Donald J. Trump has said he would repeal restrictions on immigration to the United States on highly skilled workers and students that he enacted during his presidency and would pursue a program that would automatically issue green cards to foreign university students studying in the United States upon graduation.
Appearing on a podcast on Thursday with host David Sachs, a Silicon Valley investor and backer of the former president's 2024 presidential campaign, Trump reiterated his frequent criticism of immigration as an “invasion of our country.” He was then pressed by another podcast host, investor Jason Calacanis, to “promise us more capacity to import the best and brightest people from around the world into the United States.”
“I promise you, I just happen to agree,” Trump said, adding, “What I'm going to do is, when you graduate from college, you will automatically get a green card as part of your diploma so you can stay in this country. And that includes junior college.”
Trump suggested he wanted to enact such policies while in office, but “then we had to deal with the COVID problem.” The Trump administration used the pandemic to implement many of the immigration restrictions it had sought to implement earlier in its administration.
Trump also lamented “stories of people who graduated from top universities and colleges, who desperately wanted to stay in this country, who had plans for their companies and their ventures, who can't, and who go back to India or China, where they run the same basic companies and become billion-dollar millionaires.”
Trump's comments contrasted with the immigration policies he adopted during his presidency and were a direct appeal to the wealthy business leaders he has courted as campaign donors and supporters. Sachs hosted a fundraiser for the former president in San Francisco, the liberal tech hub, this month that raised about $12 million for the Trump campaign.
Trump has previously called for reforming the nation's immigration system, including curtailing family-based immigration and prioritizing immigrants who are wealthy, have valuable work skills and are better educated.
However, during his presidency, Trump's immigration policies, which included restrictions on green cards, visa programs, refugee resettlement, and other forms of legal immigration, significantly reduced the number of lawful permanent residents entering the United States.
Early in his presidency, Trump signed an executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and later accepted a proposal to halve legal immigration. During his presidency, he denounced the H-1B visa program, the tech company's preferred way to hire skilled foreign workers, as a “stealer of American prosperity.”
