“We have to train our people how to make chips… We used to do it, and then foolishly, we lost that business to Taiwan,” Trump said on November 17 at the White House.
“The President was very clear,” Trump counselor Stephen Miller told Newsmax:
He’s talking about the semiconductor industry, which is one of the most coveted industries in the world, one of the most national security-important industries in the world. Very few other countries are able to compete in this space, and all of those jobs left for Taiwan. And so the advanced semiconductor industry, which is essential to our national security, has been taken out of the country. So he’s talking about a program in which you have a knowledge transfer to Americans of how to do a very specific manufacturing process.
The narrowing comes after Trump received backlash from his base when he told Fox Host Laura Ingraham last week: “We… have to bring in talent…. [we] don’t have certain talents and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory… to make missiles.’”
In reality, the H-1B program keeps roughly 1 million foreign graduates and their wives in a huge variety of jobs. Similar visa programs keep another 1.5 million foreigners in a broad variety of U.S. jobs. Most of the migrants are Indians, and they use the programs to extract wealth from the white collar sector for themselves, their ethnic hiring networks, and for India. The result is that millions of Americans — both young and old — are pushed out of careers and prosperity as many companies’ shareholder values and U.S. innovation are drained.
But Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, downplayed the white-collar prosperity issue, telling CNBC: “There could be a little bit of almost a quiet time in the labor market [now] because firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don’t necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college.”
The back-and-forth reflects Trump’s personal politics, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “I don’t think that this is the kind of catastrophe that some people among his supporters make it out to be — that he’s sold out all over! — but it does create an opening for the Democrats.”
He continued:
There’s a couple of things going on here. He’s confusing the H-1B program — which has become a synonym for temporary skilled migration — with maybe other [migration] avenues. I mean… the example he gave [to Ingraham] was the Hyundai plant, which had nothing to do with H-1B visas. Add on top of that the fact that the President often will say a variety of things to see what the response is. It is market research in some sense, and so he’s flexible in a lot of ways.
Loud voters do shape policy in D.C., Krikorian said:
Pressure can work in the present, not so much to make him do something that he really doesn’t want to do, but in areas where he has views but isn’t completely wedded to them. Yeah, pressure can definitely work,
He’s never going to come out tomorrow, saying, “Oh, H-1B [visas] are terrible, we’re going to get rid of them.” But this needle that can be threaded relatively easily by being tighter in some of the regulatory changes and prevailing wage changes for H-1B and by saying, “Say, look, we’re still preserving this for the best of the best, but we are reforming this to prevent abuses or something like that.” It’s not that hard…
But they need to understand that they can’t pull their punches on this. They need to be strong on this and uncompromising. And that means the [pending] wage rule, for instance, had better really have a huge increase to make sure that the low-skilled H-1Bs are simply no longer viable.
“They keep stepping in this,” Krikorian added, saying:
The President has always had a weakness for visa programs, dating back to the 2016 campaign, [including] high-skilled or low-skilled. And at the same time, the President has clearly attacked some of the abuses of H-1B program for many years.
Miller used his Newsmax interview to spotlight the major reforms that Trump’s deputies have already advanced:
President Trump, through 212(f) [in federal law] has put a $100,000 fee on new H-1Bs. We’re already seeing a dramatic change in the processing of these visas. As a result of that, the Department of Labor has launched Project Firewall to fight illegal discrimination against Americans and illegal abuses of the H-1B program …
The State Department has revoked tens of thousands of visas, and they’re just getting started with tens of thousands more. We have a new focus on denaturalizations. We have a new focus on cutting back on welfare tourism and welfare migration.
And of course, you’ve seen again, for the first time in over half a century, net negative migration to this country. You have more foreigners leaving the country than those that are being added on a permanent basis. The last time that happened, again, was over half a century ago.
‘What [Stephen Miller] just said on H-1B visas is what the electorate wants to hear,” responded pollster Rich Baris.”What @realDonaldTrump told @IngrahamAngle is NOT what the electorate wants to hear. Far more of the electorate will hear what the latter said, not the former,” he added.
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