President Donald Trump stood by his stance that immigrants with high-tech skills should be allowed into the US to support the expansion of advanced domestic manufacturing, despite mounting backlash from his conservative base.
In remarks in Washington on Wednesday, Trump singled out the workforce needs of new factories, including one being developed in Arizona by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a key partner in production of AI chips designed by Nvidia Corp.
“You can’t come in, open up a massive computer chip factory for billions and billions of dollars like is being done in Arizona, and think you’re going to hire people off an unemployment line to run it,” the president said at a US-Saudi Investment Forum. “They’re going to have to bring thousands of people with them. And I’m going to welcome those people.”
The speech marked the latest example of Trump voicing support for high-skilled immigration, a stance that the policy’s supporters have said has not been matched by the administration’s actions.
A massive raid on a Georgia battery plant in September ensnared scores of South Korean engineers working on the facility being built by Hyundai Motor Co. and LG Energy Solution Ltd. The incident strained relations with Seoul and triggered criticism that Trump’s migrant crackdown risks scaring off foreign investors he’s turned to for his effort to revive American manufacturing.
Trump on Wednesday singled out Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who was in the audience and has formed close ties with the president. Huang has publicly warned that the administration’s immigration crackdown, especially a $100,000 fee increase for H-1B visas, undermines the technology industry’s ability to recruit talent in the US.
A vocal cadre of Trump’s supporters disagrees. Fox News host Laura Ingraham pressed Trump last week to concede that “you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers” and also raise Americans’ wages.
When Trump insisted “you also do have to bring in talent,” Ingraham replied that “we have plenty of talented people here. “No you don’t,” Trump said. “You don’t have certain talents and people have to learn.”
At the forum Wednesday, the president acknowledged that his vision for welcoming skilled workers to the US risked drawing objections from his conservative base, which has largely supported his administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
“Now, I love my conservative friends. I love MAGA, but this is MAGA,” he said. “My poll numbers just went down, but with smart people, they’ve gone way up.”
Still, other business groups have expressed concern that the higher H-1B fee risks harming the economy and pressed the administration to revisit its planned changes to the skilled worker program. In a letter sent last month to Trump, roughly a dozen industry organizations representing chipmakers, software companies and retailers said the new fee threatens to crimp a crucial talent pipeline of foreign skilled workers and leave critical jobs unfilled.
Trump on Wednesday said he envisions bringing in workers from overseas who could train a generation of Americans in advanced technologies.
“If you have to bring people to get those plants opened, we want you to do that, and we want those people to teach our people how to make computer chips and how to make other things,” he said.
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