Kamal Ghorui
TOI correspondent from Washington: US Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday doubled down on the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration posture, signaling a deepened skepticism toward the H-1B visa program while framing national “loyalty” as the ultimate litmus test for immigrants.Speaking at TurningPointUSA townhall in Georgia, Vance deflected an Indian-origin student’s question regarding the decades-long green card backlog, instead pivoting to systemic fraud in the program and cultural expectations of assimilation, rather than offering a policy fix for the estimated million-plus Indians currently stuck in the permanent residency queue.The US Veep, who has long characterized the H-1B program as a tool for “big tech” to suppress American wages — despite being bankrolled by big tech at the start of his political career — told the young audience that the system is currently rife with abuse. “You can believe that there is a lot of H-1B fraud while also believing that there are people who have come to the United States who enriched this country,” he said, invoking his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, and her parents, as archetypes of successful assimilation.“Look, I am married to the daughter of immigrants from India…I love my in-laws and they’ve been great contributors to the United States. I also think when you become a US citizen, whether you have nine generations of lineage or zero, one of your obligations is to think of the best interest of your country, not the country you came from,” he said. Expressing his irritation at a Ukrainian-American who had pressed him for arms supply to Ukraine, he said his father-in-law, who moved to the U.S and became an American citizen, had never once told him he should make a decision because it’s in the best interest of the country he came from. “To the extent that attitude dominates among the new generation of (immigrants), that makes Americans feel welcoming. To be an American means to look out for Americans first and that’s the perspective we have to take to our immigration policy,” Vance argued. Vance’s in-laws, Radhakrishna “Krish” Chilukuri and Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri, immigrated from Andhra Pradesh, India, in the late 1970s. Krish Chilukuri, a mechanical engineer who studied at IIT Madras, is a lecturer in aerospace engineering at San Diego State University. Dr. Lakshmi Chilukuri 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 related to law-abiding, high-tax-paying professionals waiting decades for green cards because of country-based quotas, Vance skirted the issue, avoiding any promise to raise the 7% per-country cap, which favors smaller countries (such as Nepal and Sri Lanka, whose immigrants get residency faster). Instead, he suggested that massively lowering the immigration across the board was the only way to allow the American social fabric to cohere.“The system only works if everybody thinks of themselves as an American first,” Vance said, effectively ending the exchange without addressing the specific legislative hurdles facing those currently in the backlog.The remarks were met with enthusiastic praise from the MAGA wing of the party, which has recently grown more vocal about curbing even legal immigration. But it was panned by critics, some of whom pointed out that the loyalty test did not seem to apply to Jewish Americans, many of whom openly and vocally lobby for Israel. As the 2026 midterms approach, Vance’s calibrated stance reflects the tightrope the Trump administration has to walk: satisfying its restrictionist base without alienating the tech and business sectors that rely on H-1B talent.
