Trump Wants Immigrants—Sometimes
The president is alarming the MAGA faithful by saying he wants more high-skilled immigration. But that doesn’t mean he’s rethinking the rest of his nativism.
Since President Donald Trump began his second term in office, he's taken a hardline stance on immigration. The surge in federal enforcement is responsible for 527,000 deportations and egregious civil liberties violations. Despite his restrictionist policies, Trump is surprisingly sanguine about high-skilled immigration.
During a Tuesday interview, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told Trump that "a lot of MAGA folks are not thrilled about this idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States," alluding to the president's plan to let 600,000 Chinese students study at American universities. Trump retorted that cutting "half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country [would] destroy our entire university and college system. I don't want to do that."
Later in the segment, Ingraham asked Trump if reducing H-1B visas would be a priority for his administration and argued that, "to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers." Trump agreed with Ingraham's assertion that immigrants depress the wages of low-skilled native workers, but said "you also…have to bring in talent."
The claim that foreign-born workers lower native born wages has been contradicted time and again. Economist David Card found that the influx of 125,000 Cuban refugees to Miami from April 1980 to October 1980 "had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers." While the Card study is 35 years old, its conclusion is supported by recent research that finds "US-born workers in areas losing immigrants did not gain in income score relative to workers in less exposed areas."
To the outrage of online nativists, Trump at least appreciates that there are not enough skilled Americans to completely satisfy employer demand: "You can't take people off an unemployment line and say, 'I'm going to put you in a factory where we're going to make missiles.'" Trump cited the detainment of 500 South Korean workers at the construction site of a Hyundai factory in Georgia this September as a wrongheaded instance of immigration enforcement. Trump's admission is more than a little ironic, considering his own immigration policies and officials were responsible for the bust.
Ingraham told Trump "we have plenty of talented people," and there are undoubtedly millions of high-skilled Americans. However, if Ingraham's nebulous "plenty" is understood to mean "sufficient to satisfy labor market demand," then her assertion is refuted by the 113,460 approved H-1B petitions for FY 2025. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem celebrated as much on Fox News Tuesday evening, saying "we've sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards [and] more people are becoming naturalized under this admin than ever before."
While Trump's endorsement of high-skilled immigration does not make up for months of inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants, it does represent a win for MAGA dynamists in their ongoing feud with MAGA nativists. One can only hope that the president realizes the folly in deporting hundreds of thousands of hardworking people while 7.2 million job vacancies exist.
