While showing quite a shift from his usual immigration stand, Donald Trump proposed automatic green cards for US college graduates as a part of their diploma.
Trump Promises Automatic Green Cards
Further, the former President Donald Trump said that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges, in an interview posted on Thursday.
This is surprising as it is in contrast with the sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he typically uses on the campaign trail.
The response came when he was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast taped Wednesday with venture capitalists and tech investors called the “All-In.”
In his words, “What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college. I think 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 graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years.”
Further, he vowed to address this concern on day one.
Considering the past, immigration has been Trump’s signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House.
In a closer look, his suggestion that he would offer green cards — documents that confer a pathway to U.S. citizenship — to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates, represents a sweeping expansion of America’s immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners.
A U Turn From The Earlier Stance
We shouldn’t forget that prior to this, 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.”
Besides this he has also promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if elected.
They were very specific where Trump and his allies often said that they distinguish between people entering illegally versus legally.
In addition to this, Trump also proposed curbs on legal immigration such as family-based visas and the visa lottery program during his administration.
He has confirmed it with his actions too as right after taking office in 2017, he has 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.
In his words, the H1-B program commonly used by companies to hire foreign workers temporarily — a program he has used in the past — was “very bad”.
According to him, this was used by tech companies to get foreign workers for lower pay.
Further, Trump blamed the coronavirus pandemic for being unable to implement these measures while he was president while talking with “All-In”.
He has talked about the stories of people who graduate from top colleges and want to stay in the U.S. but can’t secure visas to do so, forcing them to return to their native countries, specifically naming India and China.
They go on and become multibillionaires, employing thousands of workers, Trump said adding “You need a pool of people to work for your company. And they have to be smart people. Not everybody can be less than smart. You need brilliant people.”
