From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Donald Trump challenges his base's immigration restrictionists, exposing a bit of a rift,

even in his own administration, especially over the issue of skilled foreign workers.

Who has the better of this debate?

Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of the Wall Street Journal. I'm Kim Strassel, and joining me today to talk about the immigration wars are my colleagues

Manet Uquay-Bruhe and Alicia Finley.

Welcome to you both.

The president appeared Tuesday night on Fox News' Laura Ingram show, where the topic became

the number of visas, the U.S. issues for skilled workers, what we call H-1B visas. And the host and

the president weren't necessarily on the same page. Let's listen to that exchange.

If you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country

with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers. You also do have to bring in talent.

We have plenty of talented people here. No, you don't. We don't have talented people here.

No, you don't have certain talents and people have to learn. You can't take people off an

unemployment, like an unemployment line

and say, I'm going to put you into a factory who are going to make missiles.

So I find this latest Donald Trump fascinating, and here's why. Because in September,

the White House issued an executive order arguing that tech firms and other parts of industry

were manipulating the H-1B program and that

too many skilled foreign workers were indeed coming in, making it harder for Americans to find jobs,

and in the process of that, they slapped a new $100,000 fee per H-1B1 petition.

So before we even talk about the debate we just saw there,

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