Softening his stance on immigration, former US President Donald Trump has promised to grant automatic green cards to foreign students graduating from US colleges to prevent them from returning to countries such as India and China, where they become multi-billionaires.
Trump’s departure from anti-immigration rhetoric comes ahead of the November presidential election, in which immigration and deporting illegal immigrants are among voters’ top issues.
However, Trump has always supported a merit-based legal immigration system.
“What I would do, what I would do — you graduate from a college, I think as part of your diploma you should automatically get a green card, a green card to stay in this country. That includes. Even junior colleges,” Trump, 78, said. said on the “All-In” podcast.
A green card, officially known as a permanent resident card, is an identification document that shows a person has permanent residency in the United States.
The podcast is hosted by four venture capitalists: Samad Balihapidea, Jason Kalaganis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, three of whom are immigrants.
Trump’s comments came when pressed by Calacanis to “promise us that you will give us more capacity to import the best and brightest from around the world into America.” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, lamented the “stories of people graduating from a top college or a college, and they wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, an idea, and they couldn’t.” – They go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places.
“… They become multi-billionaires and employ thousands and thousands of people that could have been done here,” he said.
“I’ll tell you, it’s very sad when we lose people from big schools like Harvard, MIT, and private schools that are smaller. What I wanted to do, I would have done this, but we had to solve the Covid problem because it came, You know, as you know, dominated for a while,” Trump responded.
Trump reiterated his first-term policy of allowing foreign students to obtain a green card after graduating from a higher education institution in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) field.
“If somebody graduates from a college, you go there for two years or four years, if you graduate from a college or get a doctorate, you can stay in this country,” Trump said.
“We force smart people, people who graduate from college, people who are at the top of their class at top colleges, and you can hire these people and keep people,” he emphasized.
Someone graduates at the top of the class; They can’t contract with the company because they think they can’t be in the country.
“It will end on day one,” Trump declared.
According to the Institute of International Education’s latest annual Open Doors report, more than one million international students from more than 210 destinations are studying at US institutions of higher education in the 2022-23 academic year.
China was the top country in 2022/23, with 289,526 students studying in the U.S., but students from China fell 0.2 percent from the previous year.
India, the second largest sending country, reached 268,923 international students in 2022/23, up 35 percent from the previous year. China and India accounted for 53 percent of all international students overall in 2022/23, compared with the previous year.
However, the market share for each origin has shifted, with 27 percent of students from China and 25 percent from India, compared with 33 percent from China and 18 percent from India in 2017-18. Trump’s latest comments contradicted the immigration policy he adopted while in office and were a direct message to the wealthy business leaders he treats as donors and supporters of his campaign, The New York Times said.
Trump has at times sought to reform the nation’s immigration system, reducing family-based immigration and giving preference to wealthier immigrants with valuable job skills or higher education.
But during his tenure as president, Trump’s immigration agenda included restrictions on green cards, visa programs, refugee resettlement and other legal immigration, significantly reducing the number of legal permanent residents entering the country.
He began his presidency by signing an executive order banning travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and later adopted a plan to cut legal immigration in half.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has attacked the H-1B visa program, favored by tech companies as a way to hire foreign skilled workers, as a “theft of American prosperity.” The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant visa that allows U.S. companies to hire foreign workers in specialized industries that require theoretical or technical expertise.
Tech companies rely on it to hire tens of thousands of employees every year from countries like India and China.
Trump expanded restrictions on legal immigration during the pandemic and his last year in office, and proposed suspending all immigration to the United States and deporting foreign students unless they attend certain classes in person.
A month before the 2020 election, Trump again restricted the H-1B visa program.
(Other than the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and was published from a syndicated feed.)
