During a portion of an interview with the Fox News Channel aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Ingraham Angle,” President Donald Trump discussed H-1B visas and said that bringing in large numbers of foreign workers will harm the wages of American workers “but you also do have to bring talent.” And “you don’t have certain talents” in the U.S.
Host Laura Ingraham asked if “the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.”
Trump responded, “I agree, but you also do have to bring talent.”
Ingraham cut in to say, “Well, we have plenty of talented people here.”
Trump responded, “No, you don’t.”
Ingraham cut in to follow up, “We don’t have talented people here?”
Trump answered, “No, you don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off like an unemployment line and say, I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles. … I’ll give you an example: In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants out. They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives. Making batteries [is] very complicated. It’s not an easy thing, and very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems. They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages, to make batteries and to teach people how to do it. Well, they wanted them to get out of the country. You’re going to need that, Laura. I know you and I disagree on this. You can’t just say, a country is coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant, and you’re going to take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years and they’re going to start making their missiles. It doesn’t work that way.”
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