Trump wants overseas workers to train Americans and go back home: Bessent

A day after President Donald Trump surprised observers by briefly defending the H-1B visa programme — a system he has spent years railing against — treasury secretary Scott Bessent dutifully appeared on Fox News to explain the new party line. Or rather, to tidy up after it.

According to Bessent, the President’s grand “vision” is to import skilled overseas workers, get them to train Americans for a few years, and then pack them back home like returnable containers.

“The President's vision here is to bring in overseas workers… Three, five, seven years to train US workers, then they can go home,” he declared, as though this had always been Trump’s immigration philosophy and not something that had emerged 24 hours after a MAGA muttering session.

Bessent was responding to Trump’s latest comments in which the President insisted the US “has to bring in talent” because America apparently “doesn’t have certain talents”. A sentiment that, strangely enough, did not cause a revolt on-set, though it did leave his supporters scrambling to explain how this squares with the 'Hire American' sermon they have been preaching for years.

The treasury secretary, eager to frame the President’s U-turn as a stroke of strategic genius rather than a hasty backpedal, offered a manufacturing parable: “We can't snap our fingers and say, ‘You’re going to learn how to build ships overnight.’ We want to bring the semiconductor industry back.”

Hence the plan: let foreigners do the complicated stuff, teach Americans, and then quietly exit stage right. “That’s a home run,” Bessent insisted, even as he acknowledged Americans currently “can’t have those jobs” because the country stopped producing ships and semiconductors “for years”. An admission MAGA diehards might not find especially comforting.

Trump himself had set the ball rolling in an interview with Laura Ingraham, declaring, “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.” When Ingraham gently reminded him that America has “plenty of talent”, Trump shot back:
“No, you don’t, no you don’t. You don’t have certain talents.”

He then offered a lecture on why unemployed Americans cannot be plucked from jobless lines and instantly assigned to missile factories.
“You can’t… say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory, we’re going to make missiles.’ It doesn’t work that way,” he said — an argument that, until yesterday, MAGA influencers usually reserved for mocking Democrats.

The President even cited a Georgia case involving South Korean battery workers, lamenting that US factories need highly specialised foreign technicians — a message that might have landed better had Trump not spent years insisting such workers were stealing American jobs.

All this comes while his own administration pursues a zealous crackdown on H-1B visas. Trump’s September Proclamation slapped a $100,000 surcharge on certain H-1B petitions, and the administration has since launched 175 investigations into alleged visa abuse, from ghost work sites to benching employees.

“As part of our mission to protect American Jobs, we’ve launched 175 investigations,” the labour department boasted on X, echoing the familiar capitalised sloganeering. Labour secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer chimed in that the department will ensure high-skilled jobs go to “American Workers FIRST!” — exclamation marks and all.

Which makes Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for foreign “talent” all the more curious. One might even suspect that the real “skill shortage” he’s dealing with is a shortage of patience among his own supporters, who reacted badly to his brief moment of candour about America’s engineering gap. And so, as always, the administration has scrambled to spin the pivot: foreign workers are fine, you see, as long as they eventually go home and leave no fingerprints.

In other words: bring them in, use them, lose them — and hope the base doesn’t notice the contradiction.

With PTI inputs