DeSantis H-1B Call: What Ending the Visa Would Take

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Nov. 4 that Republicans in Washington lost ground in the midterms in part because they never moved to “shut off H-1B visas.” The DeSantis H-1B remarks, made on Fox News, put the skilled-worker visa at the center of a Republican argument over what went wrong on Election Day, two months before Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress and any chance of ending the program by statute all but disappears.

“Why haven’t we done immigration, shut off H-1B visas? Why haven’t we codified Trump’s immigration executive orders?” DeSantis asked on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, according to IBTimes UK. Asked about the Senate filibuster, he said he had seen no sign that the current Republican senators wanted that kind of change, the outlet reported. Earlier the same day, at a press conference in Tallahassee, he called the results close to an “extinction-level event” for Republicans in many parts of the country, Fox 13 in Tampa reported.

For H-1B workers and the employers who sponsor them, the statement changes nothing on its own. What makes it worth reading closely is who said it and when. DeSantis has already acted on the idea where he has authority: in October 2025 he directed Florida’s public university system to curb H-1B hiring, WGCU reported, and the University of Florida later pulled an H-1B filing after it surfaced online. His comments now frame H-1B restriction as a test of Republican seriousness on immigration, a framing likely to follow the party into the 2028 presidential primaries.

Why a DeSantis H-1B shutoff would need Congress

The H-1B category exists because Congress wrote it into the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the annual cap of 65,000 new visas, plus 20,000 for holders of U.S. master’s or higher degrees, is set in statute at 8 U.S.C. 1184(g). A governor cannot bar private employers in his state from using a federal visa, and no president can repeal it. Ending the program would take a bill that clears the House and 60 votes in the Senate under current filibuster rules.

That path narrowed sharply on Tuesday. With Democrats set to hold both chambers in January, the new majority’s immigration agenda centers on oversight and enforcement funding, not on cutting skilled-worker visas. The practical effect of DeSantis’s remarks is to raise the pressure on the executive branch, which has already shown how far it can push without new legislation.

Three tools are already in play. A September 2025 presidential proclamation imposed a $100,000 payment on certain new H-1B petitions, and challenges to that payment are still moving through federal courts. In August, DHS proposed a separate fee of $103,265 on every cap-subject H-1B petition (91 Fed. Reg. 54817). And in October the Labor Department suspended PERM labor certifications at Microsoft and other large H-1B employers, closing the usual route from H-1B status to a green card at those companies.

The cost argument on both sides

Restrictionists cast the visa as a tool for replacing American workers. The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration levels, wrote this week of employers “laying off American workers and replacing them with cheaper H-1B foreign workers.” Employers see the cost question the other way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lost its district court challenge to the $100,000 payment in December 2025 and appealed to the D.C. Circuit, said the payment “makes H-1B visas cost prohibitive for businesses.”

The Chamber’s September 2026 comment on the proposed DHS fee offers the clearest look at the scale involved. Citing DHS’s own figures, it said the rule assumes about 85,000 cap-subject petitions a year and would raise roughly $8.8 billion annually, and that the fee would exceed 1 percent of revenue for about 11,051 small entities, 76 percent of the small businesses that filed cap-subject petitions in fiscal 2025. The Chamber argues DHS lacks authority to charge fees that fund agencies outside USCIS.

Those numbers frame the real question for the next two years. A statutory shutoff is out of reach for now, but a six-figure fee per petition could sharply cut demand among small and midsize employers without any change in the law. The decisions to watch are a final version of the DHS fee rule, the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. DHS (No. 25-5473), and whether the March 2027 H-1B registration season opens under the higher costs.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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