Outlining his vision of a tariff-driven industrial renaissance, President Donald Trump said immigrants would be let in to meet the needs of plants that would be opening up.
“We need more people”, he said. “We're going to let people come in. They want to come in, (but) we want them to come in legally,” he said on Wednesday while announcing the reciprocal tariffs.
“We need people to run these plants, to help the auto workers and the teamsters and the non-union people and everybody else,” he said.
“We want people, by the way, to come into our country, but we want them to come in through a legal process,” he said.
Trump listed several companies like Stallantis, General Motors, GE Aerospace, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Johnson & Johnson, Nvidia, TSMC, and Meta that were committed to investing billions of dollars to set up manufacturing facilities.
These would open up jobs for Americans, he said, while also looking at needs for labour fueled by these factories exceeding those available domestically as, in his vision, the US becomes a global industrial powerhouse.
While his administration is carrying out a campaign against illegal migrants and has begun deporting some of them, Trump made the distinction between legal immigration that was welcome and illegal migration.
“We want them to come in legally,” he said repeatedly.
Another criterion, he said, was that they should become patriots.
“They have to have the capability of loving our country, not people that hate our country -- we don't want them in our country,” he said.
Students, academics, and other visitors have had their visas revoked because Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they were involved in “activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest.”
Trump has in the past spoken of welcoming immigrants with professional skills, saying at one time that he wanted to staple green cards to the diplomas of foreigners graduating from US universities.
On Wednesday, his focus was explicitly on skilled workers.
However, factories and manufacturing facilities would also require well-educated professionals.
He also said, “We need people on the farmers,” adding they would be let in if they came in legally.
There are H2 categories of visas for skilled workers and farm labour, but the numbers are inadequate, and illegal migrants have been able to find jobs in farms and factories, making up for the shortages.