MAGA’s other immigration battle
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What are President Trump's views on illegal immigration?
So President Trump has been pretty consistent about his feelings regarding illegal immigration to the U.S. 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.
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How does Trump view high-skill work visas like H-1B?
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Today Explained.
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.
A lot of these visas actually go to companies. There's sort of a whole business model that's sprung up around the H-1B visa of sort of IT companies who staff almost their entire companies with primarily Indian men on H-1B visas. And their model is that they do IT a little bit cheaper than a lot of companies' in-house IT offices. And so what's happened over the last 20 or 30 years is that a lot of companies have actually laid off their internal IT and hired these sort of IT external companies on H-1B visas to come work for them instead.
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.
When Trump takes office, he obviously has all of this anti-immigrant rhetoric. You know, Mexicans are rapists and refugees are all terrorists. And his movement, you know, sort of involved a lot of, you know, we want to hire more Americans. We don't want jobs to go to foreigners. And so naturally, the H-1B visa became sort of a target in that broader rhetoric.
Yeah, you can see how it can find itself in the crosshairs of America first.
I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use and I shouldn't be allowed to use. We shouldn't have it. Very, very bad for workers.
But during the first Trump administration, you had a lot of competing voices. You know, Jared Kushner was in the White House, and he was sort of a more old-school Republican, pro-business voice.
We want to make sure we're bringing in people who will grow GDP, create jobs. We want to attract the best and brightest. We want to welcome people to this country.
He was a bigger fan of the H-1B visa program. And so the story of the first Trump administration was you definitely had the MAGA right, hates the H-1B.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What are President Trump's views on illegal immigration?
0:00–1:32
2
How does Trump view high-skill work visas like H-1B?
1:32–19:56
3
What conflicting opinions exist within Trump's administration regarding H-1B visas?
19:56–23:50
4
How did the Biden administration impact H-1B visa policies?
23:50–27:18