He believes, only after such vetting has taken place, we ought to keep the most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to ABC News on Friday. “This would only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”
Leavitt went on to say, “radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters” would be excluded from Trump’s proposed plan.
Trump deviated from his usual anti-immigrant rhetoric and advocated for “automatically” giving noncitizens in the U.S. green cards when they graduate from college — not just people who go through the vetting process
including using the H-2B visa program that allows American companies to hire low-wage foreign nonagricultural workers to hire workers at Mar-a-Lago during the “Palm Beach season,” he said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in 2016. Trump, however, has criticized the program for taking jobs away from Americans.
In the past, Trump advocated for merit-based immigration plans, signing the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, which sought to award business visas to high-skilled workers.
“You need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies and have to be smart people. Not everybody can be less than smart. You need brilliant people,” Trump said on the podcast.