PALM BEACH, Fla. -

In my last column, I shared my interview with Donald Trump on foreign policy. Today, we discuss immigration, specifically his plans to expand legal immigration.

I’m a supporter of Trump’s policies to crack down on illegal immigration, but not the language he sometimes employs. The problem at our southern border is not that so many people want to come here. It’s that so many are coming here illegally. And Trump’s rhetoric can obscure the fact that he agrees with me about that. So I asked Trump: Is he a strong supporter of legal immigration? “I am,” he said. “We need people.”

Indeed, it has been little noticed, but Trump has promised that, if elected, he will offer permanent residency to every foreign student who graduates from a U.S. university. I wanted to talk to him about this idea, which I think deserves more attention than it is getting. The United States hosted more than 1 million foreign students from virtually every country in the 2022-2023 academic year, and it gave green cards to just over 1 million people in 2022. Trump’s proposal would dramatically increase the number of foreigners granted lawful permanent residence in America.

“If you spend four years in college, I think you should get a green card as part of your diploma,” he said. “I feel that — and some people in the Republican [Party] don’t — but … one of the biggest complaints I had from people heading up companies [is that foreign students] go to the Wharton School of Finance, they go to Harvard, they go to these different places, and Stanford, and [American businesses] can’t recruit because … they’re not allowed to stay in the country. And they want to be able to recruit them and they can’t do it. And I’m going to have serious discussions with a lot of people about when you go through four years of college or two years of college, if you’re in a junior college. And it’ll also be good for colleges, frankly.”

“There are many cases where these young people go back to India, they go back to wherever they come from, they end up [working for] the same company,” he said. “They ended up being the biggest people. … We could have had [them]. … These [students] go up and they relocate into Canada and other places where they do that. Canada gets a lot of business because we can’t guarantee [permanent residency].”

This is an entrepreneurial view of immigration that Trump rarely shows to Americans, but it is true to his roots. So I pointed to the black-and-white pictures of his mother and father behind his desk and asked him to tell me his family’s immigration story. “My father came from Germany – he was 5 years old – through his parents. His father was in Alaska for the gold rush. And he ended up doing little tiny little hotels for the guys that went up. He said, ‘I could do better if I do a hotel than look for the gold.’ But he died at a fairly young age of pneumonia from Alaska. But very strong guy, very good guy. And [he] moved. His mother lived in Queens – Richmond Hill, which is sort of [the] German section of Queens.

“My father was a builder. He graduated from high school and did a great job,” he continued. “My mother came from Scotland, and she never went back. She came here to work. … She loved Scotland, had great respect for the queen. Anything with the queen was good. … And [they were] great parents. … They were married for many, many decades, and they had a great marriage.”

During our interview, Trump handed me a printout of a Truth Social post he had put out that day. It read: “OUR BORDERS MUST BE CLOSED, AND THE TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY INSANE, IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS, DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR COUNTIES OF ORIGIN. WE WANT PEOPLE TO COME INTO OUR COUNTRY, BUT THEY MUST LOVE OUR NATION, AND COME IN LEGALLY AND THROUGH A SYSTEM OF MERIT.”

While there is much focus on his typically all-caps calls for deportation, I was struck by how this one was paired with an all-caps endorsement of legal immigration. It horrifies many on the left, but the truth is that Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration reflects the beliefs of a majority of Americans. His mass deportation pledge has widespread public support. A CBS-YouGov poll in June found that 62% of voters supported “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally” – including 53% of Hispanics. An Economist-YouGov poll in February found that 56% of Americans supported “using military troops to arrest and deport people who are in the U.S. unlawfully.” Just 31% were opposed. And an Axios poll from April found that 42% of Democrats supported “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.”

One of the tragedies of the Biden-Harris border disaster is that the record-breaking flood of unlawful migrants they have let in has depressed support for legal immigration. While a June Gallup poll found 64% still say immigration is a good thing, a 55% majority now say they want immigration levels reduced — the first time in nearly two decades that a majority have said they want less legal immigration.

That’s clearly a reason Trump rarely talks about legal immigration on the stump. He knows it isn’t popular with his base, and that many Americans are not open to expanding legal immigration. They won’t be as long as the country is in the midst of the worst border crisis since the Mexican-American War.

But just as with the isolationists’ misjudgment of Trump, I’m firmly convinced it’s wrong to label him a nativist. “Your parents obviously made America a better place,” I said to him. “Do you think immigrants make America a better place?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

I wish he would say so on the campaign trail.