Former President Donald Trump promised to give permanent resident status to any alien who graduates from any college in an interview on a podcast Thursday. Trump was the guest on “The All-In Podcast" hosted by venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and  David Sacks. Sacks hosted a hugely successful fundraiser for Trump in Silicon Valley.

The key part of the episode takes shape when investor Jason Calacanis makes a pitch for more immigrant workers.

2016 Trump: “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first.”

2024 Trump: “I promise to staple a Green Card to anyone who graduates from ANY college, even 2-yr community colleges.”

This isn’t… pic.twitter.com/6U8hRgghso

— U.S. Tech Workers (@USTechWorkers) June 20, 2024

CALCANIS: A more important point I think, Mr. President, is we need high-skill workers in this country.

TRUMP: Yes.

CALCANIS: We need to recruit the best and brightest [unintelligible].

TRUMP: I agree.

CALCANIS: Every time we get somebody who’s superintelligent, from India, or Europe, or any country… [crosstalk]… and three of the four here are immigrants, the ones without the ties, we get these great people into our country and that’s a loss for our adversaries and our competitors and a gain for us, but I’ve never heard you talk about this. Can you please promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world.

TRUMP: I do promise, but I happen to agree, that’s why I promise otherwise I wouldn’t promise. Let me just tell you that it’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also. And what I wanted to do, and I would have done this but then we had to solve the COVID problem because that came in and sort of dominated for a little while, as you perhaps know. But what I want to do and I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diplomat a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody who graduates from a college, you go in there for two years or four years, if you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college you should be able to stay in this country. And you know more stories than I do, but I know of stories where people graduated from a top college or from a college and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places and they become multi-billionaires, employ thousands and thousands of people and it could have been done here. A bigger example is, you need a pool of people to work for your companies. You have great companies and they have to be smart people. Not everybody can be less than smart. You need brilliant people. And we force brilliant people, the people that graduate from college, the people that are number one in their class from the best colleges, you have to be able to recruit these people and keep the people. It was such a big deal, somebody graduates at the top of the class they can’t even make a deal with a company because they don’t think they are going to be able to stay in the country. That is going to end on Day One.   

PALIHAPITIYA: That’s fantastic.

SACKS: We all wholeheartedly agree with that. Being in the tech industry we understand the importance of that.

I'm sure this proposal will generate some lively debate. It will be interesting to see what impact it has on the race.