Softening his stance on immigration, former US President Donald Trump has promised to grant automatic green cards to foreign students graduating from American colleges to prevent them from returning to their home countries like India and China where they become billionaires.
Trump has distanced himself from anti-immigrant rhetoric ahead of the November presidential election, in which immigration and the deportation of illegal immigrants is one of the key issues for voters.
However, Trump has always supported a merit-based legal immigration system.
“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from college, I think you should automatically get a green card as part of your diploma, a green card to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges,” Trump, 78, said on the “All-In” podcast.
The Green Card, officially known as the Permanent Resident Card, is an identity document indicating that a person resides permanently in the United States.
The podcast is run by four venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, three of whom are immigrants.
Trump’s remarks came after Calacanis pressed him to “promise us that you will give us a greater ability to bring the best and the brightest people from around the world to the United States.” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, also lamented stories “where people graduate from a top college or colleges and they want to stay here, they have a plan, a concept for a company, but they can’t — they go back to India, they go back to China, they run the same basic company in those places.”
He said, “…and they became billionaires by employing thousands of people, and this work could have been done here also.”
“Let me tell you, it’s very sad when we lose students from Harvard, MIT, the greatest schools, and from smaller schools that are phenomenal schools. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done it, but then we had to deal with the COVID problem because that came in and, you know, took over for a period of time, as you probably know,” Trump said in response.
Trump reiterated a policy from his first term that included granting green cards to foreign students after earning a degree from a higher education institution in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field.
“Anybody graduates from college, you go there for two or four years. If you graduate from college or get a doctorate degree, you should be able to stay in this country,” Trump said.
He stressed, “We put a lot of pressure on talented people, people who graduate from college, people who are first in their class from the best colleges, you have to be able to recruit and retain these people.”
A person graduates at the top of his class; but he cannot even strike a deal with a company because he does not think he will be able to stay in the country.
“It will be over on day one,” Trump declared.
More than one million international students from over 210 origins are studying at US higher education institutions during the 2022-23 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education’s latest annual Open Doors Report.
China remained the top sending country in 2022/23, with 289,526 students studying in the US, but Chinese students saw a slight decline of 0.2 percent compared to the previous year.
India, the second-largest sending country, reached an all-time high with 268,923 international students in 2022/23, a 35 percent increase on the previous year. Overall, 53 percent of international students in 2022/23 were from China and India, an increase on the previous year.
However, the market share for each origin has changed, with 27 per cent of students from China and 25 per cent from India, compared to 33 per cent from China and 18 per cent from India in 2017-18. Trump’s latest comments are a contrast to the immigration policy he pursued while in office and are a direct offer to the wealthy business leaders he has been courting as donors and supporters of his campaign, The New York Times said.
Trump has repeatedly tried to reform the country’s immigration system to reduce family-based immigration and give priority to wealthy immigrants who have valuable work skills or are highly educated.
But during his tenure as president, Trump’s immigration agenda included restrictions on green cards, visa programs, refugee resettlement, and other forms of legal immigration, significantly reducing the number of lawful permanent residents entering the country.
He began his presidency by signing an executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, and later passed a proposal to reduce legal immigration by half.
Throughout his presidency, Trump criticized the H-1B visa program, favored by tech companies as a way to hire foreign skilled workers, calling it “stealing American prosperity.” The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.
Technology companies depend on it to hire thousands of employees every year from countries like India and China.
Trump had expanded restrictions on legal immigration during the pandemic and in the final year of his term and had proposed suspending all immigration to the United States and deporting foreign students if they did not attend at least some classes in person.
A month before the 2020 election, Trump again moved to restrict the H-1B visa program.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
