Trump Campaign Backtracks on Trump Promise of More College Migrants

President Donald Trump’s campaign team is rewriting his Thursday night promise to grant green cards to any foreign graduates of four-year universities and two-year community colleges.

President Trump believes “we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America … who would never undercut American wages or workers,” said the statement from spokeswoman Katherine Leavitt. 

The clean-up came after Trump spoke to four West Coast investors who could help him win greater support from the nation’s investors and business community.

“Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools — and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also,” he told the four tech-sector investors, three of whom are immigrants:

What I want to do, and what I will do, [ensure] if you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma get a green card to be able to stay [legally] in this country, and that includes junior colleges too.

Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years —  if you graduate or if you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.

In the 2016 campaign and in the White House, Trump periodically veered from his American-first, low-migration campaign. Each time, he and his staffers backpedaled to the center amid protests by his base. 

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The zig-zags likely made no difference to Congress’ laws because the Democrats rejected any significant compromises out of hatred for Trump. However, business allies in the White House used those zig-zags to block multiple draft regulations that would have raised American salaries by reducing white-collar migration.

Amid the zig-zags, Trump blocked and deported many blue-collar and white-collar migrants. For example, he stopped the inflow of H-1B and L-1 foreign workers in 2020, and he barred foreign workers from jobs at the Tennessee Valley Authority. “He saved 200 [technology] jobs that would have been outsourced and then eventually offshored,” Kevin Lynn, the founder of US TechWorkers, told Breitbart News. 

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In recent weeks, Trump has negotiated with groups of investors and has refused to give them all they want.  For example, the New York Times reported on January 13 that Trump suggested that foreign graduates should go home to help their own countries and that only “the best and brightest” would be allowed to stay:

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But in his June 20 talk with the four investors, Trump ignored Fink’s less-migration proposal and went much further than his prior statements:

I know of stories where [foreign students] graduated from a top college, or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here  They had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t [so] they go back to India, they go back to China. They do the same basic company in those places, and they become multi-billionaires, employing thousands and thousands of people.

And a bigger example is you that you need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies, and they have to be smart people … You need brilliant people. And we force [home] the brilliant people, the people that graduate from college, the people that are Number One in their class from the best colleges.

You have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people. It was such a big deal — somebody graduates at the top of the class, they can’t even make a deal with the company because they don’t think [the graduate is] going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on Day One.

“That’s fantastic, that’s fantastic,” responded Chamath Palihapitiya, who was born in Sri Lanka, and then migrated from Canada to the executive suite of Facebook and to his investment firm in California. 

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