In a recent podcast, Donald Trump said that he wanted to see more legal immigrants in the U.S. Trump expressed concern about foreign students getting their higher education degrees in America’s universities and then subsequently leaving the country.

“It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also,” Trump opined. “But 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, and that includes junior colleges too.”

Trump has long been caricatured by the mainstream media as “anti-immigrant” or “anti-immigration.” Like the popular racism smear, this claim is often repeated as if self-evidently true, but it lacks any actual evidence to back it up.

What is true is that Trump, like a majority of Americans, is opposed to illegal immigration, an essential distinction that his Democrat opponents and their mainstream media colleagues avoid noting. Indeed, so pronounced is the conflation between legal and illegal immigration that one is led to wonder if Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts even believe it exists.

Given the media’s false characterization of Trump, anyone not paying attention might find his pro-green card position surprising. However, Trump has a history of calling for expanding legal immigration. For example, back in early 2019, he stated: “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.”

In the spring of 2017, shortly after he took office, Trump sat for an interview with The Economist and was asked if he wanted to “curb legal immigration.” Trump pushed back, responding that he wanted “to stop illegal immigration.” He explained, “I want people to come in legally. But I want people to come in on merit. I want to go to a merit-based system. … I absolutely want talented people coming in, I want people that are going to love our country coming in, I want people that are going to contribute to our country coming in.”

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump advocated expanding guest worker visa programs for both high- and low-skilled foreign workers. He pointed out that there were many jobs out there that many Americans were unwilling to do but that many foreign workers were more than willing to take on.

Prior to the pandemic, in early 2020, Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told a group in England that one of the issues Trump was concerned about was the lack of enough immigrant workers. “We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said. “We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”

Once again, Trump does not now nor has he ever expressed an anti-immigration position or agenda. Rather, the opposite has been the case. What Trump has opposed is the illegal, uncontrolled, and unfettered influx of migrants streaming across our southern border. This is inherently dangerous and represents a threat to our nation in many ways — a belief that, until about 10-15 years ago, both parties shared.

But Trump says mean things about undocumented migrants is the common complaint from the Left. Well, those unkind things are not necessarily false, nor are they inherently racist. In fact, to claim that all illegal aliens — who have come from countries all over the world — are essentially Hispanic is to engage in racism.

Leftmedia outlets like The Washington Post, though, continue to peddle this tired, false narrative, even suggesting that Trump joking about having migrants fight against professional mixed martial artists is “spreading violent rhetoric.”

But this epitomizes the problem with our mainstream media. They are not interested in reporting the truth to the public; rather, they are invested in advancing a leftist narrative, no matter how bogus, in order to advance a progressive political agenda. And this is why so many people are surprised when Trump says he’s in favor of expanding legal immigration.