Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has faulted Senate Republicans for failing to curb the H-1B visa programme, the main route by which Indian technology professionals work in the United States, as he blamed the party's midterm losses partly on its own voters staying home
WASHINGTON — Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has faulted Senate Republicans for failing to curb the H-1B visa programme, the main route by which Indian technology professionals work in the United States, as he blamed the party's midterm losses partly on its own voters staying home.
Asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham how big a mistake it was not to get rid of the Senate filibuster, DeSantis said he "saw no indication that the current group of Republican senators were interested in doing that type of conservative change."
"I mean, why haven't we done immigration, shut off H-1B visas? Why haven't we codified Trump's immigration executive orders?" he told Ingraham. He also asked why Republicans had not "stripped jurisdiction from the federal courts over deportation cases."
"There's so many things that could have been done, they didn't even attempt it," DeSantis said.
He said the midterm result was "a rebuke of the president and the Congress by Democrats, independents and some Republicans that crossed over." But, he added, "a lot of our voters who stayed home, they stayed home because they were frustrated with the lack of productivity from Republicans in the House and Senate."
"So it's really both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. It's not just one," he said.
At a news conference in Florida on Wednesday, DeSantis called Tuesday's results "close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last 100 years."
"This was not a positive view of the Democrats. This was a rejection of Republicans in Washington and Democrats just happened to be the beneficiary," he said.
He said Republicans in Texas, long "the crown jewel of Republican politics", had lost "a very highly publicised US Senate race" and "the governor, attorney general, all the other statewide" offices. "If the Republican Party doesn't have Texas as an anchor, then we're not gonna be viable nationally going forward," he said.
Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate on Tuesday, while Republican Byron Donalds won the race to succeed DeSantis, Fox News reported.
DeSantis, who leaves office in January and has not ruled out a 2028 presidential run, has made H-1B a recurring target. At an event near Lakeland on September 14, he said: "I think we should eliminate H-1B visas in the United States, to be quite frank," Fox 49 reported.
Indians are by far the largest beneficiaries of the programme. According to the latest annual report to Congress by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), released in April, 70 per cent of the roughly 406,000 H-1B petitions approved in fiscal 2025 were for beneficiaries born in India.
China was a distant second at about 12 per cent. Indians made up about 78 per cent of approvals for continuing employment.
The programme allows US employers to hire foreign workers in speciality occupations, largely in technology. It is capped at 65,000 new visas a year, plus 20,000 for holders of US advanced degrees. Ending it would require legislation from Congress, which Democrats will control from January.