So Trump Employs Undocumented Immigrants at His Properties and Nobody Really Cares?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a30379305/trump-winery-undocumented-workers-fired/

By Jack Holmes
Jan 2, 2020

When ICE raided some chicken plants in Mississippi last year, they rounded up nearly 700 undocumented immigrant workers. They did not arrest the managers or corporate executives who systematically employed them. This fits a pattern, according to The New York Times: between March 2018 and 2019, the feds prosecuted 112,000 people for illegal entry or re-entry, but charged just 11 employers for hiring some of these same people.

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It's employers who are primed for a change in incentive structure, yet they are rarely, if ever, punished. It's enough to make you think this is not, nor has it never been, about the plight of the American worker. It's a regime where workers can be simultaneously exploited by employers and demonized by political elites, ground up by the great American machine.

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Donald Trump, you see, has always employed undocumented immigrants—at many of his properties, on many of his construction projects. He has no issue with these people except when it's convenient fodder for a rage spasm to get The Base going. The latest example arrived on the last day of 2019 via the Washington Post.

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This goes all the way back to the '80s, of course, when Trump had hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants building Trump Tower. He paid them as little as $4 an hour—and always well below union wage—because that's why people like Donald Trump employ people without papers. He ultimately settled a lawsuit around the workers' treatment. It's fitting that the people who made his flagship project possible would fit the theoretical description of the people he has built a political career smearing as criminals. (In practice, he is referring to brown immigrants.) But it also fits because Trump is merely a particularly garish emblem of the post-Reagan plutocrat class, where greed is good and other people—whether they're undocumented workers or they own a small contracting business—are just marks waiting to get fleeced.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-organization-fires-more-undocumented-workers--a-year-after-its-use-of-illegal-labor-was-revealed/2019/12/31/1f03685a-2b7c-11ea-be79-83e793dbcaef_story.html

By Joshua Partlow and
David A. Fahrenthold
Dec. 31, 2019 at 7:38 p.m. EST

Nearly a year after the Trump Organization pledged to root out undocumented workers at its properties, supervisors at the Trump Winery on Monday summoned at least seven employees and fired them because of their lack of legal immigration status, according to two of the dismissed workers.

The timing of the firings at the rural Virginia winery, 11 months after the company began purging the ranks of undocumented greenskeepers and cooks at Trump golf courses, came during the vineyard’s winter downtime. Workers had finished the arduous annual grape harvest, which involved working 60-hour weeks and overnight shifts under floodlights.

Two of the fired workers — Omar Miranda, a 42-year-old tractor driver from Honduras, and a second employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect family members seeking to stay in the United States — said they thought the company had held off on firing them until after the year’s work was complete, taking advantage of their labor for as long as possible. Both had worked at the winery for more than a decade.

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