J.D. Vance, considered to be a top contender to succeed Donald Trump as president, recently made one of the most striking statements by a D.C. politician when it comes to H1B visas.

"My view is the H-1B program is completely broken, and I’d be very supportive of just eliminating it," Vance said Thursday during an interview with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec aboard Air Force Two. 

Vance's comments cut directly to the biggest complaint about H-1B visas: a program sold as a way for American companies to recruit highly skilled foreign talent can also create an incentive to substitute less expensive foreign labor for American workers.

"If you want to say, ‘I’d like to bring a genius into the United States of America,’ you can have that conversation," Vance said.

"But if you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who’s an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius," he continued. "That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people."

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Vance said the problem isn't confined to Silicon Valley, arguing that accounting firms and other employers have also "totally taken advantage of" the system. And he put some of the blame squarely on Congress.

"Congress was not going to reform the H-1B program because unfortunately a lot of people were bought by the cheap labor lobby," Vance told Posobiec. "Meanwhile, we in the Trump administration are trying to at least make it less fraudulent."

Vance has been one of the most public-facing vice presidents in recent memory. As reported by RedState colleague Nick Arama, he recently hit the campaign trail in Florida, where he faced down hecklers and sparked the classic "USA" chant that has been a mainstay of Trump rallies for a decade.

The Trump administration is already trying to make using H-1Bs dramatically more expensive to limit their abuse.

President Donald Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B petitions through a presidential proclamation, but that policy has run into trouble in federal court. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. blocked federal agencies from enforcing the fee, concluding that the government hadn't followed the required rulemaking procedures.

The vice president also blamed Congress for failing to overhaul the system.

But H-1B isn't the only foreign-worker program drawing scrutiny from mass immigration opponents. One reaction to Vance’s remarks argued that Washington should also focus on H-4 employment authorization and Optional Practical Training, or OPT.

H-4 is a dependent status available to spouses and children of certain H-category visa holders. H-4 children cannot simply work because of that status, and employment authorization for spouses is limited to certain cases, principally families whose H-1B worker has reached particular stages of the employment-based green-card process.

OPT, meanwhile, isn't a separate visa. It allows eligible F-1 students to work temporarily in jobs related to their field of study. Standard OPT can provide up to 12 months of employment authorization, while qualifying STEM graduates can receive a 24-month extension, potentially allowing up to three years of work authorization.

This matters because eliminating H-1B alone would not necessarily settle the larger political fight over foreign labor. OPT can allow graduates to work before obtaining H-1B sponsorship, while eligible H-4 spouses can receive employment authorization because of their spouse’s position in the employment-based immigration system. Critics therefore increasingly view H-1B, OPT and H-4 employment authorization as interconnected parts of a much larger labor pipeline.

Many have been critical of Vance because Trump has been talking about the displacement of American workers through H-1B for a decade. Yet the problem seems to be ongoing.

In a March 2016 campaign statement, Trump accused companies of importing temporary foreign workers “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,” Trump declared, promising an “absolute requirement to hire American workers first.”

Trump’s position during that campaign was not entirely linear. Earlier that same night, he said during a Republican debate that he was “softening” his position because America needed to retain highly skilled graduates. His subsequent statement returned to a much harder line against using H-1B as a source of lower-cost labor.

Once in office, Trump signed his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order and called for H-1B visas to favor the “most-skilled and highest-paid applicants” rather than workers who could replace Americans for less money.

Vance is taking Trump's argument to its logical endpoint: If Congress cannot prevent H-1B from being used to undercut American workers, he is prepared to scrap the program. That puts the next move squarely in Congress.

“I understand people are annoyed,” Vance said. “What I would say is tell your congressman to fix this program.”