Thursday, July 21, 2016

Donald Trump Turned Down 94.4 Percent of American Job Applicants, Applied for Hundreds of ‘H’ Visas Instead

Note that the National Review is a conservative news source.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431908/donald-trump-immigration-hypocrite-who-ignores-american-workers

by Charles C. W. Cooke February 25, 2016

Surprise! Donald Trump is a rank hypocrite on immigration. Per the New York Times:

Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” and it is not just the very-well-to-do who want to get in.

Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired.

In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.

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he has also pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, according to the United States Department of Labor, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.

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When Disney behaved like this, there was a loud and sustained outcry from . . . well, no less than Donald Trump himself. In an interview with Breitbart, Trump argued that Disney should be forced to rehire any Americans it had overlooked or replaced. Trump also said this:

If I am President, I will not issue any H-1B visas to companies that replace American workers and my Department of Justice will pursue action against them.

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And yet, by Trump’s own logic, the H-2B program that he so heavily used is even more egregious than the H-1Bs system that Disney took advantage of. Why? Well, because unlike H-1Bs — which can in theory be used to recruit skilled workers — H-2Bs are aimed directly at the bottom of the economic ladder. Here’s the Times again:

“You almost have them as indentured servants,” said Danny Fontenot, director of the hospitality program at Palm Beach State College. “And they affect everyone else’s wages. You can make a lot of money by never having to give your employees raises.”

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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431933/donald-trump-foreign-workers-american-workers-arent-good-enough

Donald Trump Thinks American Workers Aren’t Good Enough for the Trump Organization
by Ian Tuttle February 25, 2016

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In the early 1980s, Donald Trump was a thirtysomething real-estate up-and-comer embarking on what would, for a while, be the tallest all-glass structure in Manhattan, and what remains the centerpiece of the Trump architectural empire, his Vanity of Vanities: Trump Tower, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. According to Barbara Res, the then-31-year-old who Trump selected to oversee Trump Tower’s construction, the Donald humbly referred to Trump Tower as “The Most Important Project in the World.”

Apparently, the first leg of the project was too important to entrust to American workers. In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Federal Court, members of House Wreckers Local 95 alleged that, to avoid paying union employees their pension and welfare benefits, Trump (and the contractor he used for the job, Kaszycki & Sons) brought in some 200 undocumented Polish workers to demolish the Bonwit Teller building that then occupied the site of the future Trump Tower.

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“Testimony established that Donald Trump visited the 57th Street site and observed Kaszycki’s Polish workers, noting that they were ‘good hard workers,’” the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York wrote in its opinion in 1991. “Workers also observed Trump visiting the job site of the Bonwit Teller demolition job.” And it’s likely that he would have been able to distinguish between union and non-union workers: “The Polish workers were obvious not only in numbers but also in appearance. In contrast to the union workers the non-union, Polish workers were distinguished by the fact that most of them did not wear hard hats. In addition the Polish workers staged several very visible work stoppages because they were not being paid their wages.”

There were other good reasons to disbelieve Trump. Daniel J. Sullivan, a labor consultant and FBI informant who had advised Trump on the demolition, testified that Trump told him about undocumented workers at the site.

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Some three decades later, nothing has changed. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump is using undocumented workers in the construction work on his much-feted project to convert Washington, D.C.’s Old Post Office Pavilion into a luxury hotel. “Interviews with about 15 laborers helping renovate the Old Post Office Pavilion revealed that many of them had crossed the U.S-Mexico border illegally,” the Post’s Antonio Olivo wrote in July, “before they eventually settled in the Washington region to build new lives.”

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Reuters reviewed Department of Labor data last August, and reports that Trump-owned companies have tried to import 1,100 workers on temporary visas since 2000. Jobs “that Americans won’t do” include waitress, cook, vineyard worker, golf-course superintendent, hotel manager, banquet manager, and maid. Additionally, American women apparently are not attractive enough for Donald Trump; the Trump Model Management and Trump Management Group LLC have sought to import 250 fashion models from overseas.

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