‘I want to see our school system thrive,’ the president said.
President Donald Trump on Nov. 11 defended his plan to offer 600,000 visas to Chinese students.
“We do have a lot of people coming in from China. We always have, China and other countries,” Trump told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham during an interview on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“We also have a massive system of colleges and universities. And if we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business. I think that’s a big deal.”
Trump added that this would hit historically black colleges and universities especially hard, and they “would all be out of business.”
He said the plan was aimed not at China but at the international students from around the world more broadly, and his thinking comes from a business perspective.
“We take in trillions of dollars from students. You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from foreign countries. I want to see our school system thrive,” he said.
Colleges often charge international students higher tuition than U.S. students.
He pushed back at the idea that this proposal is upsetting the Make America Great Again (MAGA) base of supporters.
“Don’t forget, MAGA was my idea, MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else, and MAGA wants to see our country thrive,” he said.
Trump also defended plans to focus on H1-B visas and bring more foreign workers into the country.
“When you don’t have certain talents, you have to have people to learn. You can’t take people off like an unemployment line and say: ‘I put you into a factory. We’re going to make missiles,’” Trump said.
He referenced the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers at a battery plant in Georgia earlier this year and defended the company’s decision to bring them to the United States.
“You know, making batteries [is] very complicated. It’s not an easy thing, and very dangerous,” he said. “They had five or six hundred people, early stages, to make batteries, and to teach people how to do it.”
