Free advice to voters and the media: Pay more attention to what politicians do than to what they say.
There’s been tons of credulous coverage of Donald Trump’s policy statements that defy his record. Take, for example, his “proposal” last week to provide green cards to foreign-born graduates of U.S. colleges.
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“Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also,” the former president said on “All-In,” a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley investors. “But what I want to do, and what I will do, is 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.”
This is a terrific idea that politicians and wonks of all political stripes have proposed many times before.
After all, one of America’s greatest advantages is its ability to attract global talent — people who study here and invest their skills in the land of opportunity. We don’t have sufficient native-born talent to develop many of our “strategic” high-tech industries. For instance, international students compose about two-thirds of enrollment in electrical engineering and computer science graduate programs at U.S. universities, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics reports.
Unfortunately, after we train the best and brightest from around the world, we make it exceptionally hard for them to remain here by capping the number of high-skilled visas available and setting country-specific quotas for green cards. This can unwittingly help our adversaries. As Trump put it in the podcast: “I know of stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t. They go back to India. They go back to China. They do the same basic company in those places, and they become multibillionaires employing thousands and thousands of people, and it could have been done here.”
This is all true. But, when he was president, Trump made the problem significantly worse. He (or aides such as Stephen Miller) implemented policies that further restricted skilled legal immigration and made the lives of these international workers and students a living hell.
Denial rates for new skilled-worker visas roughly quadrupled under Trump, from an average of about 7 percent in the five years before he took office to 29 percent in the first half of fiscal 2020. (Then, in mid-2020, a legal settlement forced the administration to stop many spurious denials.) Trump’s appointees also made it much more difficult for skilled workers already here to renew their visas, adding red tape even when nothing about the workers’ circumstances had changed.
Trump’s immigration officials threw so much sand in the gears that visas were sometimes mailed out after they had already expired.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-opimmigration_inline_collection_20
On other occasions, Trump officials determined that high-skilled immigrants’ young children were “economic security” risks who must be barred from entry. His appointees were especially hostile to international students from China, despite Trump’s recent lamentations that U.S. policies are driving bright would-be entrepreneurs back to China. Or if not China (or India), the Trump administration’s various hostilities often drove talented immigrants to seek residency in Canada instead.
Trump’s plans for a second term would likely be worse. In late 2020, Trump tried to implement even more restrictions on high-skilled immigration, including one that would have once again jacked up denial rates for skilled-worker visas. Perhaps most relevant: He sought to reduce how long STEM international students could work here after they graduated. (Fortunately, neither policy was successfully implemented before he left office.)
Republican lawmakers probably wouldn’t stand in his way if he resumed this unfinished business. An early version of what would evolve into the Chips Act granted more green cards to immigrants with STEM doctorates from U.S. universities; Republicans killed the measure.
Why, then, did Trump make this new green-card promise (at least, until his campaign walked it back)?
Simple. He’s pandering — both to his deep-pocketed Silicon Valley donors as well as to the broader public. Polls show that Americans generally like legal immigrants. They believe legal immigration levels should stay the same or rise, think it should be easier to come here legally, and want more high-skilled immigrants in particular.
This is part of a broader pattern: Americans generally trust Trump more than Biden on immigration but disapprove of his immigration policies (the real ones, not the ones he occasionally pretends to espouse).
It doesn’t help, of course, that journalists often fail to stress-test his statements against his actions. As much grumbling as there is about our presidential rematch, this circumstance does confer one advantage: The candidates both have track records handily available. The media should use them.
There’s been tons of credulous coverage of Donald Trump’s policy statements that defy his record. Take, for example, his “proposal” last week to provide green cards to foreign-born graduates of U.S. colleges.
Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic.
“Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also,” the former president said on “All-In,” a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley investors. “But what I want to do, and what I will do, is 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.”
This is a terrific idea that politicians and wonks of all political stripes have proposed many times before.
After all, one of America’s greatest advantages is its ability to attract global talent — people who study here and invest their skills in the land of opportunity. We don’t have sufficient native-born talent to develop many of our “strategic” high-tech industries. For instance, international students compose about two-thirds of enrollment in electrical engineering and computer science graduate programs at U.S. universities, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics reports.
Unfortunately, after we train the best and brightest from around the world, we make it exceptionally hard for them to remain here by capping the number of high-skilled visas available and setting country-specific quotas for green cards. This can unwittingly help our adversaries. As Trump put it in the podcast: “I know of stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here. They had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can’t. They go back to India. They go back to China. They do the same basic company in those places, and they become multibillionaires employing thousands and thousands of people, and it could have been done here.”
This is all true. But, when he was president, Trump made the problem significantly worse. He (or aides such as Stephen Miller) implemented policies that further restricted skilled legal immigration and made the lives of these international workers and students a living hell.
Denial rates for new skilled-worker visas roughly quadrupled under Trump, from an average of about 7 percent in the five years before he took office to 29 percent in the first half of fiscal 2020. (Then, in mid-2020, a legal settlement forced the administration to stop many spurious denials.) Trump’s appointees also made it much more difficult for skilled workers already here to renew their visas, adding red tape even when nothing about the workers’ circumstances had changed.
Trump’s immigration officials threw so much sand in the gears that visas were sometimes mailed out after they had already expired.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=mc_magnet-opimmigration_inline_collection_20
On other occasions, Trump officials determined that high-skilled immigrants’ young children were “economic security” risks who must be barred from entry. His appointees were especially hostile to international students from China, despite Trump’s recent lamentations that U.S. policies are driving bright would-be entrepreneurs back to China. Or if not China (or India), the Trump administration’s various hostilities often drove talented immigrants to seek residency in Canada instead.
Trump’s plans for a second term would likely be worse. In late 2020, Trump tried to implement even more restrictions on high-skilled immigration, including one that would have once again jacked up denial rates for skilled-worker visas. Perhaps most relevant: He sought to reduce how long STEM international students could work here after they graduated. (Fortunately, neither policy was successfully implemented before he left office.)
Republican lawmakers probably wouldn’t stand in his way if he resumed this unfinished business. An early version of what would evolve into the Chips Act granted more green cards to immigrants with STEM doctorates from U.S. universities; Republicans killed the measure.
Why, then, did Trump make this new green-card promise (at least, until his campaign walked it back)?
Simple. He’s pandering — both to his deep-pocketed Silicon Valley donors as well as to the broader public. Polls show that Americans generally like legal immigrants. They believe legal immigration levels should stay the same or rise, think it should be easier to come here legally, and want more high-skilled immigrants in particular.
This is part of a broader pattern: Americans generally trust Trump more than Biden on immigration but disapprove of his immigration policies (the real ones, not the ones he occasionally pretends to espouse).
It doesn’t help, of course, that journalists often fail to stress-test his statements against his actions. As much grumbling as there is about our presidential rematch, this circumstance does confer one advantage: The candidates both have track records handily available. The media should use them.
