COMMENTARY: Green cards for international college grads a great deal

On a podcast this summer, former President Donald Trump said that, if elected, he would give permanent green cards to all international students who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities. If so, it would boost our economy and potentially decrease the government’s budget deficit. However, it wouldn’t solve our border problems.

Trump declared, “What I want to do and what I will do is, you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

He elaborated, “And that includes junior colleges, too. Anybody 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.”

There were 858,395 international students in U.S. colleges in 2022-23. If a quarter of them graduate annually, legal immigration will increase by 200,000 yearly and surely grow in future years as the promise of a green card attracts more international college applicants.

The regular inflow of highly skilled immigrants would benefit Americans by increasing economic growth. The National Academy of Sciences reported that perhaps the most crucial benefit of immigration is the “infusion by high-skilled immigration of human capital that has boosted the nation’s capacity for innovation and technological change.” The NAS added that this innovation “has the potential to increase the productivity of natives” and economic growth.

The policy change would secure economic benefits without causing most of the standard worries about immigration. College graduates commit fewer crimes than non-graduates. Virtually all immigrants who graduate college already speak English and are at least partially assimilated. And while they represent a significant flow, they do not amount to a flood in the context of overall legal immigration to the United States, which has averaged 2.5 million people annually over the past decade, excluding the pandemic years.

Following Trump’s remarks, campaign representative Karoline Leavitt stated that an aggressive vetting process would “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges” from this program. Presumably, most immigrants already here on student visas would pass this test. Rather than “public charges,” these immigrants would create a net tax gain.

The NAS estimates that each immigrant with a college degree creates a combined fiscal surplus for national, state and local governments of around $500,000 over 75 years (in present value). Those with graduate degrees create a surplus of closer to $1 million. A decade of giving green cards to college graduates could easily generate $1 trillion in net fiscal surplus.

In short, this policy should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, good economics is often not good politics. During his presidency, Trump severely cracked down on immigration, including high-skilled immigration, and his base is often motivated by his anti-immigrant rhetoric. The only chance this idea has politically is if it is combined with increased border security to crack down on illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, illegal immigration can’t be cured by enforcement alone. The majority of people crossing the border illegally have essentially no legal path to immigration, and few, if any, of them would be able to take advantage of a green-card-for-college-grads program. As long as massive differences exist between economic opportunities in the United States and their origin countries, illegal immigration will remain a problem despite enforcement — if there is no plausible legal path for these lower-skilled immigrants.

No single immigration reform can solve all our immigration problems, but giving green cards to college graduates is a step in the right direction. These immigrants would get the opportunity to realize the American dream, and we natives would enjoy more economic growth.

Benjamin Powell is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and is director of the Free Market Institute and a professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.