Of all the immigration-related ideas for former President Donald Trump to go soft on, automatic green cards for college students may be the worst one at the worst time.
Trump has proposed that foreign students who graduate from American universities should “automatically” get to stay in the country. “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges too.” He said he would address this problem “on day one.”
Naturally, this had to be walked back by his press secretary, who insisted that “all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges” would be excluded from this hypothetical program through an “aggressive vetting process.” As usual, either Trump doesn’t know what it is he is advocating or his team had to clean up his comments because he didn’t understand the gravity of what he was proposing.
You don’t need to look much further than the plague of antisemitic protests that swamped college campuses across the country to see how this could backfire. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) correctly called for foreign students on student visas taking part in pro-Hamas protests to be deported. Almost needless to say, foreign students graduating from colleges in diversity, equity, and inclusion degree programs should not “automatically” be given green cards to stay in the country permanently.
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It doesn’t end there, though. Federal officials warned in 2019 that China has sent “thousands” of spies to American universities as professors and students “who are directly linked to a state-sponsored effort to steal intellectual property.” Once again, it goes without saying that a blanket policy of granting green cards to all college graduates, including those with ties to Chinese espionage, would be a bad idea. A better one would be using that “aggressive vetting process” to avoid giving student visas to compromised individuals in the first place. (My colleague Tiana Lowe Doescher addresses the problems with the student visa system in her own piece on the topic, which you should read.)
Maybe Trump truly didn’t mean that every college graduate should automatically get a green card (which is what he said). Maybe the cleanup by his press team was the initial policy all along. But Trump has a track record of swaying with the wind even on immigration, embracing amnesty proposals in exchange for negotiations on his border wall and flip-flopping on his calls for mass deportations (for which he is calling once again). He needs to be held accountable for every proposal he pitches, no matter how half-baked and off-the-cuff it may be.