Trump clarified that he meant America needs certain talented H-1B visa workers until Americans learned those skills.
President Donald Trump clarified why he is defending the H-1B visa program and said America indeed needs certain talent “until they learn it”. As an example, he cited the chip making skill which confused the ‘America First’ supporters more, as they said Trump probably forgot that America built chips and then trained other countries to build them. Giving more context to what he recently said on H-1B on the latest FOX News interview, Trump said US “foolishly” allowed its chipmaking capability to other countries like Taiwan.“For instance, if you’re going to be making chips, we don’t make chips too much here anymore,” he said. “But we have to train our people how to make chips because we didn’t do it. We used to do it and then, foolishly, we lost that business to Taiwan,” he said as he was asked what he meant by his new H-1B stand when he said America needs certain talent.
Trump’s stand on H-1B led to a MAGA civil war as MAGA lawmakers opposed to his pro-H-1B stand and said that he insulted Americans by implying that they lack something. In the FOX interview, Trump spoke about the Korean battery workers in US plants in Georgia who were recently raided. Trump said America needs such specially skilled people. The administration also affirmed that they want foreigners to come, work, train and then go back to their own countries. On Monday as Trump spoke about the chip market, he said the chipmakers are all coming back to the US because of the tariffs. “Within a very short period of time, we’re going to have the majority of the chipmaking in the world… where it should have been all along,” he said.
‘We aren’t buying it’
MAGA commentators were not satisfied with Trump’s clarification and said they are not buying Trump’s defence that America needs H-1B immigrants to make computer chips. “We have chip manufacturing across this country, including all advanced research and development and production. How are we doing it now with very little H1Bs in that field? What are almost all H1Bs Indian not Taiwanese?” one wrote.”The entire premise of Trump’s H1B stance is ridiculous anyway. He’s saying that we don’t have the talent to fill these manufacturing and tech jobs AND that we’ll be importing workers via H1Bs to come here. Well then if that’s the case, why do we have any student visas? Since it takes ~5 years of schooling to train these students on student visas to enter the workforce and Trump also says it’d take too long to train US citizens to do these jobs, why wouldn’t we just pay for Americans’ schooling instead of training outsiders on the same skills?” another wrote.