Surprise: Donald Trump’s Entire Anti-Immigration Agenda Is a Con
While the president bashes immigrants on the campaign trail, he’s hiring foreign labor at Mar-a-Lago and sourcing his Trump 2020 flags from China.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07 ... a-is-a-con
When he is not slandering the Justice Department for investigating his friends, Donald Trump has kept his presidency focused on two demagogic concerns. The first is purely ethnocentric: for the past several months, Trump has been ramping up deportations of non-criminal immigrants, demonizing them in increasingly fascistic terms, and cracking down on illegal border crossings, including by forcibly separating migrant families seeking amnesty and warehousing their toddlers in tent cities in the desert as political leverage. The second major theme of Trump’s presidency has been his escalating trade war with China, which he has long believed is ripping off the U.S. by selling Americans the things they don’t want to make themselves. It’s all part of his “America First” schtick, wherein foreigners and foreign countries are screwing us over, and only Uncle Don can put a stop to it.
President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has applied for permission to hire 61 foreign workers to serve as waiters and cooks during the winter social season in Palm Beach, Fla., according to data posted this week by the Labor Department.
The postings show that—despite Trump’s insistence that immigration is holding down wages and crowding out native-born American workers—his club believes it cannot find any Americans in South Florida who are qualified to hold two very common restaurant-industry jobs.
This isn’t a new development: Trump has been stocking his workforce with cheaper foreign labor for years, rather than raise wages to attract American workers. As BuzzFeed notes, Trump-owned businesses, or ones bearing his name, have attempted to hire more than 480 foreign guest workers since he launched his campaign in June 2015, including more than 240 at Mar-a-Lago. “It’s very, very hard to get people,” Trump explained during a 2016 debate, arguing that “other hotels do the exact same thing,” and the practice is allowed by law. “I take advantage of that. There’s nothing wrong with it. We have no choice.”
Of course, all that was meant to change when Trump took office. During his inaugural address last year, Trump promised that with him as president, the country would “follow two simple rules: buy American, and hire American.” As it turns out, Trump isn’t doing too well with “buy American,” either:
As the U.S.’s trade conflict with China heats up and President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign gets underway, a Chinese manufacturer says his factory has been hired to create flags for Trump’s 2020 bid. The factory, which used to make red scarves for the communist Young Pioneers before China opened up its trade, now makes about 100,000 international flags a day.