WASHINGTON: Former US President Donald Trump convulsed the immigration eco-system on Thursday by promising automatic green cards to all foreign students in America, including undergraduates, in what would be a repudiation of the strong anti-immigration sentiment of his political base.
In a podcast with Silicon Valley investors and business leaders, Trump spoke of “stories where people 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 — they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places.
Pledging to change this, the former President said he would institute policies where “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.”
There was immediate blowback to the Trump announcement, with his supporters questioning “is this America First?” and what happened to “buy American, hire American?”
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 American universities and colleges. More than a million Indian college graduates already in the US, going back 10 to 15 years, have been in line for a green card, which typically paves the way for citizenship.
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