He said in an interview that he had used the visas for skilled workers “many times.” But he has mainly used visas for unskilled workers like housekeepers.
President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to weigh in on Saturday on a heated debate among his supporters over the role of skilled immigrant workers in the U.S. economy, saying he had frequently used the visas for those workers and backed the program.
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties,” he told The New York Post. “I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”
But his comments — which were enthusiastically embraced by the technology industry as an endorsement — may muddy the waters because Mr. Trump appears to have only sparingly used the H-1B visa program, which allows skilled workers like software engineers to work in the United States for up to three years and can be extended to six years.
Instead, he has been a frequent and longtime user of the similarly named, but starkly different, H-2B visa program, which is for unskilled workers like gardeners and housekeepers, as well as the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers. Those visas allow a worker to remain in the country for 10 months. Federal data show Mr. Trump’s companies have received approval to employ over 1,000 workers through the two H-2 programs in the past 20 years.
The Trump transition team did not reply to multiple requests for comment seeking clarity on the type of visas the president-elect was referring to in the interview.
But it did respond to a prior query about Mr. Trump’s position on work visas by sharing the text of a speech he made in 2020 extolling the work of American citizens in building the country, noting that “Americans must never lose sight of this miraculous story.” While campaigning in 2016, Mr. Trump spoke out against the H-1B program, calling it “very bad for workers” and stating that “we should end it.”