But hours after Trump’s unscripted remarks, his campaign officials tempered the comments, saying there would be an “aggressive vetting process” that would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges”, and that the policy would apply only to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America”.
That would still open the doors to tens of thousands of skilled immigrants, mainly from India and China, who come to the US for higher education. By some estimates, more than a million foreign students come to the US every year; and at any given time nearly 300,000 students from India – now said to be the largest contingent of foreign students – are studying at US universities and colleges.
In the “All-In” podcast hosted by David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor who backs the former president’s 2024 campaign, Trump appeared to be courting – at the risk of angering his voting base – the tech business community which has long sought to streamline the immigration process to get more high-skilled workers who come to America as students and graduate into H1-B visas that allow limited stay in the US. But Trump’s nativist MAGA (Make American Great Again) base sees this as a betrayal of American workers.
During the Trump presidency, his advisor Stephen Miller fashioned an immigration policy that restricted among other things a work-visa programme for foreign students even though the then president often spoke of giving permanent residency to immigrants who are wealthy and/or highly educated, at the expense of family-based immigration that also allows non-skilled or low-skilled immigrants to get a green card on the basis of family ties.
