Trump Defends Plan to Offer 600,000 Chinese Student Visas

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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 wasn’t aimed at China but 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.

“You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country, destroy our entire university and college system, I don’t want to do that,” Trump said.

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.

“You know, making batteries are 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.”

Atlanta immigration attorney Charles Kuck, who represents four of the detained South Korean nationals, told The Associated Press in September that no company in the United States makes the machines used in the Georgia battery plant, so workers had to come from abroad to install or repair equipment on-site. He said it would take about three to five years to train someone in the United States to do that work.

“This is not something new. We’ve been doing this forever, and we do it when we ship things abroad; we send our folks there to take care of it,” Kuck said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox and Friends on Nov. 12 that Trump’s remarks addressed the reality of the U.S. manufacturing base.

“For years, 20, 30 years, we have offshored precision manufacturing jobs,” he said. “We can’t snap our fingers and say ‘you’re going to learn how to build ships overnight.’”

He said foreign workers can be brought in to help train U.S. workers.

“I think the president’s vision here is to bring in overseas workers, where these jobs went, who have the skills three, five, seven years to train the U.S. workers, then they can go home, [and] the U.S. workers fully take over,” he said.

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