Donald J. Trump said he would push for a program that would automatically give green cards to foreign students in America after they graduate, reversing restrictions he placed as president on the immigration of highly skilled workers and students to the United States.
Appearing with host David Sachs, a Silicon Valley investor who is backing the former president’s 2024 campaign, in a podcast broadcast on Thursday, Mr Trump repeated his frequent criticism of high levels of immigration as “an invasion of our country”. . He was then pressed by Jason Calacanis, another investor who hosts the podcast, to “promise us that you’re going to give us more of an opportunity to bring the best and brightest from around the world to America.”
“I promise, but I happen to agree,” Mr. Trump said, adding “what I’m going to do is — you graduate from a college, I think you should automatically get, as part of your degree, a green card so you can stay in this country, and that includes the students’ colleges.”
Mr Trump suggested he wanted to implement such a policy while in office, but “then we had to solve the Covid problem”. The Trump administration has invoked the pandemic to implement many of the immigration restrictions that officials wanted to enact earlier in Mr. Trump’s tenure.
Mr. Trump also lamented “stories where people graduated from a top college or a college, and they wanted desperately to stay here, they had a plan for a company, an idea, and they can’t — they go back to India. they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multi-billionaires.”
Mr Trump’s comments were at odds with the immigration policy he has adopted during his tenure and were a direct jab at wealthy business leaders whom he has courted as campaign donors and supporters. Mr. Sachs hosted a fundraiser this month for the former president in San Francisco, the heart of the liberal tech industry, that raised about $12 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Mr Trump had at times sought to reform the country’s immigration system to limit family-based immigration and prioritize immigrants who were wealthy, had valuable job skills or were highly educated.
But during his tenure as president, Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda included restrictions on green cards, visa programs, refugee resettlement and other forms of legal immigration, greatly 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 proposal to cut legal immigration in half. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has criticized the H-1B visa program, which is favored by tech companies as a way to hire foreign skilled workers, as “theft of American prosperity.”
