A Republican senator from Kansas facing a tough reelection battle told an Indian-American advocacy group over the summer that he was committed to defending “legal immigration pathways” for skilled foreign workers, breaking with the Trump administration’s crackdown on H-1B visas.

And, in remarks delivered on Capitol Hill, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said he’d work to end the annual cap on green cards, calling the federally imposed limit “one of our nation’s great injustices.”

H-1B visas, which provide legal status for skilled foreign workers in specialized industries, have become a central target of the anti-immigrant right who claim the program incentivizes U.S. companies to hire cheaper international workers over American employees and has often mixed muddied economic arguments with just plain racism. And the push against H-1Bs has seen some results: President Donald Trump issued an executive order last year that would impose a $100,000 fee on certain visa applicants, but it remains tied up in the courts.

The right-wing’s efforts got a major boost last week, when Vice President JD Vance said he’d support “just eliminating” the skilled worker visa program altogether and that companies abusing H-1Bs were “defrauding the American worker.”

But Marshall, speaking at an event held in June by the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies, positioned himself as a countervailing Republican voice on legal immigration.

The Kansas Republican praised Indian-American immigrants, claiming they were the “most educated, highest-earning immigrant community” in the U.S.

“Every single time someone in Washington questions whether legal immigration works, you’re the answer,” he said in remarks posted online and reviewed by HuffPost. “You’re not the argument, you’re the answer.”

Marshall continued that he was “committed to … defending the legal immigration pathways that bring Indian talent to our hospitals, our labs and our companies,” though he did not name the H-1B program.

And the GOP senator made a particularly impassioned case for raising the federal limits on how many permanent resident cards the government can issue to immigrants from a single country. Right now, immigrants from any one country can only make up 7% of the roughly 400,000 green cards the government issues each year, a limit that has long blocked some Indian immigrants from a pathway to citizenship.

“I’ll continue to legally and sensibly address the per-country green card cap, which is certainly one of our nation’s great injustices,” Marshall told the crowd. “It tells the world’s most talented, hardest-working immigrant community that the line is 70 years long — not because of anything you did, but because too many of you came from the same place.”

The Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies, which held the event in Washington featuring Marshall, has spoken out against the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the number of H-1B applicants. In an August statement, the advocacy group warned the proposed $100,000 fee “could make legitimate hiring economically impractical and unintentionally encourage companies to place high-value jobs overseas.”

The organization did not immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment.

Marshall, for his part, has long backed H-1B holders on Capitol Hill. While serving in the House in 2018, the then-congressman spoke at a rally organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition where he advocated to protect the children of immigrants on H-1B visas.

The RHC, founded by Indian-American businessman Shalabh Kumar, refers to these children as “Deferred Action for Legal Childhood Arrivals,” or DALCA — a variation of the acronym used to describe children born in the U.S. whose parents are here illegally. Marshall has raked in thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Kumar, according to publicly available data. The RHC did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

“I am very proud to stand with the DALCA recipients and look forward to helping them out,” the Kansas Republican said at the time.

A spokesperson for Marshall’s office did not return a request for comment.

Marshall’s break with the administration and with fervently anti-immigrant elements on the political right comes as he faces an increasingly difficult path to reelection in November. The Cook Political Report on Tuesday shifted its rating in the Kansas Senate race from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up,” reflecting recent polling showing Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton slightly leading Marshall with a month to go before Election Day.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC controlled by allies of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, last week poured millions of dollars into pro-Marshall advertising in Kansas — another sign that the lawmaker’s reelection chances are in jeopardy.

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