Trump Suddenly Loves Immigration

The H-1B visa about-face: “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,” former President Donald Trump told The All-In Podcast. “And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.”

One of the podcast’s co-hosts had asked him to “promise” to give people like them (venture capitalists and entrepreneurs) “more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America.”

“I know of stories where people graduated…from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here,” Trump continued. “They had a plan for a company, or 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.”

“You need a pool of people to work for your companies,” he added. “You have great companies, and they have to be smart people. You have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people. Somebody graduates at the top of the class, they can’t even make a deal with a company because they don’t think they’re going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on Day One.”

What Trump is articulating about high-skilled workers, and the H-1B visas they are eligible for, is not just sensible but also something immigration proponents have been saying for a long time.

The idea that he’ll focus on this as a policy priority strains credulity, given that this is the man who hired notorious restrictionist Stephen Miller as one of his top immigration advisers during his first term. (Miller, “best known for his role in implementing a ‘zero tolerance’ policy at the Mexican border, in which migrant parents were systematically separated from their children as part of a deterrence strategy,” writes Reason‘s Billy Binion, was the architect of some of Trump’s most cruel and haphazard policies that worsened the already-convoluted immigration system.)

It’s especially funny that his spokesperson attempted to walk much of Trump’s comments back, leaving would-be voters even more confused as to what the administration might choose to prioritize.

Donor management: In some sense, this is the most predictable tale of all time: A politician tells donors exactly what they want to hear, and it’s questionable whether he’ll actually do anything based on this.

For the unfamiliar, The All-In Podcast is comprised of venture capitalists—Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks—and entrepreneur David Friedberg, who range from politically Trump-curious (but not sold) to donor-supporters, like Sacks, who just hosted a Trump fundraiser at his home in San Francisco at which Trump purportedly raised $12 million. Other Silicon Valley folks, like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who claimed Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them (and sued over it) during their college days, have come out of the political closet in the last few days and publicly pledged donations to Trump.

A seemingly related headline: “Trump has rapidly eroded Biden’s edge in 2024 cash battle.” Whether these Silicon Valley donors buy what Trump is selling—that he’s interested in helping America prevent brain drain to China and India—is debatable, but it’s clear that currying favor with these folks is having a positive outcome for Team Trump.

As for the All-In guys, the whole interview is worth a watch since the crew eschews the apoplectic tone used by much of the media. The end result is better for it, and certainly more useful to the viewer. It’s yet another example of how the traditional media fumbled the ball during the 2016 election and subsequent Trump years, failing to self-correct, and how media-class incuriousness has led to a worse quality product.

Of course, All-In has its own problems—they’re playing the role of journalists, but Sacks is himself a Trump donor, and there’s a sycophantic attitude toward the former president at times—but at least their cards have been laid on the table. Compare that to a media class that sometimes pretends it’s not disproportionately liberal but won’t tell you who they voted for (the way Reason journalists do). Partisanship does not mean you can’t do good journalism, but journalists sometimes delude themselves into thinking that hiding their political affiliation results in objectivity or somehow prevents bias from seeping in.

Scenes from New York: 

This is such a misleading hit piece. Yes, Jacobin wants the DSA-member Bowman to win. So they selectively quote from a DOJ federal monitoring to make it seem that the more centrist Latimer is bad on affordable housing. In fact the monitor cites him and his administration… https://t.co/Pg3L6ZTzOd pic.twitter.com/uY6oMrOmGN

— Mike Pesca (@pescami) June 20, 2024

• Earlier this week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a statewide ban on smartphones in public schools. (Of all the Newsom priorities, this is possibly the least bad, at least to me. And, amusingly, even The New York Times admits that “teachers unions have been reluctant to take on the responsibility of having to enforce the policies, though they also have welcomed efforts to prevent distractions.”)
• Must Catholic hospitals be forced to provide euthanasia? Assisted suicide activists, and the family members of a suicide patient, are suing St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.
• “The US Supreme Court upheld a 2017 tax on American-owned businesses’ foreign profits, rejecting an appeal that could have saved companies hundreds of billions of dollars,” reports Bloomberg.
• “America’s top export may be anxiety,” writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, complicating Jonathan Haidt’s smartphone thesis a bit.
• The former Thai prime minister has been indicted for allegedly defaming, insulting, or threatening a member of the royal family.
• “The gloating insistence from progressives that they are never bothered by the behavior of disturbed people on the subway does not fit the facts about mental illness and violence,” writes Freddie deBoer in a provocative Intelligencer piece about forcing mentally ill people into involuntary treatment in order, he argues, to save them.
• A cruise ship rescued 68 migrants who were attempting a voyage to Spain’s Canary Islands in dangerous conditions via a fishing boat. Six people died, which tragically adds to the roughly 5,000 migrant death toll from sea crossings to the Canary Islands so far this year.
• What has Javier Milei accomplished so far in Argentina? Watch the latest Just Asking Questions to find out.

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