By AB Wire
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted the H-1B skilled-worker visa program and criticized proposals to increase visas for Chinese students during an appearance on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, saying the U.S. should “put the American people first” in immigration and education policy.
Pressed by host Laura Ingraham on skilled-worker visas, DeSantis said companies “game the system,” calling H-1B a “total scam.”
“These companies game the system,” he said on Tuesday night. “And you have some of these companies that are laying off large numbers of Americans while they’re also getting new H1B’s and renewing H1B’s. And a lot of times people used to say, “Well, you know we’re getting the cream the crop from all around the world.” The reality is that’s not actually what H1B’s are. Most of them are from … from one country, India. There’s a cottage industry about how all that people make money off this system.”
Ingraham framed H-1B as a mechanism favored by large corporations, naming Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, and cited a figure of about 400,000 approved applications from India, China and other countries, saying approvals have doubled since 2000. She questioned whether the American workforce had “declined that much,” arguing companies should raise wages so U.S. workers fill those roles.
DeSantis, who ran against Trump in the Republican presidential primary last year, pointed out that young Americans are struggling to find jobs in the “current job market because of artificial intelligence.”
He said, “You are starting to see evidence that they’re having a much tougher time because of what’s happening with AI. So if that’s going to continue to produce dislocations, why would we be importing foreign workers when we have our own people that we need to take care of.”
He added that tying workers to one employer can resemble “a form of indentured servitude” and suppress wages.
READ: We will change H-1B visas, green card system: Commerce Secretary Lutnick (August 26, 2025)
The governor also weighed in on a separate flash point: student visas for Chinese nationals. Ingraham referenced former President Donald Trump’s recent remarks about allowing “hundreds of thousands” of Chinese students, contending that level would nearly double the roughly 380,000 currently in the U.S. DeSantis said any foreign-student policy should “benefit the American people, not subsidize colleges,” and warned about national-security concerns, asserting that a “specific percentage” of Chinese students are “engaged with the CCP.” Citing Florida’s 12-campus state university system of just over 300,000 students, he argued a large influx would be outsized and said he would “rather see those slots go [to] American students.”
DeSantis tied his criticisms to the broader theme of the Trump era: prioritizing U.S. workers and interests. “The overall message… was we’re going to put the American people first,” he said, adding that approach should “apply to visa programs as well.”
A day earlier, on Monday, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Ingraham that the Trump administration plans to “change the H-1B program” and “change the green card,” previewing a new “gold card” aimed at “the best people.” Lutnick also asserted that the “average American makes $75,000 a year and the average green card recipient $66,000,” framing the proposed overhaul as a move away from what he called the “bottom quartile.” He did not provide sourcing for those earnings figures during the segment.
The exchanges sit within a broader push by prominent MAGA figures to curb or remake H-1B. Ingraham has repeatedly labeled the program a “scam,” and former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has linked H-1B to U.S.–India trade leverage while urging tighter controls, underscoring a political effort to steer skilled-immigration policy toward wage- or merit-based selection and away from today’s lottery-driven allocations.