President Donald Trump defended the H-1B visa program this week, arguing that the U.S. must “bring in talent” from abroad rather than rely solely on American workers — a stance that triggered swift pushback from conservatives who say the program suppresses American wages.

The H-1B program allows U.S. companies to bring in highly skilled foreign workers for up to six years. Large tech companies rely heavily on the program, arguing that the visas help them stay competitive. Critics counter that the program suppresses wages and displaces American workers. 

In a FOX News interview on “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump on whether H-1B visas undermine American employees.

“If you want to raise wages for Americans,” Ingraham said, “you can’t flood the country with thousands of foreign workers.”

“I agree, but you do also have to bring in talent,” the President responded.

When Ingraham countered, “We have plenty of talented people here,” Trump said, “No, you don’t have — you don’t have certain talents. And you have to — people have to learn.”

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory, we’re going to make missiles,’” he added.

Trump doubled down later in the exchange, saying, “I know you and I disagree on this. You can’t just say ‘a country’s coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re going to start making missiles. It doesn’t work that way.”

The interview came weeks after Trump signed a September executive action imposing a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas — a significant hike that the administration said would encourage companies to hire U.S. graduates over foreign workers, CatholicVote reported. 

Pushback to Trump’s comments came quickly. An October clip of Vice President JD Vance in which he rejected the idea that America needs to import talent resurfaced shortly after Trump’s interview.

“This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things – that you have to implore a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things – I just reject that,” Vance said in an October interview. “I think that if we invest in our own people, we can do a lot of good.”

Critics also pointed to a sharp reversal from Trump’s 2016 campaign stance on the program. According to the American Presidency Project, Trump said in March 2016 that H-1B recipients were “temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay.”

“I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program,” he reportedly said at the time. “No exceptions."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., offered a similar response on her personal X account, writing, “I believe in the American people. I am one of you. I believe you are good, talented, creative, intelligent, hard working, and want to achieve. I am solidly against you being replaced by foreign labor, like with H1Bs.”

Other Republicans warned the stance could badly harm the GOP heading into the 2026 midterms.

“This is insane — we’re going to lose the mid-terms so badly,” Anthony Sabatini, a Republican county commissioner in Florida, said in a Nov. 11 X post. “We’ve never seen an administration crash & burn in its first year so badly — for no reason other than to appease donors and special interests.”

Meanwhile, the White House insisted that the administration will continue using existing visa programs and has strengthened oversight of them. 

“Under the Trump administration, we’ve sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards, to all of that,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told FOX News Nov. 12, “but also more people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before. More people are becoming citizens.”

The H-1B debate wasn’t the only flashpoint from Trump’s interview. He also defended a plan to admit 600,000 Chinese students into the U.S., even as Ingraham noted that “a lot of MAGA folks” oppose allowing “hundreds of thousands of foreign students” into the U.S.”

“It’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business,” Trump said, adding, “But one thing: you don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country, destroy our entire university and college system. I don’t want to do that.”

>> Trump defends Chinese student visas and 50-year mortgage plan, blames Democrats for shutdown in FOX interview <<