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News > World

Trump Opposes Guest Workers, but Continues to Employ Them

  • Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Dallas, Texas.

    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Dallas, Texas. | Photo: Reuters

Published 14 March 2016
Opinion

The presidential candidate sees no irony in the fact that he hired guest workers on a visa program he wants to end.

Donald Trump is the Republican front-runner thanks in part to his strident campaign against immigration, but Trump the businessman was quite welcoming of foreigners, provided he could get them cheap.

He denies that there's anything contradictory about that.

As a businessman, one's job is to "be more profitable than your competitors who will seek every advantage in labor costs, overhead and taxes,” Trump wrote in an email to the Associated Press, which published the comments Monday. “The job of a president is to represent every single working American."

One of Trump's major policy proposals is scrapping the U.S. guest worker program. Those are jobs that should go to U.S. citizens, Trump has argued.

RELATED: US: Donald Trump Says He 'Would Be So Angry' If He Were Black

As a businessman, though, he was a big fan.

While the Trump Organization has not disclosed employment numbers, AP reported that the Trump hotel in Chicago regularly employs Irish guest workers with the J-1 visa, as well as hundreds more at the Mar-a-Lago Florida resort and 75 in his Atlantic City casinos.

Trump reportedly did not advertise all of the job openings to locals.

"We can't expect individual companies to drive up their own costs," he told AP. "To do so would put that company and its workers at a competitive disadvantage against other businesses that would not follow suit."

The reason he favors the program as a businessman is that workers are not guaranteed protections by the Department of Labor, letting companies get away with paying them very low salaries. Participants also have to pay thousands of dollars just to enter the program and, depending on the sponsor, pay taxes on their income.

Trump the candidate sees the program as an abuse not of foreign workers, though, but of U.S. nationals, who he argues would be employed were it not for the program, even though most guest workers go to the states with lower unemployment rates.

Under his campaign's proposal, Trump the billionaire would be forced to fire all the guest workers he currently employs. To make America great again, as he puts it, Trump will need to take on himself.

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