Trump Says We Need H-1B Migrant Workers Because Americans Don’t Know How To Make Chips
President Donald Trump told reporters Monday that H-1B migrant workers are needed right now because Americans don’t know how to make microchips.
Trump met with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Nov. 10, and the host pressed the president’s H-1B visa plan. The president argued that America needs to import more people because current citizens are not qualified or talented enough to do certain jobs. Trump was asked to expand and clarify his comments on Monday and told reporters that H1-B workers were needed to help make microchips as the industry returned to the United States.
“For example, if you want to make chips – we don’t make a lot of chips here anymore, but we’re going to be in a year, we’re going to have a big part of the chip market. But we have to train our people to make chips, because we haven’t been in the habit of doing that, and then stupidly, we lost that business to Taiwan, very, very stupidly, because if they had a president who thought like me, they wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.” Trump said. “But it’s all coming back. I think we’re going to have one, within a few years, and not because of the Chips Act.”
The president said the Chips Act was a disaster for America and had caused other countries to lose billions of dollars.
“The chip makers are all coming back, and I think in a very short period of time we may even have the majority of chip manufacturing in the world happening in the United States, where it should have been all along,” the president added.
“But because we had people who didn’t believe in tariffs – if they believed in them, they didn’t know how to use them – no one could have left our country right now, and instead almost 100% of the chips are made in Taiwan. It’s so shameful. The good news is that it’s all coming back,” he concluded.
The two men credited with creating the microchip, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, were both Americans and worked for American companies.
Since Trump’s initial comments on H1-B visas, the president has faced backlash from his base. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a former rival of the president, appeared to try to capitalize on the criticism.
“Republicans have the majority in Congress and could legislate the elimination of H1B (and any program designed to import cheap foreign labor). It’s actions, not words, that count,” DeSantis wrote on November 13 in response to a tweet from a longtime ally of his ally criticizing Congress for not acting more quickly on H1-B visas. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump and DeSantis could be destined for a head-to-head rematch in key GOP primary)
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, who recently clashed with the president, announced on Nov. 13 on X that she was announcing a bill to phase out the H1-B visa program.
