President Donald Trump said H-1B visas are necessary to attract talented workers to the United States, adding that the country lacks certain types of talent. His remarks came during a confrontational interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, two months after he signed an executive order that raised visa fees for skilled workers to $100,000.
Key data
In a fragment of the interview broadcast on the program The Ingraham Angle On Fox News, Trump stated that the United States surpasses China in artificial intelligence “by a lot,” assured that the country has “the best economy” and added: “There will never be a country like the one we have now.”
Ingraham then asked if this meant that “the issue of H-1B visas will not be a big priority for his administration, because if they want to raise the wages of American workers, they can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.”
Trump responded: “Well, I agree, but you also have to attract talent.”
When Ingraham replied, “We have a lot of talented people here,” the president replied, “No, they don’t.”
Asked to clarify his comment, Trump explained: “No, you don’t have certain talents and people have to learn,” adding as an example that Americans cannot be “taken off the unemployment line” and put in a factory “where we are going to make missiles.”
Tangent
Trump also mentioned the immigration raid at a Hyundai electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia in September, where some 300 South Korean workers were detained. The former president, who had previously defended the raid, offered the incident as an example, telling Ingraham:
“They did the raid because they wanted to expel the illegal immigrants. They had people from South Korea who had been making batteries all their lives. You know, making batteries is very complicated. It’s not easy and it’s very dangerous.”
He added that the South Korean company had “about five or six hundred people, in the early stages, to make batteries and train others in the process. They wanted them to leave the country. You’re going to need that, Laura.”
Furthermore, the US president said that: “You cannot simply say that a country comes and invests 10 billion dollars to build a plant and takes people out of unemployment who have not worked in five years to put them into manufacturing missiles. It doesn’t work like that.”
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What did Trump say about Chinese students at American universities?
In another clip from the interview, aired Monday night, Trump argued with Ingraham about immigration after she commented, “Many MAGA supporters are not enthusiastic about the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States.”
The host continued: “You have said that up to 600,000 Chinese students could come to the United States. Why, sir, is that considered a pro-MAGA stance when so many young Americans want to study and there are universities that will not admit them?”
Trump responded that many students have always come from China and other countries, adding that: “If we cut that number in half, which might make some people happy, half of the universities in the United States would close.”
He added that: “We don’t want to lose half of the students from around the world who come to our country or destroy our entire university system. I don’t want to do that, and don’t forget that MAGA was my idea. MAGA wasn’t anyone else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anyone, and MAGA wants to see our country prosper.”
Key background
Trump’s defense of the H-1B visa program comes less than two months after he issued an order that raised application fees for the temporary skilled worker visa to $100,000.
These visas have been a key avenue for the U.S. tech industry to hire qualified foreign workers, and before the increase, applications cost companies less than $3,600 per candidate.
Last month, the Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC, against the tariff increase, warning that it would “significantly harm American businesses, which would be forced to dramatically increase their labor costs or hire fewer highly skilled employees for whom domestic replacements are not readily available.”
This article was originally published by Forbes US
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