Vice President JD Vance launches crackdown on legal immigration visas
Vice President JD Vance announced a sweeping crackdown on four major legal immigration visa programs – H‑1B, Optional Practical Training (OPT), Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) and J‑1 – during a press conference in Washington, DC on September 10, 2026.
The administration framed the actions as necessary to curb alleged fraud and protect American workers from being displaced by foreign labor, marking a decisive turn toward a stricter immigration stance after a contentious debate within the administration in 2024.
On the H‑1B front, Vance pointed to a dramatic 92% drop in registrations from the largest IT outsourcing firms and reaffirmed the $100,000 fee per application that the Trump administration had previously reinstated. He warned that companies laying off U.S. workers would face tighter scrutiny before receiving new H‑1B approvals, emphasizing that the program’s 85,000‑annual cap remains in place.
For the OPT program, the Department of Homeland Security proposed a $70,000 fee for new applications and a $30,000 fee for extensions. A DHS spokesperson said the fees are needed to address “the program’s rampant fraud” and warned the program could be shut down if the fees are not implemented.
“Optional Practical Training was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” the spokesperson said.
The PERM program saw a targeted enforcement action against Microsoft, which Vance said had “abused the system.” The administration announced that Microsoft would be barred from applying for PERM, effectively preventing the company from converting H‑1B workers to permanent resident status.
Vance also singled out a list of elite universities – including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT – for their high usage of J‑1 visas in federally funded grants, noting that these institutions “employ J‑1 visas at a rate of about 61%, well above the national average of 38%.” The move challenges a program that annually issues roughly 300,000 J‑1 visas for work‑study exchange programs.
Collectively, the affected programs support millions of legal foreign workers across technology, academia and research sectors. Critics warn the proposed fees and suspensions could cripple pipelines of skilled labor, while supporters argue they are essential to safeguarding American jobs.
The anti‑fraud task force will continue to review additional universities and corporations over the coming weeks, and officials hinted that further regulatory measures could be introduced pending the task force’s findings.
