WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump suggested in a podcast released Thursday that foreign nationals living in the U.S. should “automatically” get green cards upon college graduation.
“What I want to do, what I’m going to do, is if you graduate from college, you automatically get a green card as part of your diploma so you can stay in this country,” Trump said. “And that includes junior college.”
Trump made similar comments during the 2016 campaign but only restricted legal immigration during his time in office.
Trump was responding to a podcast where one of the hosts said, “We need highly skilled workers in this country,” after another host chimed in, pointing out that three of the four hosts are immigrants.
“Can you promise us more capacity to import the best and the brightest people from around the world into America?” the moderator asked, to which Trump responded with a green card.
Trump said he had made that promise, adding that it was “very sad to see us lose talent from the best universities, from Harvard to MIT, and from the not-so-great universities that are great as well.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on his position.
Shortly before, Trump had repeated unsubstantiated claims that immigrants coming across the southern border were coming from prisons, jails, mental hospitals and psychiatric institutions, and claimed, without evidence, that “terrorists are coming into the United States at levels we’ve never seen before.”
When asked about visas for highly skilled workers during a 2016 Republican primary debate, Trump replied, “We need highly skilled people in this country.”
“They’re going to Harvard. They’re going to Stanford. They’re going to Wharton. And as soon as they graduate, they get kicked out,” Trump said in March 2016. “They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately. They can’t stay here. And in order for that to happen, we absolutely have to preserve the brainpower of this country.”
But visa denials and extensions have increased during Trump’s presidency, making it more difficult for some foreign workers to stay in the United States.
In 2019, President Trump launched a merit-based legal immigration system that prioritized highly skilled immigrants, but in 2020 he also signed an executive order freezing the issuance of new visas to foreign workers.
Now campaigning for another term, Trump has often made anti-immigration rhetoric a central part of his campaign speeches.
Trump has likened immigrants to Dr. Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs.” He claims that immigrants coming to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a claim the Biden campaign has likened to Adolf Hitler. Last month, he claimed without evidence that immigrants are bringing “highly contagious diseases.”
