The Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey was built with the labor of undocumented workers. As the Washington Post reports, undocumented workers have been consistently employed there over the years, including a large number from the Costa Rican village of Santa Teresa de Cajon.
Soon after Trump broke ground at Bedminster in 2002 with a golden shovel, this village emerged as a wellspring of low-paid labor for the private club, which charges tens of thousands of dollars to join. Over the years, dozens of workers from Costa Rica went north to fill jobs as groundskeepers, housekeepers and dishwashers at Bedminster, former employees said. The club hired others from El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala who spoke to The Post. Many ended up in the blue-collar borough of Bound Brook, N.J., piling into vans before dawn to head to the course each morning.
Imagine if someone ran for president arguing that the number one priority for the country was to combat the influx of drugs entering the country through the Mexican border. Imagine if they argued that the problem was so severe that we needed to surrender some of our constitutional rights in support of the effort to fix the problem. Imagine that this candidate succeeded in getting elected on this platform.
Finally, imagine that it soon emerged that they were actually one of the larger customers for Mexican drugs and that they had a vast criminal enterprise dedicated to putting those drugs up our kid’s noses and into their veins.
That is very close to what we’re dealing with here. Trump ran a more general campaign against Latin American immigration, so the drug problem was only a subset of his pitch. He was also complaining about other kinds of crime, especially of the violent variety. But a main concern of his was that illegal immigration drives down wages and costs Americans opportunities for employment. Yet, he was a large American employer who was emptying villages of people eager to cross our border and work for his hotels and resorts.
Over the years, the network from Costa Rica to Bedminster expanded as workers recruited friends and relatives, some flying to the United States on tourist visas and others paying smugglers thousands of dollars to help them cross the U.S.-Mexico border, former employees said. New hires needed little more than a crudely printed phony green card and a fake Social Security number to land a job, they said.
Some workers described Bedminster as their launchpad to buy homes and start businesses. Others remembered it as grueling labor under bosses who were demanding, even bigoted — and who at times used the workers’ illegal status against them…
…“For me, moving to the U.S. wasn’t a very drastic change,” said Mauricio Garro, 36, who worked in maintenance at the golf course for five years until he returned to Santa Teresa in 2010. “My whole town practically lived there.”
Anyone who is angry about undocumented people taking American jobs and still takes anything Trump has to say about the issue seriously is no different from someone who would support a anti-drug candidate even after learning that they were one of El Chapo’s biggest American distributors.
Anyone can be the victim of a con, but when the con is exposed you are supposed to take some kind of defensive action to prevent being conned again. Too many of our citizens seem incapable of learning from their mistakes. It’s becoming a rather pathetic spectacle.
I’m so old, I remember when Zoe Baird and Kimba Walker had to withdraw their names from consideration for AG because they had hired undocumented workers to nanny their children and they had the audacity not to pay Social Security taxes.
And they weren’t even leading a national campaign to deport all undocumented immigrants.
This is a good post, but this information, in one form or another, has been known for a very long time. Perhaps the specific information about the Costa Rican village where many of the Bedminster staff were recruited, hired and brought here from was relatively unknown. However, it was known a long time ago that Trump has recruited, hired and employeed a large number of undocumented workers, not just at Bedminster, but at his other properties, both as construction workers, and then upon completion, as maids, groundskeepers, valets, etc.
This has been KNOWN, but Trump’s fans don’t care. They shriek and wail about the brown hoardes allegedly streaming over the southern border, not only “stealing” jobs but raping, murdering, stealing and so on. Yet when confronted with the absolute reality of Trump’s hiring practices FOR DECADES, they turn a blind eye, continue with their racist wailing and cling ever closer to their tin-pot savior.
I. Don’t. Get. It.
Not only that, Trump also campaigned on limiting H1(b) visa workers, but he is also well known to recruit a lot of those for his properties, especially from Eastern European countries.
As more factual information is uncovered about Trump’s decades-long hiring practices, I expect nothing to change in terms of his voting base. They simply don’t care. IOKIYAR applies ALWAYS.
But they’ll still continue to shriek about WALL, most especially if they live closer to Canada than to Mexico.
Evidently for his admirers, what he says outweighs what he does. His message is so important for the nation, it earns him the privilege of not having to be follow it himself.
Looked it up and the employing undocumented aliens is another RICO crime.
Anyone can be the victim of a con, but when the con is exposed you are supposed to take some kind of defensive action to prevent being conned again.
This is true, but one way that people resolve this cognitive dissonance is through intense goalpost shifting. In this case, some possible responses are:
“Well, all politicians are crooks.”
“But Hillary was worse.”
“That happened before he ran for public office.”
“He was just being a good businessman.”
“Well, he probably fired them after he realized they were illegals.”
All of these excuses are bullshit, but they’re designed to resolve the tension mentioned above. After all, few people like to think of themselves as dupes.
few people like to think of themselves as dupes.
There you have it. Apparently the incident of THE ENTIRE WORLD laughing at Trump in the UN General Assembly wasn’t enough for Trumpians to catch on.
In a simpler, more innocent time, when America might have been great, & college students were still putting on black face shows, this kind of scandal would have generated its own particular special prosecutor and investigation.
Now it’s just part of the tidal wave of toxic trash flowing in – ho hum.
The Republican fears. He’s deeply connected to the Lizard-Brain and Trump knows how to twitch their fears. The fact that he’s contributing mightily to exactly the thing they hate and fear the most just doesn’t compute with them at all.
See, those illegal immigrants Trump was hiring for over 30 years to staff his hotels and resorts with low cost workers? They were recruited by Trump to come here and live and work. And have children, all of whom will, by operation of the 14th Amendment automatically become US citizens. Or, as the right wing bigots like to call them: “Anchor Babies!”
The very thing they have been screaming about for years now. The stuff of their worst nightmares. For how long now have we had to listen to their ignorant bleating: “I turned to my wife and said ‘It doesn’t even feel like America any more.” because he saw some brown people speaking Spanish in public. Those people!
And it gave them the willies that “those people” were “pouring across our borders”. Committing crimes! Etc. Etc. The whole nine racist yards.
Now try and tell these imbeciles that their tin pot dictator has been conning them all along? Exactly what every Libtard in America has been saying this entire time? They were “owning the Libs! So hard! Ha! Ha!”
They just can’t process the reality that is passing in front of their eyes. It doesn’t compute. The image and reality is too divergent. So, their brains reject it and they carry on as before. MAGA!
Would’ve been nice if this obvious story (which took about zero investigational reporting and was occurring in the backyard of The NY Times) came out during the campaign, no? I guess they needed all those columns for Hilary’s emails…