Border groups normally aligned with former President Donald Trump are balking at his promise to provide green cards “automatically” to any foreign student who attends a U.S. university or junior college.
Nonprofit and advocacy organizations seeking to restrict immigration called on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to walk back a statement he made in an interview that aired Thursday evening, in which he said he would hand out an unlimited number of permanent residency cards and work permits to students who graduate from American schools.
“Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America?” Jason Calacanis asked Trump in the All-In podcast hosted by Silicon Valley tech investors.
“I do promise,” Trump said. “But I happen to agree. Otherwise, I wouldn’t promise. … 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.”
The promise is a perceived departure from the Trump administration’s commitment to putting U.S. citizens first in line for jobs and has sent immigration restrictionists into shock, with public opposition to a policy they argue would make non-U.S. citizens harder to compete against. The Trump campaign clarified afterward that certain groups would be filtered out, including “public charges” and “America haters.”
The Project for Immigration Reform, part of the Washington-based conservative Institute for Sound Public Policy, warned that the “sky is the limit” given how liberally Trump said he intended to issue green cards.
“Trump specifically said stapling a green card to ‘any’ college diploma,” PIR wrote in a post to X early Friday.
Immigration group NumbersUSA, which favors reducing immigration levels, said the move would put the existing system “on steroids.”
“You’d turn colleges into visa mills,” Jeremy Beck, vice president of NumbersUSA, told the Washington Post.
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Neetu Arnold, a research scholar for the National Association of Scholars, pointed to the impact that it could have on enrollment at universities and colleges.
“If college becomes a guaranteed path to a green card, won’t we get a bunch of universities that are essentially pay-for-green card schools? The diploma would cease to work as a filter for skill,” Arnold said in a post on X.
