Is Trump For Immigration? President Wants To Hire Foreign Workers At Westchester Golf Course

President Donald Trump has railed against what he calls “low-skilled immigration that continues to reduce jobs and wages for American workers,” but recent actions suggest he may prefer to hire such workers rather than U.S. citizens for his sprawling businesses.

The former reality TV star with an estimated $3.5 billion to his name filed a request with the Labor Department for the right to employ foreign servers for his Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, BuzzFeed first reported Wednesday. The job order calls for the use of eight H-2B visas — which allow foreign workers to temporarily fill non-farm jobs if there are “not enough U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified and available” for the positions — for waiters and waitresses. The employees would work at the golf course between May and October and earn a minimum of $14.08 hourly.

The request was filed March 7 by a national processing center, but it was unclear when the Trump Organization submitted its initial request.

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Trump has a long and well-documented history of employing foreign workers. He got permission from the Labor Department to hire 64 foreign workers to cook, clean and wait on guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for between $10.17 and $12.74 per hour, the Palm Beach Post reported in December. He also got foreign worker visas for 69 housekeepers, cooks and waiters for the same club earlier last year, the paper found in March 2016.

Between 2010 and February 2016, Trump requested visas for more than 500 foreign nationals to work at Mar-a-Lago, despite only hiring 17 of the nearly 300 U.S. residents who’d applied for or been referred to the waiting, cooking and cleaning jobs at the resort over the same period, the New York Times reported.

The H-2B program may make foreign workers vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, according to a December 2016 report from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. By taking advantage of often much cheaper labor, the program also pushes down general wages for low-skilled American workers, according to Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

And the foreign workers have essentially no authority to change that.

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“H-2B workers ... cannot switch employers, which means that if something goes wrong on the job — for instance, if an H-2B worker isn’t paid the wage he or she was promised, or is forced to work in an unsafe workplace — the H-2B worker has little incentive to speak up or complain to the authorities,” Costa wrote in a post on the nonprofit’s site, adding that there was little evidence of any labor shortage in the hospitality industry, in which H-2B workers like the ones employed at Mar-a-Lago and the Trump National Golf Club are often hired. “Complaining can result in getting fired, which leads to becoming undocumented and possibly deported. It also means not being able to earn back the money that was invested in order to get the job.”