Donald J. Trump stated he would push for a program that might routinely give inexperienced playing cards to all overseas school college students in America after they graduate, a reversal from restrictions he enacted as president on immigration by high-skilled staff and college students to america.
However hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his marketing campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked again the previous president’s feedback, saying in a press release that there could be an “aggressive vetting course of” that might “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public costs” and that the coverage would apply solely to the “most expert graduates who could make important contributions to America.”
Showing with the host David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the previous president’s 2024 marketing campaign, on a podcast that aired Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump had repeated his frequent criticism of excessive ranges of immigration as an “invasion of our nation.” However he was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, one other investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us you’ll give us extra means to import the most effective and brightest around the globe to America.”
“I do promise, however I occur to agree,” Mr. Trump stated, including “what I’ll do is — you graduate from a university, I feel you need to get routinely, as a part of your diploma, a inexperienced card to have the ability to keep on this nation, and that features junior schools.”
It might have been a sweeping change that might have opened an unlimited path to American citizenship for foreigners. The State Division estimated that america hosted roughly a million worldwide college students within the educational yr that led to 2022 — a majority of whom got here from China and India. America granted lawful everlasting residence to roughly a million folks in the course of the yr that led to September 2022, so such a coverage change would considerably improve the variety of inexperienced playing cards issued.
Mr. Trump steered on the podcast that he had wished to enact such a coverage whereas in workplace however “then we needed to remedy the Covid drawback.” The Trump administration invoked the pandemic to enact lots of the immigration restrictions that officers had wished to place in place earlier in Mr. Trump’s time period.
Mr. Trump additionally lamented “tales the place folks graduated from a prime school or from a university, they usually desperately wished to remain right here, that they had a plan for a corporation, an idea, they usually can’t — they return to India, they return to China, they do the identical fundamental firm in these locations. They usually change into multibillionaires.”
Mr. Trump’s preliminary feedback stood in distinction to the immigration coverage he adopted whereas in workplace, and his marketing campaign’s assertion muddled what had been a direct overture to rich enterprise leaders whom Mr. Trump is courting as donors and supporters of his marketing campaign. Mr. Sacks hosted a fund-raiser this month for the previous president in San Francisco, the beating coronary heart of the liberal tech trade, that raised about $12 million for Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign.
Mr. Trump had at instances sought to reform the nation’s immigration system to reduce family-based immigration and to prioritize immigrants who have been rich, who had helpful work abilities or who have been extremely educated.
However throughout his time period as president, Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda included restrictions on inexperienced playing cards, visa packages, refugee resettlement and different types of authorized immigration, considerably lowering the variety of lawful everlasting residents getting into the nation. Stephen Miller, a White Home adviser to Mr. Trump who nonetheless helps information his pondering on coverage, was the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda and had sought to tighten restrictions on pupil and work visa packages.
He started his presidency by signing an government order that banned vacationers from seven predominantly Muslim nations and later embraced a proposal to chop authorized immigration by half. All through his presidency, Mr. Trump assailed the H-1B visa program, favored by tech corporations as a option to rent overseas expert staff, as a “theft of American prosperity.”
Mr. Trump expanded restrictions on authorized immigration in the course of the pandemic and his final yr in workplace and had proposed suspending all immigration to america and deporting overseas college students if they didn’t attend at the least some lessons in individual. A month earlier than the 2020 election, Mr. Trump once more moved to limit the H-1B visa program.
