When Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign last summer, the first issue he raised was immigration. Promising to build a wall between Mexico and the United States (no, not the one that already exists) and ban all Muslim people from entering the country (a ban he now amends to any “territory” that has been compromised by terrorism), Trump began his descent into xenophobic hysteria. Lately, the Republican presidential nominee has also focused on restoring American jobs by restricting business owners from outsourcing their labor and production needs. As he said during his Republican Nation Convention speech last Thursday: “I’m going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America!”
All of America, that is, except for Palm Beach Florida, the home of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort — the very same place he would eavesdrop on employees — and The Trump National Golf Club, Jupiter. BuzzFeed News reports that the Republican nominee is currently “seeking temporary visas to bring in 65 [foreign] workers at Mar-a-Lago along with another seven waiters and six cooks at the golf club.” Trump’s application claims that he could not find enough Americans to fill the open positions, which pay $10.17 per hour for housekeepers, $11.13 for servers, and $12.74 for cooks.
Tom Veenstra, a senior director at Palm Beach’s career services center, told BuzzFeed that there’s no way Trump couldn’t source those jobs in Florida. Veenstra said his agency “has a database of 1,327 Palm Beach County residents interested in server, cook, and chef positions.” Furthermore, Mar-a-Lago has never contacted the agency to seek help finding employees. According to the report, “One of the strictest rules of the H-2 program is that American workers must always be given preference in hiring.” Companies often go to great lengths to make it look like they tried and failed to hire Americans.
This news follows the revelation that manufacturing for the presidential hopeful’s Donald J. Trump fashion line is outsourced to factories in Central America and Asia. CNN reported in May that Trump shirts were being shipped to the United States from Honduras, where the average factory wage is $1.30 an hour, and Bangladesh, which has “the lowest wages and the worst and most unsafe working conditions of any major apparel exporting country.”
(Via BuzzFeed)