Trump has consistently supported a merit-based legal immigration system. (Deposit)
Washington:
Softening his stance on immigration, former US President Donald Trump promised to automatically grant green cards to foreign students graduating from US universities to prevent them from returning to their home countries like India and China, where they become multi-billionaires.
Trump’s shift away from anti-immigration rhetoric comes ahead of November’s presidential election, in which immigration and the deportation of illegal immigrants are among the key issues for voters.
Trump, however, has consistently supported a merit-based legal immigration system.
“What I want to do and what I will do is: If you get a college degree, I think you should automatically get a green card as part of your degree, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes colleges too,” Trump, 78, said on the “All-In” podcast.
A green card, officially known as a permanent resident card, is an identification document showing an individual who has permanent residence in the United States.
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 Calacanis urged him to “promise us that you will give us more capacity to import the world’s best and brightest to America.” Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee, also lamented “stories where people had graduated from a big college or university, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a business, a concept, and they can not”. – They go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic business in those places.
“…and they become multi-billionaires, employing thousands and thousands of people, and it could have been done here,” he said.
“Let me just tell you, it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, from MIT, from the bigger schools. And the lesser schools that are also phenomenal schools. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done that, but then we “We had to solve the COVID problem because it came up and, you know, kind of dominated for a little while, as you may know,” a Trump said in response.
Trump reiterated his first-term policy that foreign students would get a green card after earning a degree from a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) higher education institution.
“Anyone who graduates from a university, goes there for two or four years, if you get a degree or a doctorate from a university, you should be able to stay in this country,” Trump said.
“We force bright people, college graduates, top of their class at top colleges, to be able to recruit those people and keep them,” he said.
Someone graduates at the top of the class; They can’t even make a deal with the company because they don’t think they can stay in the country.
“This is going to end one day,” Trump announced.
According to the Institute of International Education’s latest annual Open Doors report, more than 1 million international students from more than 210 originating locations are studying at U.S. higher education institutions in the 2022 academic year- 23.
China remained the top country of origin in 2022/23, with 289,526 students studying in the United States. But Chinese students saw a slight decline of 0.2% from the previous year.
India, the second-largest country of origin, reached a record high of 268,923 international students in 2022/23, an increase of 35% from the previous year. Overall, 53% of all international students in 2022/23 were from China and India, a figure comparable to the previous year.
However, the market share of each place of origin has changed, with 27 percent Chinese students and 25 percent Indian students, compared to 33 percent from China and 18 percent from India in 2017-18. Trump’s latest comments contrast with the immigration policies he adopted during his term and are a direct overture to the wealthy business leaders he is courting as donors and supporters to his campaign, the New York said Times.
Trump had at times sought to reform the nation’s immigration system to reduce family-based immigration and prioritize immigrants who were wealthy, had valuable job skills or were highly educated.
But during his tenure as president, Trump’s immigration agenda included restrictions on green cards, visa programs, refugee resettlement and other forms of legal immigration, significantly reducing the number of legal permanent residents entering in the country.
He began his presidency by signing an executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, then passed a proposal to cut legal immigration in half.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has supported the H-1B visa program, favored by technology companies as a way to hire skilled foreign workers, calling it a “theft of American prosperity.” The H-1B visa is a nonimmigrant visa that allows U.S. businesses to employ foreign workers in specialized occupations requiring theoretical or technical expertise.
Tech companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.
Trump expanded restrictions on legal immigration during the pandemic and his final year in office and had proposed suspending all immigration to the United States and deporting foreign students if they did not attend at least some classes in person.
A month before the 2020 election, Trump again moved to restrict the H-1B visa program.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)