WASHINGTON – In a major departure from his stated policy, former President Donald Trump said he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges.
Though Trump keeps hammering his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail, his Thursday comments were seen entirely differently; the tycoon-turned-president was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the “best and brightest”.
“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 who graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years,” he said in a podcast with venture capitalists and tech investors called the “All-In.”
Immigration has taken center stage for the US elections and Trump’s comments imply that if elected and executed, the policy would confer a pathway to U.S. citizenship to hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates.
The republican party president keeps saying that the immigrants endanger public safety and steal jobs but the comments regarding the automatic green card have pleasantly surprised pro-immigration groups.
Trump takes a strong exception to immigration and once suggested that the immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the former Trump era, the president also proposed curbs on legal immigration such as family-based visas and the visa lottery program.
A visible indication of his anti-immigration stance is the fact that after assuming charge in 2017, he issued his “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, instructing his cabinet to suggest reforms to ensure that business visas were granted only to the highest-paid or most skilled applicants to protect American workers.
Trump has also said that the H1-B program commonly used by companies to hire foreign workers temporarily was “very bad”.
Soon after the comments were made, Trump’s campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that the president outlined the most aggressive vetting process in U.S. history, to exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges.
‘He believes, only after such vetting has taken place, we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America. This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers,’ said a statement issued after the podcast went viral.
