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Donald Trump claimed he would offer green cards to foreign students in the U.S. once they graduate, a proposal that stands in stark contrast to his extreme anti-immigration platform — and a pledge that will likely amount to nothing.
“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,” Trump said on a Thursday episode of "All-In," a tech podcast hosted by major Silicon Valley investors.
"And that includes junior colleges, too," he added. "Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years, if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country."
Trump, who has been aggressively trying to court Silicon Valley investors and executives, said he’d intended to push for that policy when he was in office, but then the Covid pandemic took over. “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools, and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also,” he said.
Trump’s campaign quickly walked back those remarks, saying the policy would be applied far more selectively than Trump suggested on the podcast. Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Friday:
President Trump has 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.
As one might conclude from his campaign's recasting of his promise, Trump's remarks don't align with his virulently anti-immigration platform, which includes plans to enact sweeping national raids and mass deportations across the country if elected in November. But the former president, who kick-started his political career by playing to xenophobic fears, has had conflicting positions on this issue in the past.
While running for president in 2016, his campaign vilified H1-B visas, which it claimed would "decimate American workers." Trump later said that he had changed his mind and specifically noted Silicon Valley's need for highly skilled migrant workers. In 2020, as president, he enacted a suspension on new work visas and extended limits on green cards. The Associated Press also reported that Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, applied for an H1-B visa for a worker in 2022.
During his nearly hourlong appearance on the podcast, Trump spoke about a range of other topics. Notably, he revisited an earlier promise — one he ultimately did not see through completely as president — to release all remaining records on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, saying that the CIA “probably” killed him.