Donald Trump has made a surprising turnaround on his former policies as US president, promising to provide green cards to all foreign students who graduate from American universities. On a podcast, he said they would bring in legislation where “if you finish college, I think you should automatically have a green card given with your diploma so that you can stay in this country and that even includes community colleges too.”
Nevertheless, just hours after Trump’s unscript remarks, his campaign officials walked back the comments by saying that there would be an “aggressive vetting process” which will “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges”, adding that such visas shall only be issue to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America”.
However, it could still mean tens of thousands of highly-skilled immigrants primarily from India and China who come for higher education in the US. Every year over one million foreigners study at US institutions; currently nearly 300 thousand Indian students constitute America’s largest 2 contingent of international pupils.
In David Sacks’ “All-In” podcast, Trump seemed to be trying to win over – at the risk of alienating his voting base – the tech industry player who had for long been lobbying for making immigration easier thus attracting more highly skilled labor force studying in America as students and eventually graduating into H1-B visas with limited stay. Conversely Trump’s nativist MAGA (Make American Great Again) base sees it as selling out Americans workers.
As part of an immigration policy framed by Stephen Miller during Trump’s presidency among other things was a work-visa programme for foreign students while despite promises about giving permanents status to rich and/or highly educated immigrants by the then president at other times he ponderously favored family based immigration against employment-based immigration also allowing non-educated or unskilled persons enter into US through family network registration on visa basis.
