Vice President JD Vance broke his silence amid the ongoing H-1B row and the controversy over the Donald Trump administration’s crackdown on universities. In an interview with the Newsmax, Vance dismissed criticisms that the crackdown will lead to an academic brain drain in the US. “First of all, I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that we’re going to have a brain drain,” Vance said. “If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens — some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly, by American citizens who built an incredible space program with American talent,” Vance said.“This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things … do you have to import a foreign class of [students] and professors to do these things? I just reject it. I just think we should invest in our own people. We can do a lot of good.”Vance’s comments came amid a fresh row over H-1B as the USCIS revealed that they have selected 120.141 H-1B visa applications for 2026. Several companies, including Walmart, announced job cuts, enraging US workers as they allege that the administration is not doing enough to put Americans first — as companies are still relying on cheap labor from outside. Moving on to his second point, Vance defended the crackdown on universities and said, “These institutions do an important job; but if you back up and look at American higher education over the past 20 or 30 years, there are a few incontrovertible facts.”“No. 1, the hard sciences, particularly biology, we have a terrible what is called a reproducibility crisis, meaning most of the papers that are published in biology don’t replicate; they’re not good science. So even our elite universities are not often doing good science.“Second important point, these institutions — sometimes by their own admission — are engaging in explicit racial discrimination, often against whites and Asians in explicit violation of the Civil Rights Act. If the people’s government can’t come in, given those problems, and say, ‘Look, we’ve got to have some accountability here; you can’t violate the Civil Rights Act,'” he continued.“We’ve got to make sure that if we’re funding science with federal money, you’re actually doing good science. That’s called accountability.”Vance said this is not ‘fascism’ and if the American taxpayer is frustrated with these universities, they have got to reform. “What they’re doing instead, what too many of them are doing and saying, ‘Aw, the Trump administration, this is dictatorial, this is fascism.’ No, this is democratic accountability, and I think universities ought to see it as an opportunity. If they do that, they’re going to get better, and the American people will be better off because of it,” he said.
