“What I want to do and will do is that if you graduate from a university, I think you should automatically have a green card as part of your diploma and be able to stay in the country,” Trump said in an interview at the All In podcast. “And that includes the junior college, “Anyone who graduates, who has been there for two or four years.”
This apparent back-and-forth on an issue as important in the presidential campaign as the immigration issue generated confusion: Trump, the candidate with one of the most anti-immigrant rhetoric in modern American politics, suddenly says that he will propose granting residencies to those who graduate and some Days later his campaign seems to reverse it.
The Trump campaign clarified to Univision Noticias that what former President Trump said in the All-in podcast about the green cards It is merely “a proposal.”
Last week, on the occasion of the celebration of the 12 years of the creation of the program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), approved by President Barack Obama to protect immigrants without legal status who were brought from deportation by their parents to the United States as children, President Biden announced measures to regularize nearly half a million undocumented spouses of US citizens, and work visas for young graduates, including DACA recipients and others dreamers
What Fox said about the ‘green cards’ of trump
The Fox headline was: “Campaign Backs Down on Trump’s Promise to Grant green cards“.
The article from the conservative network indicates that the Trump campaign retracted the idea of ”automatically” giving residences to immigrants who “graduate” and quotes, in turn, the press secretary of the Trump campaign, Karoline Leavitt , in a statement given to the New York Post, noting: “President Trump has made clear that on the first day of his new administration, will close the border and launch the largest mass deportation effort of illegal immigrants in history.”.
Leavitt’s statement, which was also given to ABC, indicated that the plan that the former president would propose would carry out an “aggressive vetting process” on the students to exclude “all communists, radical Islamists, supporters of Hamas, whom They hate the United States…”
The campaign’s refusal cited by Fox, in the end, does not seem to be a total reversal of the proposal that, if he reached the White House, Trump would make regarding the green cardsbut rather a clarification that it would include an investigation of potential applicants.
Jaime Florez, Hispanic communications director for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, told Univision News that Fox’s approach “seemed misleading.”
Asked if the former president would like to pursue this plan if he were to return to the White House, Florez said: “Of course, that is the idea, exactly.”
“The purpose is to show that yes, there is interest in having immigrants in the United States, but we have to try to reward the best immigrants, and not simply open the border so that everyone who wants to arrive can enter.”
Trump “can’t” do that (by himself)
Trump’s comments generated a wave of rejection among many Republicans and hard-line conservatives on the immigration issue.
The executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian, said the proposal was “absurd”: “The problem is that any foreign graduate, even from a fraudulent two-year master’s program… would get a green card.”
But in any case, could Trump do that if he became president?
“Only Congress can change the law,” said lawyer Armando Olmedo, co-author of the book ‘ Immigration, the new rules’ published together with the immigration expert journalist from Univision Noticias, Jorge Cancino. “You can’t give him the green card to foreign students graduating from American universities if the corresponding regulations are not changed first.”
In that sense, the Trump campaign stressed that it was just a “proposal.
“What former President Trump mentioned is a proposal… the former president is not yet the president and furthermore, unlike what this administration is doing, which is making immigration decisions without consulting them with Congress, when Trump arrives in the House Blanca, all these things are going to be duly brought to Congress, as appropriate when it comes to immigration laws,” Florez assured Univision Noticias.
Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric
Some experts point out that the former president’s comment seems to seek to seduce business sectors that are very eager for certain types of university graduates, especially in sciences related to technology and computing. Many industries need professional immigrants to grow their businesses because American graduates often cannot meet the demand for positions in certain areas.
But Trump has a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric and has made negative references such as “poisoning the blood” of the United States. The eventual Republican presidential candidate said that he will seek to launch a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
These differences between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants, between legal and illegal immigration, have often been blurred when I was in the Oval Office, restricting access to legal avenues of immigration, such as residency applications or visa permits and job.
Trump has also been a vocal critic of what he calls “chain immigration,” in which a family member becomes a naturalized American and then begins the process of bringing his or her immediate family to the country.
In the end, both Biden’s initiative and the subsequent proposal in apparent reaction by Trump can be understood within the dynamics of the presidential campaign, as gestures that seek to bring them closer to crucial parts of the electorate, especially among the Hispanic community.
Trump attacks undocumented immigrants and evokes Nazi rhetoric by saying that they “poison the blood” of the United States
