Trump Shouldn’t Cozy Up To Wall Street

Donald Trump garnered a rare rebuke from many otherwise loyal supporters last week in the wake of comments he made on the All-In Podcast, a show hosted by four Silicon Valley executives. The comments  —and the ensuing backlash — revolved around Trump’s response to a host’s demand that the former president “promise” to “give us more ability to import the best and brightest from around the world to America.” (Polished industry-speak for more foreign workers). To that, Trump replied:

You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years — if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.

Later, bemoaning the fact that foreign graduates of U.S. colleges couldn’t stay in the country after graduating, Trump promised: “That is going to end on day one.”

The comments echoed what Trump reportedly said to “a group of America’s most powerful chief executives” in a meeting earlier this month. A New York Times report on the meeting — which included “dozens of leading chief executives, including Tim Cook of Apple, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Doug McMillon of Walmart and Charles W. Scharf of Wells Fargo” — detailed Trump’s efforts to “reassure” the business tycoons with promises of more corporate tax cuts and “talk[ing] up the importance of high-skilled immigration, saying he knew businesses needed these workers.” Per the Times:

Mr. Trump said he thought it was “wrong” that people who made sacrifices to come to America and attend top U.S. schools should have to go home to their countries, one of the people said. Another person who was in the room recalled that Mr. Trump made the point that the high-skilled immigrants who received an American education could either be successful in the U.S. or in their home countries. He said that the best and the brightest were needed to help America, this person said.

As many conservatives have already explained at length, the idea is bad — very, very bad — on its face. In a moment where immigration — both legal and illegal — is drowning the country, at the same time as the U.S. education system is more broken than it ever has been in living memory, stapling green cards to every foreigner’s diploma would simultaneously make both even worse. It would exacerbate discrimination against native-born Americans in higher education, boxing them out of their own country’s education system (and by extension, the pipeline to the American middle and upper-middle classes); it would further displace American workers (something the H-1B visa system is already very much doing); and it would twist and pervert the incentive structures for universities to heretofore-unseen ends, converting many colleges into de facto green card mills. (For an example of this in practice, look to Canada, where diploma-for-pay mills posing as colleges are cranking out tens of thousands of “international students” a year, due to the country’s college-to-permanent-residency pipeline). (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Against Juneteenth)

It’s entirely possible that Trump, a man known for his exaggerated manner of speaking, didn’t really mean what he said. As many were quick to point out, the former president made similar comments on the campaign trail in 2016, and subsequently fought to lower legal immigration rates, including as it pertained to visas. The Trump campaign itself rushed to clarify the comments, pledging to keep only the most “skilled” and “thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.”

But even if the comments were meaningless on substance, they demonstrate an effort on Trump’s part to woo the corporate elites — both in his remarks on last week’s podcast, and during his meeting with wealthy executives earlier this month. Another New York Times piece today (“C.E.O.s Are Frustrated With Biden. That Doesn’t Mean They Embrace Trump”) outlines why that approach is unlikely to bear fruit: While a “number of prominent figures in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street … have grown increasingly vocal in their criticism of Mr. Biden, their praise of former President Donald J. Trump, or both,” the Times writes, “that shift mostly reflects movement among executives who already supported Republican politicians but had not previously embraced Mr. Trump. There is little evidence of a major shift in allegiance among executives away from Mr. Biden and toward Mr. Trump.” (READ MORE: Oh, You Thought This Was About Basketball?)

Trump’s natural base lies in Middle America rather than the C-suites of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Those are the men and women who thronged to his populist message in 2016; who drove hours to hear him speak; who devoted their nights and weekends to canvassing, knocking doors, and get-out-the-vote operations for him, both in 2016 and 2020. If Trump wants to fight for them, he must fight against the managers of global capital who have hollowed out their towns, flooded their communities with pills and addiction, and flung open their nation’s borders to suffocate the native jobs that remained. Cozying up to the business elite — especially on the issue of immigration — would be a betrayal of the people who made him president in the first place.

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