Krikorian: Donald Trump, Immigration Expansionist

From the US right wing largely anti-immigration crowd. Comments on how this approach would “would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine.” Sounds somewhat familiar to some of our education institutions and provincial ministries?

In a podcast this week with several tech investors, Donald Trump said he wants to give green cards to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. institution. (The full interview is here; the immigration comments start at about 43:40.)

It’s true that his staff has subsequently tried to walk some of this back, but his comments shouldn’t surprise anyone.

While Trump’s explicit endorsement of this specific “staple a green card to every diploma” scheme is new, he’s always made clear, even during his first campaign, that he favored increased immigration. I’ve written in these pages about Trump’s support for expanded immigration here and here. And here. And here.

That said, this week’s comments by Trump really were more preposterous than usual. While he cited “people who are No. 1 in their class in top colleges,” he specifically added that foreign students getting a two-year degree from “junior colleges” should also automatically get green cards. Even lobbyists for higher ed and the tech industry aren’t this brazen. They exploit the appeal of keeping the “best and brightest” among foreign students as a means of protecting broader cheap-labor schemes, but I’ve never heard one seriously argue for giving green cards to graduates of community colleges.

If a foreign student completes a PhD in a hard science from one of the top research universities in the country, I will personally deliver a green card to their home. But someone who got an associate’s degree in communications? It’s laughable.

Trump promised the tech guys that the current situation would “end on Day One,” which is more nonsense, since any staple-a-green-card ploy would require legislation. But since this gimmick has been floating around for years, it’s worth thinking through what it would mean.

It would turn every university (and community college!) into a citizenship-selling machine. There are no numerical limits on the admission of foreign students — who number about 1 million now — and foreign students are already a major profit center for schools large and small.

But if any degree from any school would guarantee a green card (and thus U.S. citizenship, access to welfare, and the ability to bring your relatives), applications would soar at every kind of school, and new schools would pop up like mushrooms. Any residual connection that taxpayer-subsidized U.S. institutions of higher education (which is all of them, public or private) still have to the interests of the United States would be washed away by the gusher of easy foreign money. Good luck getting your kid into Hofstra, let alone Harvard.

Not to mention that elite higher education has become a hive of anti-American villainy — why reward them with a firehose of foreign cash?

In Australia the connection between foreign-student visas and permanent residence is closer to what Trump proposes, though still not automatic. The result is that foreign students account for more than 40 percent of all college enrollment and total close to 3 percent of the entire nation’s population. It’s gotten so bad there — remember, even without the automatic provision of a green card that Trump wants — that even the center-left Labour government is cracking down on foreign-student admissions.

The silver lining might be that we can start a conversation about our whole system of admitting foreign students. What’s the rationale for it? Why take any foreign students at all? Why is there no numerical limit? Why no percentage cap for any individual school? Shouldn’t the American people have a say in who moves here, rather than just university-admissions officers? Why is the hiring of foreign graduates (masquerading as students) subsidized through the Optional Practical Training program? And why is ICE so lackadaisical (even under Trump) in its oversight of foreign students, through the sleepy Student and Exchange Visitor Program?

Ceterum censeo academiam delendam esse. (The academy must be destroyed)