In the swarming fury of Donald Trump headlines, simultaneously feeding his gluttonous quotes while regurgitating exactly what they thirst for, an underlying fallacy arises between his rhetoric and business practice. He has undoubtedly turned the circadian rhythm of news cycle times into an art, while equally creating one of the presidential election’s greatest conundrums: the law-defying physics behind (or perhaps under) his hair.
The Republican hopeful’s campaign platform vows to return American jobs from foreign shores, using his economic prowess to substantiate such claims and his business empire as physical evidence. During his candidacy announcement in June, he said, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
However, according to a Reuters investigation into a U.S. Department of Labor recent release, Trump-owned companies have applied for 1,100 foreign work visas through a controversial temporary program since the turn of the millennium, with most of said applicants approved. The analysis did not reveal countries of origins for these immigrant workers, but this practice certainly corroborates evidence that Trump’s business procedure directly contradicts the headline-hungry, immigration policy quotes he seemingly churns daily.
As a candidate championing the American workforce, importing foreign labor, such as 70 work-visas for the service, cooking, and cleaning positions at Trump’s luxurious Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, diminishes the available marketplace for such Americans he would represent and serve. Perhaps, under that head of hair, only he thinks he knows where to find “Mexico’s best.”
The Daily Beast reported last month his controversial use of undocumented Polish workers to demolish land on Fifth Avenue 35 years ago, when Trump began to build his crowning addition to the Manhattan skyline. All the while, his workers were bullied into 12-hour, seven-day workweek schedules through deportation threats. The case was initially dismissed because of the judge’s perception of fault falling on the contractor’s shoulders. Eventually, 19 years after the demolition of the Bonwit Teller building, the ruling went against Trump.
Despite Trump’s flashy quotes, neither his campaign nor legal team returned comment to either the Reuters or Daily Beast exposés.
Amid his controversial Mexico comments, the Washington Post revealed last month that a Trump-owned company was footing the construction of a new luxury hotel in the Old Post Office Pavilion using immigrant workers, many of whom initially arrived in the country illegally. Of those in the construction who are legal, they achieved work visas through marriage or specialized immigration programs.
This spatial proximity of a billion-dollar empire to the White House may now physically reflect the intimacy of money and politics in our nation.
For the self-proclaimed self-made billionaire Republican candidate who leads his party’s polls, undocumented workers have seemingly been a part of the backbone framework behind the rise of his business empire. His obscured immigration policy, unveiled last week in a CNN interview, loosely supports itself on the ideology of deport first, ask questions later, readmit if they meet Trump-approved standards.
Trump is a bona fide business mogul. However, he has deluded himself in the persona of his campaign. His reactionary, galvanizing quotes saturate the Internet and mouths of the population, but their claims are blinded from evidence under the foundation of his real-estate kingdom: immigrant workers, a considerable portion of whom were or remain illegal, lay his groundwork, despite his hard-lined campaign rhetoric of eradicating those undocumented residents of this nation.