Mar-a-Lago Is Still Trying To Hire Foreign Workers

Despite President Trump’s push for U.S. companies to hire American workers, even his own businesses are not complying.

The President’s infamous golf resort, Mar-a-Lago, recently filed requests to hire 61 foreign workers. This request comes just over a year after Trump signed his “Buy American and Hire American” executive order.

According to records submitted to the U.S. Labor Department on Thursday and Friday, Mar-a-Lago also filed requests to obtain several visas for non-American servers and cooks, stating that the potential hires would stay in the U.S. for a period of seven months, earning between $12 to $13 an hour, depending on the position.

This, however, is not an isolated incident. According to HuffPost, Trump’s Florida business has filed at least 10 different requests to hire foreign workers since 2015.

Additionally, The New York Times reported that only a total of 17 of 300 American applicants have been hired in the past eight years. Furthermore, The New Yorker reported this March, “Since 2010 Mar-a-Lago alone has obtained a total of 500 H-2B visas for seasonal foreign workers.”

H-2B visas, however, can only be obtained if there are no American workers available, which the President has insisted otherwise throughout his campaign and presidency.

Incidentally, a former employee told CNN that a large percentage of these seasonal workers are attractive, young women from Romania and South Africa, adding that the President prefers workers with an “exotic appeal.”

In addition to Mar-a-Lago actively seeking out foreign workers, the Palm Beach resort has made very little effort to hire American employees in the first place. According to The Washington Post, “Mar-a-Lago only placed two hard-to-find classified ads in tiny type for waiters with no phone number or email information. Workers could apply only by fax or mail.”

These ads, however, were not posted until after Mar-a-Lago had already filed requests to hire 70 foreign workers. Despite there being over 5,000 qualified Americans available to work various positions at President Trump’s resort, “The Trump Organization hired at least 1,260 foreign workers from 2001 to 2006, according to a CNN analysis.”

In May, the President and his administration also made an additional 15,000 H-2B visas available for various businesses across the countries.

In the midst of President Trump’s “Made in America Week” at the White House over a year ago, Trump had said, “We believe jobs must be offered to American workers first. Does that make sense?” That same week, however, “Mar-a-Lago was applying for foreign worker visas.”