority in U.S. companies to export Americans’ private data and jobs into so-called “Global Capacity Centers” in India.

The Wall Street Journal is also using the debate to prod Vance into ignoring the visa programs during the 2028 primary race. The newspaper’s editorial board wrote on November 12:

Do legal immigrants enrich America or damage it? That’s one of the debates now emerging on the political right, including it seems even in the White House. President Trump says the U.S. needs skilled foreign workers, while Vice President JD Vance is signaling that he wants far fewer immigrants even if they arrive legally … For all of his campaigning against illegal immigration, Mr. Trump understands that America needs the world’s strivers to continue to prosper. Perhaps he can make that case to his young apprentice.

But American citizens need to protest administration flubs, Jenks said. “Americans should always speak up … Not only do we have the right, we have the obligation to speak against bad policy and for good policy,” she said, adding, “Someone or some group is giving President Trump really bad talking points.”