I find myself completely dumbfounded this evening by the following: Trump had a good idea. He’s proposed that foreign graduates of US colleges and universities should get an automatic green card with their diploma. I’m dumbfounded because this diagnoses an actual problem (foreign graduates and the employers who want to hire them often struggle with the immigration bureaucracy) and offers a sensible solution that (relevant to the topic of this thread) risks antagonizing some of his more xenophobic supporters.
I find myself completely dumbfounded as well. During his administration, I handled H-1B visa sponsorships for my employer, and the USIC was actively hostile towards the whole process making it much more difficult than it had to be. I used to tell hiring managers to assume we’d get a request for evidence (RFE) from the goverment which was a pain in the butt to complete and added $5,000 to the process in attorney and other fees. To hear Trump suggest foreign graduates automatically get a green card is amazing. So amazing that I don’t think there’s a chance he’d follow through.
While I have an overall positive attitude about immigration, I’m not actually sure it’s a good idea. But it’s one I’d be willing to consider at least.
Biden should announce tomorrow that he will have legislation immediately introduced in Congress to bring this about and that it will be called the Donald J. Trump College Graduate Green Card bill.
MAGAt heads will assplode all across the land. But DJT will possibly be so flattered he may order Squeaker Johnson to make sure it passes the House and gets to the Senate.
THAT is a chain of events that could very well get DJT bumped from being the nominee.
There is a trick to this. There has to be. If anyone knows that a credential from a supposedly prestigious university can be attained via financial compensation and without any actual academic effort involved, it is Donald Trump.
…hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks aired, his campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, walked back the former president’s comments, saying in a statement that 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.”
The link above is a gift link to the full article in the NYTimes.
Unsurprising. I was just surprised he would put this out there in the first place, since it involves two of the great bugbears of modern Republicans: immigrants and higher education. And it wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark, as he went out of his way to state that junior colleges would be included. Trump doesn’t know that the fuck a “junior college” is, so he was clearly prepped to say that.
Well, there goes Kari’s scant remaining chances at being the Veep, and that probably just cost Flynn’s. Donald will not appreciate a line of reasoning based on that he is surely going to be confined soon so we better engineer understudying him with a military caudillo.
