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Will Trump act on his green card pledge?

US President-elect had promised international students green cards upon graduation

Sunder Pichai of Google. Elon Musk of Tesla. Satya Nadella of Microsoft. Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

Many of the CEOs at the helm of Silicon Valley’s - and the world’s - leading technology companies have one thing in common: they are all naturalized American citizens who completed their studies in the USA. Furthermore, almost 45% of Fortune 500 companies in the USA were founded by immigrants or their children.

For years, international students majoring in STEM subjects in US universities have been able to stay in the USA on their F-1 student visa and be legally employed for up to three years after the conclusion of their studies through a program called Optional Practical Training (OPT). But after this period, they must enter a H-1B lottery system should they wish to stay longer. Regardless of which university they graduated from or the major they pursued, international students had a 25%-35% chance of being selected for the H1-B visa. Should they not be selected, many students are compelled to return to their countries of origin, much to their disappointment and that of employers.

All of this is set to change under the coming Donald Trump administration, should the president-elect keep his promises.

Long known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Donald Trump, in the week leading up to election, stated unequivocally on the “All-In” podcast, which focuses on business and technology, “[What] I want to do, and what I will do, is 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. That includes junior colleges, too.”

This would be a policy shift from his first term, but a welcome one for the 1.1 Million international students currently enrolled in US universities. Current US immigration policies do not accommodate direct pathways to green cards (permanent residency) and citizenship for noncitizen US university graduates, but that may be set to change under a Trump presidency. “Should he keep his election promise, this would be transformational for international students, US universities, and American society as a whole,” says Peter Davos, Founder and CEO of Dubai-based educational consultancy. “The US needs to provide simple and straightforward pathways to citizenship for its international graduates, many of whom desire to settle in America permanently. These changes are critical to continuing to fuel American leadership in global innovation,” he adds.

Trump went on to say “Somebody graduates at the top of the class, they can’t even make a deal with the company because they don’t think they’re going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on Day 1. It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools,” he added.

The US needs 400,000 new engineers each year and more than one-third of engineering jobs go unfulfilled, according to a recent report by CCG Consulting. The most effective way to fill that gap is through the revision of US existing immigration laws and allowing noncitizen STEM graduates to stay in the USA. President Joe Biden had promised that STEM PhDs would be granted green cards upon the conclusion of their studies, but wasn’t able to fulfill that promise; let’s hope that President-Elect Donald Trump will fulfill his.

The author is the Founder and CEO of Hale Education Group, an education consultancy based in Dubai. He is the son of immigrants to the US and holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Oxford, and Harvard.