President Donald Trump suggested on Monday that the United States needs H-1B foreign visa workers because Americans currently do not know how to manufacture microchips.
Asked by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday regarding a clarification on his administration’s stance concerning the H-1B visa program, which allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire foreign workers to work in certain skilled job sectors, Trump told reporters that the United States needs to outsource certain jobs to foreign workers until American workers “learn” certain skills, such as chip manufacturing.
“For instance, if you’re going to be making chips — we don’t make chips too much here anymore, but we are going to be in a period of a year, we’re going to have a big portion of the chip market. But, we have to train our people how to make chips, because we didn’t get — we used to do it, and then foolishly, we lost that business to Taiwan, very, very foolishly, because if they had a president that thought like I did, they would not have let that happen,” Trump told reporters.
Trump claimed that the Chips Act was a “disaster” for the United States and that the legislation gave foreign countries and companies billions of dollars. However, the president said that chip manufacturing is “coming back” to the United States due to the implementation of his administration’s tariffs.
“Chip makers are all coming back, and I think within a very short period of time, we’re going to have maybe even the majority of the chip making in the world will be right in the United States, where it should have been all along,” Trump said.
“But because we had people that didn’t believe in tariffs — if they believed in them, they didn’t know how to use them — we would have had nobody leaving our country right now, and instead, you have almost 100% of the chips are made in Taiwan,” the president added. “It’s so disgraceful. The good news is it’s all coming back.”
Trump’s comments to reporters on Monday come after he debated the issue of H-1B visas with Fox News host Laura Ingraham during an interview on November 10.
During the recent interview, Ingraham asked Trump about his plans for the H-1B visa. The Fox News host claimed that the Trump administration cannot raise wages for American workers by allowing “tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers” into the country.
“Well, I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent,” Trump told Ingraham during the interview.
“Well, we have plenty of talented people here,” Ingraham told the president, prompting him to say, “No, you don’t.”
Asked if the United States did not have talented people in the country, Trump added, “You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn.”