Conservative border hawks slam Trump’s college green card vow for foreign students
Former President Donald Trump has floated green cards for all foreign students who graduate from US universities and junior colleges in a podcast interview — prompting hardline immigration advocacy groups to lash out at what they called a “cockamamie proposal.”
“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,” Trump, 78, told “The All-In Podcast.”
Jason Calacanis, one of several Silicon Valley tech investors who hosts the podcast, prompted the response when asking whether the 45th president would “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”
“I do promise,” Trump said before proposing to keep foreign graduates of four- and two-year US higher education institutions in the country.
He also claimed he would have enacted the policy had the COVID-19 pandemic not erupted during the final year of his first term in office.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Post that the green-card handout was “a cockamamie proposal” that would unleash a “firehose of foreign cash” by effectively “stapling a green card to the diploma” of any US college graduate.
“If someone earns a PhD. at a university in a hard science, I personally will drive to their house and give them a green card,” Krikorian said. “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.
“If this proposal were adopted, you would see an explosion of quickie, one-year master’s programs around the country as a way of selling green cards to foreigners,” he added, which lobbyists and others would “exploit” to earn profits from potentially “billions of people around the world.”
“There’s no percentage limit for any particular institution,” Krikorian concluded. “Foreign students are one of the drivers of immigration because if you come here to study from Yemen or Cameroon, why would you want to go back?”
“This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a statement.
“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,” added Leavitt, touting an “aggressive vetting process” that would “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,” she explained. “This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”
“We already have way, way too many foreign students,” Krikorian disagreed. “Letting any large group of people is going to inevitably affect the wages of Americans.”
“US immigration policy must serve the interests of all Americans, not the interests of elite business leaders who seek cheap labor,” added Chris Chmielenski, the president of the conservative Immigration Accountability Project.
The Trump handout “would reduce wages for all Americans, increase job competition, particularly for recent college graduates, and pose a threat to national security,” he said.
There are more than 1 million foreign college students in the United States, according to a November report from the International Educational Exchange — meaning Trump’s initiative, if it happens, could become one of the most popular new paths for immigration to the US.
Of the 1,057,188 foreign college students in the US during the 2022-2023 academic year, an estimated 289,526 (27%) were from China and 268,923 (25%) were from India.
Other countries with significant numbers of students in the US include South Korea (4.1%), Canada (2.6%), Vietnam (2.1%), Taiwan (2.1%), Nigeria (1.7%) and Japan (1.5%).
Foreign college students are sought after by some universities because they often are assessed higher tuition and fees than American students — meaning greater income for the institution.
Foreigners often are billed more even than out-of-state students at public colleges, where state governments often impose quotas that require the admission of a large number of in-state students who pay less for their education.
“Foreign students pay full freight, which the universities love,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, who called it “a bad deal” to make temporary student visas “a stepping stone to get into the United States permanently.”
“It’s also undermining the interests of a lot of American college students,” he added. “You have kids coming out of college — it’s a tough job market. These are just more people that they’re going to have to be competing with.”
The green-card extension would cut against some of Trump’s promised immigration restrictions if he is elected to a second term — including plans for “nearly 20 million” illegal migrants to be removed through the “largest mass deportation effort” in US history.
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump also ripped President Biden for a “mass amnesty” plan to hand out work permits to non-citizens who graduate from US colleges and universities and let other migrants achieve permanent residency status if their are married to Americans.
“All an illegal alien has to do is sign up for his new program — it’s a sham marriage or college degree — and they can expect amnesty and taxpayer support,” he said of the plans the Biden administration announced this week.
“We are supporting people that come in illegally, but our soldiers, our veterans, are dying on the streets of these horribly-run Democrat cities,” he added.
“Our country is under invasion. We should not be talking amnesty. We should be talking about stopping the invasion.”
Biden’s proposal emphasized speeding up visa approvals for nearly 600,000 migrants on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status as well as other non-citizen college graduates.
Trump did not specifically say Thursday whether he would extend the automatic work authorization to DACA status holders, a main thrust of Biden’s immigration announcement Tuesday.
In fiscal year 2023, US Citizenship and Immigration Services fielded a record-breaking 10.9 million applications for naturalization — adding to a mounting backlog.
The overall visa processing backlog was only reduced by 15% that year, according to the agency, and 878,500 new citizens took the Oath of Allegiance.
Public polling shows immigration is one of Biden’s weakest issues among US voters, with even a majority of Hispanics siding with Trump on efforts to deport illegal immigrants, a CBS/YouGov poll this month found.
One of the “All-In” hosts, David Sacks, has endorsed the former president’s 2024 candidacy.
