This week, both President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem signaled the U.S. needs to keep importing foreigners to take American jobs.
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham asked Trump during an exclusive interview whether the “H-1B visa thing” would “be a big priority for your administration? Because if you wanna 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,” the president said, before the rest of the segment derailed. “But you also do have to bring in talent.”
“We have plenty of talented people here,” Ingraham pointed out.
“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said.
“We don’t have talented people here?” Ingraham asked.
“You don’t have certain talents, and … people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m gonna put you into a factory where we’re gonna make missiles,’” Trump responded, to which Ingraham raised the question: “How did we ever do it before? When you and I were growing up?”
Trump went on to discuss a recent immigration enforcement operation at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, which led to the arrest of hundreds of Korean workers. Trump implied that without those foreign workers “mak[ing] batteries and … teach[ing] people how to do it,” the U.S. couldn’t produce batteries because Americans apparently lack the necessary skills.
Trump’s defense of foreign labor isn’t just questionable, it’s the opposite of his America First promise. America First is about our sovereignty and mending the link between our prosperity and our people. The idea that we can’t build things anymore without importing foreign labor is the same defeatist logic that globalists used to justify hollowing out other American industries.
Noem seemed to echo a similar sentiment not long after on Fox & Friends. She noted that the administration would “keep using our visa programs” and make sure they have “integrity.”
“[U]nder the Trump admin, we’ve sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards, to all of that, but also more people are becoming naturalized under this administration than ever before. More people are becoming citizens because we’re … making sure that these individuals … are here for the right reasons.” Noem said.
But America doesn’t need more paperwork Americans. If — and this is a big if — Americans are actually lacking the necessary skills to fill crucial roles, that doesn’t mean we import a bunch of foreign labor or create Americans in name only. It means our leaders should figure out ways to reform education, trade, and policy so that Americans can do the work themselves.
It’s something Vice President J.D. Vance understands, having told Newsmax earlier this year that “this idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject that.”
The late, great Charlie Kirk knew this as well. On Aug. 14, he posted a graph displaying the rapid decrease in the percentage of “30-year-olds who are both married and homeowners” along with the caption: “This is the social compact breaking down. We need urgency to restore it: 1 – Mass deportations 2 – Stop the H-1B scam 3 – Dramatically reduce LEGAL Immigration 4 – End chain migration and the Visa Lottery 5 – Build 10 million homes for Americans 6 – Crush the College Cartel.”
In fact, Trump himself once knew of the dangers of the H-1B visas, saying in 2016 that the visas are “very, very bad … for our workers and it’s unfair for our workers and we should end it.”
What happened to that Trump?
He’s still there, undoubtedly, but he needs to come out again.
You cannot put America first by putting Americans last. If America First means importing foreign labor, then the phrase itself has lost all meaning. Either we are a nation of Americans that is built by and for Americans, or we subscribe to the globalist logic that gutted our factories and sold out small-town America to cheap foreign overseas factories.
As Ingraham suggested in her exchange with Trump, America bet on its own people for centuries, and we did better than fine. Let’s do that again.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
