Former President Trump says he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from US colleges, a sharp departure from the anti-immigrant rhetoric he typically uses on the campaign trail. Trump was asked about plans for companies to be able to import the 'best and brightest' in a podcast taped Wednesday with venture capitalists and tech investors called the All-In. "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, vowing to address this concern on day one if he were reelected president, per the AP. "And that includes junior colleges, too, anybody graduates from a college. You go there for two years or four years."
Immigration has been Trump's signature issue during his 2024 bid to return to the White House. His suggestion that he'd offer green cards—documents that confer a pathway to US citizenship—to potentially hundreds of thousands of foreign graduates would represent a sweeping expansion of America's immigration system that sharply diverges from his most common messages on foreigners. However, in a statement released hours after the podcast was posted, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt emphasized that Trump's proposal would "only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers." She added that it would "exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters."
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