Anti-immigrant sentiment is a baffling thing. I live in a mostly conservative small Southern California city that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the 2016 election. People in this town love to eat at their local restaurant food chains, yet at nearly every restaurant Mexican and Central American immigrants are in the kitchens preparing the food. That dynamic is prevalent in many other aspects of life here. The nicely manicured front yard lawns around town are only there because Latin American immigrants are available to do the work. Other examples are plentiful. This city’s day-to-day bustle wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for the services immigrants provide.
It’s this kind of innate hypocrisy that permeates throughout President Trump’s “shithole” (or what some claim was “shithouse”) comments regarding immigrants from Haiti and African countries. Now, an article from The New Yorker from March of last year is getting some renewed attention due to the fact that it drives home this hypocrisy even further, pointing out that a large of number of the guest workers at Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort are immigrants from — wait for it — Haiti.
In fact, Mar-a-Lago hires more seasonal workers from Haiti than workers from any other country, according to CNBC.
Those Haitians come to the United States to work for Trump on H-2B visas, temporary work permits issued by the Department of Labor to employers who can’t find enough American workers to fill their need for low-skilled, seasonal labor.
At Mar-a-Lago, the season runs from November to April, when sunny Palm Beach is a mecca for wealthy Northerners escaping the cold.
For the 2017-18 season, the club applied for and received 70 H-2B visas. The foreign workers serve as cooks, housekeepers and servers, paid between $10 and $13 an hour, according to filings Mar-a-Lago submitted to the DOL.
In other words, Trump is an American who literally petitioned the government for “more Haitians.”
Trump must have a secret stash of Norwegians lining up be dishwashers at Mar-a-Lago.
Featured image via maralagoclub.com
