Trump proposes green cards for foreign graduates of US colleges, relying on anti-immigrant rhetoric

MIAMI — Former President Donald Trump said in an interview posted Thursday that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he typically uses during his campaign.

Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest” in a podcast recorded Wednesday with venture capitalists and technology investors called the “All-In.”

“What I want to do and what I’m going to do is for you to graduate from a university. I think as part of your degree you should automatically get a green card to stay in this country. And that also applies to junior colleges: everyone graduates from a university. You will go there for two or four years,” he said, pledging to tackle the problem from day one.

Immigration was Trump’s top issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he offer green cards — documents that provide access to U.S. citizenship — to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a major expansion of the U.S. immigration system that differs sharply from his most common messages to foreigners.

Trump has blamed immigrants in the country illegally for committing crimes, stealing jobs and government funds, and has suggested they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history if elected.

Trump and his allies often say they make a distinction between people who come in illegally and those who come in legally. But during his administration, Trump also proposed restrictions on legal immigration, such as family visas and the visa lottery program.

Immediately after taking office in 2017, he issued his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, directing Cabinet members to propose reforms to ensure that business visas were granted only to the highest-paid or best-educated applicants to employ American workers. to protect.

He has previously said that the H1-B program commonly used by companies to temporarily hire foreign workers – a program he has used in the past – was “very poor” and was used by tech companies to hire foreign workers for get a lower wage.

During the conversation with ‘All-In’, Trump blamed the coronavirus pandemic for his failure to implement these measures while he was president. He said he knows of stories of people graduating from top schools who want to stay in the US but cannot get a visa to do so, forcing them to return to their native countries, particularly India and China. He said they will go on and become multi-billionaires, employing thousands of people.

“You need a group of people who can work for your company,” Trump said. ‘And they have to be smart people. Not everyone can be less than smart. You need brilliant people.”