Trump defends H1-B visas for foreign workers 'to bring in talent'

In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News' The Ingraham Angle, President Donald Trump said that H-1B visas were necessary to bring foreign workers to the United States to fill in gaps where "certain talents" are lacking. 

Ingraham asked if H-1B visas "will not be a big priority for your administration, because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers."

"Well I agree, but we also do have to bring in talent when—" Trump began.

Ingraham cut him off, asking, "We don’t have talent?"

"No, you don’t have—you don’t have certain talents," Trump replied. "And you have to, people have to learn. You can’t take people off unemployment, like an unemployment line, and say, I’m going to put you into a factory, we’re going to make missiles."

Trump noted a recent raid at a Georgia Hyundai facility, in which 475 arrests were made, including at least 300 people believed to be South Korean nationals. Under an agreement with South Korea, those workers detained in the ICE raid were flown back to their country.

"In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants out — they had people from South Korea that made batteries all their life. You know, making batteries is very complicated. It’s not an easy thing. Very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems. They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages, to make batteries and to teach people how to do it. Well, they wanted them to get out of the country. You’re going to need that, Laura," Trump said. 

He later added, "I mean, I know you and I disagree on this. You can’t just say a country is coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re going to start making missiles. It doesn’t work that way."

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Trump’s "point here is, again, we can’t snap our fingers and say, you’re going to learn how to build ships overnight. We want to bring semiconductor industry back to the US. There’s going to be big facilities in Arizona. So 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 US workers, then they can go home. The US workers fully take over."

Trump’s response was criticised across social media. Frontines TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez wrote, "Trump needs to get out of his bubble and back on the ground listening to the American people who elected him to work for us. His H-1B comment shows how out of touch with the base he has become. Disheartening."

Matt Walsh wrote, "Even if it were true that we don’t have enough talented people in this country, which it isn’t, that would be all the more reason to stop importing foreigners. We need to train up our own people. Give actual Americans a shot. America is for Americans."

Independent journalist Breanna Morello wrote, "This has been a rough week for President Trump. Here he is defending H1B visas by saying we need them because not all Americans can make missiles. UNPOPULAR TAKE: Why would we want foreigners making OUR missiles?"