Donald Trump announced that he is “softening” his opposition to high-skilled foreign workers coming into the United States.
“I’m changing it and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country,” Trump said during the Fox News debate in Detroit.
Trump’s comments are a mainstream Republican position, but they’re at odds with his most prominent immigration hawk supporters. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., endorsed Trump just a few days after holding a hearing on high-skilled immigration visas that featured a laid-off Disney IT engineer.
Trump has hosted former Disney employees at a rally to attack Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., for helping write a Gang of Eight immigration bill that would allow for an increase in high-skilled immigration.
Leo Perrero, a former Disney employee, got choked up while testifying before Sessions’ committee about having to train a foreign worker who was replacing him. “That day, 20 years of hard work, a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, and an IT job for Disney were all over when my team, along with hundreds of others, were displaced by a less-skilled foreign work force imported into our country using the H-1B visa program,” Perrero told a panel of senators.
Trump emphasized the need for bringing high-skilled immigrants into the United States, especially when they’re trained at American universities. “We need highly-skilled people in this country and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in,” he said. “But — and we do need it, and Silicon Valley, we absolute have to have it.”
