Former President Trump’s campaign has backtracked on a promise that the former president would “automatically” issue green cards to migrants after they graduate from college, US media reported.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement last week, according to Fox News:
President Trump has made it clear that on day one of his new administration, he’s going to shut down the border and launch the largest mass deportation effort of illegal aliens in history.
She also noted that the former president would have included an “aggressive vetting process” and “excluded all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and government prosecutors.” Trump said during the appearance:
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.
The proposal was immediately rebuffed, with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, telling the New York Post that such a giveaway is a “ridiculous proposal” that would cause a “firestorm of foreign money” by “sticking a green card on the diploma” of an American college graduate. Krikorian said:
If someone earns a Ph.D. at a university in a hard science, I personally will drive to their house and give them a green card. The issue is any foreign college graduate, even from a bogus two-year master’s program or gender studies [major], would get a green card.
Trump’s backtracking on anti-immigrant rhetoric comes ahead of November’s presidential election, in which immigration and deportation of illegal immigrants are among the key issues for voters. Trump, however, has always supported a merit-based system of legal immigration.
Number of international students in the US
According to the Institute of International Education’s latest annual Open Doors report, more than one million international students from more than 210 countries of origin are enrolled in US higher education institutions during the 2022-23 academic year.
China remained the country with the largest number of international students studying in the US in the 2022-2023 academic year at 289,526, but the number of students from China fell slightly by 0.2 percent from the previous year.
India, the second largest sending country, reached a record 268,923 international students in the 2022-2023 academic year, up 35% from the previous year. Overall, 53% of all international students in the 2022-2023 academic year were from China and India, comparable to the previous year.
However, the market share for each place of origin has changed, with 27% of students from China and 25% of students from India, compared to 33% from China and 18% from India in the 2017-2018 academic year. Trump’s recent comments have been at odds with the immigration policies he has implemented while in office and have been a direct appeal to the wealthy business leaders he has groomed as donors and supporters of his campaign.
Trump’s attempts to reform immigration system
Trump has at times tried to reform the nation’s immigration system to reduce family immigration and favour wealthy immigrants with valuable labour skills or who are highly educated.
But during Trump’s tenure, the immigration programme included restrictions on green cards, visa programmes, refugee resettlement and other forms of legal immigration, significantly reducing the number of legal permanent residents entering the country.
He began his presidency by signing an executive order that banned entry for tourists from seven predominantly Muslim countries, and later supported a proposal to cut legal immigration in half.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has criticised the H-1B visa programme, which is used by technology companies as a way to hire foreign skilled workers, as “stealing American prosperity”. The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to hire foreign workers in specialised occupations that require theoretical or technical knowledge.
Tech companies hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries such as India and China.
Trump expanded restrictions on legal immigration during the pandemic and in his final year in office and has proposed suspending all immigration to the US and deporting foreign students if they don’t attend at least some classes in person.
