Breaking with Trump, Jensen Huang makes the case for immigration: 'We want all the world's great minds to come here'
A key Trump ally in the tech world is trumpeting the benefits of immigration.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, himself an immigrant from Taiwan, said on a recent podcast that he believes the United States needs to maintain its status as an attractor of top tech talent — even if those workers come from outside the United States.
“We want all the world’s great minds to come here, bring their great ideas,” Huang said on the Bg2 podcast. “The inflow of intellectual property into this country is unlike anything else the world’s ever seen.”
Though Huang said immigrants must enter the country “lawfully,” he said that striking a good balance is necessary. “Surely we want to do it,” he said of attracting foreign talent.
Huang’s spirited comments clash with the Trump administration’s agenda, which has sought to crack down on H-1B visas — often the first gateway for tech workers entering the country — as part of its wider crackdown on immigration.
In a statement to Business Insider, a White House spokeswoman said, “There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential.”
In September last year, Trump signed an executive order setting a $100,000 fee for new H-1B applications, to be paid by companies hiring the foreign workers.
Some of the top tech companies sponsoring H-1B visas include Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple.
Then, last week, Vance and other US officials said during a press conference that the administration was banning Microsoft and Adobe from a federal visa sponsorship program that links an H-1B visa to a green card.
“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance said during the press conference.
Huang has emerged as one of Trump’s more reliable allies in the tech world. Huang said last month that AI CEOs were scaring people about the tech for “ulterior reasons,” an act he called “irresponsible” and “unnecessary.”
“We don’t need more regulations,” Huang said. “We need to apply the current regulations we have.”
As Trump weighed calls from some AI CEOs to regulate the burgeoning industry after a series of rogue AI incidents, the president ultimately took an approach aligned with Huang’s view.
Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
At an October 8 event at the White House, Trump gave science and tech medals to six CEOs. Only one of them, Michael Dell, was born in the United States. The rest — Elon Musk of SpaceX, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sergey Brin of Google, and Lisa Su of Taiwan — were born abroad.