Immigrant’s Daughter Asks JD Vance a Question On Green Cards That He Conveniently Skirts Around
Vice President JD Vance was confronted at a Turning Point USA event by a student, who claimed to be a daughter of legal immigrants, about the difficulty of obtaining American citizenship. When asked how the Trump administration intends to tackle the long queues for a Green Card, Vance gave a non-answer.
The student claimed that she is aware of Vance speaking up against the H-1B visa in the past. She further said that she and her family have been residing in the United States for more than ten years. The student herself was born in the United States.
“For people who have been here on H-1B visas, it’s been really hard, like getting the Green Card based on everything with quotas,” she said. In that length of time, her family has practically rooted itself in the United States.
“How do we fix the immigration system for people who have been waiting for the green cards for so long?” she also revealed that her family would have taken 150 years just to acquire the green card under the Biden administration.
The student followed up with her question, “How is the Trump administration trying to fix that for people who have been here, are paying taxes, and are doing a lot of stuff that citizens do, but they can’t do what a lot of citizens do? We’re also looking for the American dream.”
Migration is not this administration’s priority
It’s a question that many migrant families are faced with. One pathway often taken by immigrants is to find employment in the United States, gain a working visa, and then acquire citizenship overtime. But becoming a citizen is often rife with challenges because the United States is a competitive country.
He said, “I think there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system. You can believe on one hand that there’s a lot of fraud in the H-1B system while also believing that there are people who’ve come to the United States in the past who have enriched this country.” Vance also prefaced his reply by praising his Indian in-laws and his wife, Usha.
He continued, “But I also think that when you become an American citizen, whether your family has nine generations of lineage in the United States or whether your family has zero generations of lineage in the United States… But one of the obligations of citizens is that you have to think about the best interest of the country and not the country you came from beforehand… The system only works if you think of yourself as American.
Vance also made an example of supposed American-Ukrainians who confronted him about wanting to defund Ukraine’s defense against Russia. He compared this incident to his American-Indian father-in-law, whom Vance said has never told him to support India’s best interests.
If legal migration isn’t an option, what now?
What does any of these have to do with the initial question? Absolutely nothing, and it’s a roundabout way of revealing that the Trump administration has no current plans to remedy the broken immigration system. Vance’s lack of an answer isn’t surprising, especially since he’s also in leadership of an administration that has been cracking down on legal migration, from revoking temporary protected status for people from several countries to restricting the number of H-1B workers.
The H-1B visa is granted to non-immigrants who intend to work in a specialty occupation that has “a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent.” Nevertheless, Vance has been under scrutiny for implying that H-1B visa holders caused layoffs of American citizens in tech.
Moreover, instead of easing access to H-1B visas, the Trump administration has imposed a $100,000 fee as a prerequisite for eligibility. It’s unclear how putting a hefty fine on this type of visa is sure to weed out the quality of workers, but the mandate adds a requirement that has nothing to do with meritocracy.
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