Miami: Former President Donald Trump has said in an interview that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from US colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he typically uses on the campaign trail.
A Green Card, known officially as a permanent resident card, is an identity document showing a person has permanent residency in the United States.
President Trumps Views On Importing "The Best & Brightest People From Around The World"
Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the "best and brightest" in a podcast taped on Wednesday which venture capitalists and tech investors called the "All-In".
“What I want to do and what I will do is that when you graduate from a college, you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too - anybody who graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years,” he said, vowing to address this concern on day one.
"We force brilliant people, people that graduate from college, people that are number one in their class from the best colleges, you should be able to recruit these people and keep the people," he asserted.
“Somebody graduates at the top of the class; they can't even make a deal with the company because they don't think they're going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on day one," Trump announced.
Immigration is Trump's signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he would offer green cards - documents that confer a pathway to US citizenship - to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a sweeping expansion of America's immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners.
Open Doors Report Of The Institute Of International Education
According to the latest annual Open Doors report of the Institute of International Education more than a million international students from more than 210 places of origin are studying at US higher education institutions in the 2022-23 academic year. China remained the top-sending country in 2022/23, with 289,526 students studying in the U.S. India, the second largest sending country, reached an all-time high of 268,923 international students in 2022/23, an increase of 35 per cent as against the previous year. Overall 53 per cent of all international students in 2022/23 were from China and India, comparable to the prior year.
Trump has blamed immigrants who are in the country illegally for committing crimes, stealing jobs and government resources, and suggested that they are "poisoning the blood of our country".
He has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in US history if elected. Trump and his allies often say they distinguish between people entering illegally versus legally. But, during his administration, Trump also proposed curbs on legal immigration such as family-based visas and the visa lottery programme.
Buy American & Hire American Executive Order Issued
Right after assuming office in 2017, he issued his "Buy American and Hire American" executive order, directing Cabinet members to suggest reforms to ensure that business visas were only awarded to the highest-paid or most skilled applicants to protect American workers.
He has previously said the H1-B program commonly used by companies to hire foreign workers temporarily - a program he has used in the past - was "very bad" and used by tech companies to get foreign workers for lower pay.
The podcast was hosted by four venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, three of whom are immigrants.
Trump's remarks came as he was pressed by Calacanis to "promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America."
"Let me just tell you that it's so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this, but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came in and, you know, sort of dominated for a little while,’’ Trump said in response.
President Trump Reiterates His First-Term Policy
Trump reiterated his first-term policy, about foreign students getting a Green Card after receiving a degree from a higher education institution in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) field.
"Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years, if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country," Trump said.
