Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
As Trump rails against immigrants and falsely accuses them of stealing jobs from U.S. citizens, his private golf club in Florida is asking the government to approve a request to hire 40 more foreign workers, new filings show.
Records posted by the Department of Labor on Thursday reveal that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club is seeking permission to hire 40 foreign workers to serve as waiters and waitresses for the winter season.
If approved, the workers would be employed from October through May at a rate of $12.68 an hour.
According to Buzzfeed, which first reported on the filings, Trump’s businesses “have sought to hire more than 480 foreign guest workers, including more than 240 for Mar-a-Lago” since the start of his presidential campaign in June 2015.
Trump has justified hiring foreign workers instead of U.S. citizens by claiming that it’s too hard to find Americans willing and able to fill the jobs.
This flatly contradicts Trump’s repeated assertions that immigration depresses U.S. wages and steals jobs from native-born Americans.
Thought it’s false, the claim that immigration hurts American workers has been cited by Trump and other White House officials like Stephen Miller as a primary rationale for cracking down on legal immigration.
Trump’s own “plan” for immigration reform has an entire section titled, “Put American Workers First,” in which he claims that our current immigration policies have “destroyed the middle class.”
“The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans … to earn a middle class wage,” Trump’s immigration plan asserts.
And now, Trump is once again seeking to benefit from the very same foreign workers he so frequently denigrates.
Last July, during the White House’s “Made in America” week, Trump asked the Labor Department for permission to hire 70 foreign workers as cooks, waiters/waitresses, and housekeepers at Mar-a-Lago.
Earlier this year, he also applied to hire foreign workers at his golf club in Westchester County, NY, and at Trump Winery in Virginia.
Clearly, Trump is happy to hire foreign workers when it boosts his bottom line — just as he’s happy to demonize them when it riles up his rabid base.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
