Astead Herndon

All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

But when it comes to legal pathways to immigration, Trump's feelings are harder to gauge.

The president has gone back and forth on H-1B visas, the ones for high-skilled workers in industries like tech and medicine.

He has said that he has himself used these visas to hire people, and he recently pushed back against Laura Ingraham of Fox News, a MAGA loyalist, to defend these visas from right-wing attacks.

You also do have to bring in talent.

Well, we have plenty of talented people here.

No, you don't.

No, you don't.

So why is President Trump supporting a program that his MAGA base doesn't like?

That's coming up next on Today Explained from Vox.

H-1B visas have been a simmering issue on the right for years now.

A couple months ago, we had The Wall Street Journal's Michelle Hackman on to explain.

She said there's been a lot of legitimate abuses of the program.

This week, we got Michelle back on the line to walk us through the latest.

She says this H-1B visa mess all started back in 2016.

Yeah, you can see how it can find itself in the crosshairs of America first.

What happened during the Biden years?

H1B visas are a total scam that are decimating the American workforce.

So now that Trump is back in office, the visas have become, again, another flashpoint.

Because as we know, Trump has made immigration such a cornerstone of his politics, but that's almost exclusively focused on domestic immigration, deportations, and things that are happening, what I would say, not for a college-educated or a highly skilled worker class.