Trump proposes green cards for foreign grads of US colleges, departing from anti-immigrant rhetoric
MIAMI– Former President Donald Trump said in an interview posted Thursday that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he usually uses it on the campaign trail.
Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast recorded Wednesday with venture capitalists and technology investors called the “All-In.”
“What I want to do and what I’m going to do is for you to graduate from a university. I think as part of your degree you should automatically get a green card to stay in this country. And that also applies to junior colleges: everyone graduates from a university. You will go there for two or four years,” he said, pledging to tackle the problem from day one.
Immigration was Trump’s top issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he offer green cards — documents that provide access to U.S. citizenship — to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a major expansion of the U.S. immigration system that differs sharply from his most common messages to foreigners.
Trump often says at his rallies that immigrants in the country illegally endanger public safety and steal jobs and government resources. suggested that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history if elected.
Trump and his allies often say they make a distinction between people who come in illegally and those who come in legally. But during his administration, Trump also proposed restrictions on legal immigration, such as family visas and the visa lottery program.
Immediately after taking office in 2017, he released his ‘Buy American and Hire American’. executive orderdirecting Cabinet members to propose reforms to ensure that business visas are granted only to the highest-paid or best-trained applicants to protect American workers.
He has previously said that the H1-B program often used by companies to temporarily hire foreign workers is a program he has used in the past – was “very bad” and used by tech companies to get foreign workers for lower wages.
During the conversation with ‘All-In’, Trump blamed the coronavirus pandemic for his failure to implement these measures while he was president. He said he knows of stories of people graduating from top schools who want to stay in the US but cannot get a visa to do so, forcing them to return to their native countries, especially India and China. He said they will go on and become multi-billionaires, employing thousands of people.
“You need a group of people who can work for your company,” Trump said. ‘And they have to be smart people. Not everyone can be less than smart. You need brilliant people.”