In April 2017 Trump told an audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was about to take bold action on foreign guest workers. He promised to end the "theft of American prosperity." Foreign worker visas "should never, ever be used to replace American workers." he said.
But the executive order he signed was not bold, as Trump said, but tepid. It simply directed four cabinet agencies to "suggest reforms" with no deadline for submitting their ideas.
There are also work visas for low-skilled workers like the staff at Mar-a-Lago, which had for years relied on the very workers Trump wanted kept out - foreigners. Trump said during one of the Republican primary debates that Mar-a-Lago, like other local seasonal resort properties, had no choice but to import workers. "People don't want a short-term job," he said. "So, we will bring people in, and we will send the people out. All done legally."
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida broke in. "That's not accurate," he said, because at least three hundred Americans who sought work at Mar-a-Lago were not hired. That, Rubio said, helped Trump push down wages, the very issue Trump complained was caused by too many foreign workers in America.
"When you bring someone in on one of these visas they can't go work for anybody else," Rubio noted. "They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don't have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that's why you bring workers from abroad."
Trump kept interrupting Rubio, making it difficult for those watching to understand the debate unless they read the transcript later.
The public record showed that hundreds of local residents did want jobs but were not hired.
In July 2017 the Trump administration decided to let in more foreign workers, not exactly what Trump promised on inauguration day when he said every decision would be made to promote American jobs and buy American.
American "businesses in danger of suffering irreparable harm due to a lack of available temporary nonagricultural workers" would be able to hire an additional 15,000 foreigners in temporary low-skill, low-paid jobs.
That would increase supply by more than 40 percent for the second half of the year.
This was a prime example of Trump not walking his campaign talk in office, but also of driving down wages, just as Rubio had said was Trump's goal.
In Palm Beach, for example, hundreds of people were willing to work at the wages offered by Mar-a-Lago, roughly $10 to $13 an hour, for the 2016-17 season.
Locally four people wanted work for every low-skill resort job offered.
That means there was no shortage of local labor for the seasonal positions. With so many workers available, hiring locals might not even put upward pressure on wages. When there is so much more demand for work than employers could supply, employers can offer less pay and still recruit people.
But workers who come from overseas on visas are subject to more control. Their employer can arrange pay that depends on their staying until the last day of the season and hold back part of their pay through "bemusing" arrangements. That means anyone who gets out of line, anyone who gets fired, gets shorted on his or her pay and sent home early.
President Trump declared July 24 the start of Made in America Week.
Trump said he would be "recognizing the vital contributions of American workers and job creators to our Nation's prosperity."
The same week a tiny classified ad ran twice in the back pages of The Palm Beach Post. It offered work for "3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club." The jobs paid wages only - "No tips:'
The ads did not identify the employer, but the fax was a Mar-a-Lago number.
A week earlier, Mar-a-Lago had applied to the Labor Department - run by a Trump appointee - for visas to import thirty-five people to wait on tables, twenty cooks, and fifteen chambermaids. All it needed to do was show that it offered work and not enough people showed up to take the jobs. That was easily accomplished. Run a tiny ad with few details. Tell locals to apply via fax, a technology few people seeking such low-paid seasonal work were likely to own. People could mail a letter but letters can get lost or take time being delivered.
Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.
There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump's paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn't be violating American law.
Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of "Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers."
To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill's purpose is to "establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States."
That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.
The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.
The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.
The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.
David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017
