Horowitz: Why Do Trump and Rubio Still Favor Cheap Foreign Labor?

Source: Conservative Review | February 16, 2016 | Daniel Horowitz

What is remarkable about the 2016 presidential election process thus far is the sheer volume of important questions that have not been asked.  While the leftist media is busy asking candidates about their shoes, the things the American people should know—indeed, need to know—before they vote in the primaries and again in the fall never seem to come up.

In keeping with this pattern of discussing nonsense over substance, two of the candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, have never been asked to fully explain their position on foreign workers: Why do they both support the importation and use of cheap foreign labor, and the displacement of American employees? 

While Rubio is widely known for his comprehensive amnesty bill, his name is also on another atrocious and much more recent immigration bill. He has yet to be asked about it at a debate or in any major forum on the campaign trail.  In January 2015, Rubio joined Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) as an original co-sponsor of a bill that is deceptively named the Immigration Innovation (or “I-Squared”) Act.  The only original thing about this bill is that its supporters have innovatively prevented the American people from noticing how economically destructive it would be if it ever became law.

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Trump’s campaign has lobbed fire at Rubio for the latter’s unapologetic, pro-corporatist support for the H-1B program generally and the I-Squared Act specifically.  But Trump himself has used quite a few foreign visa programs in his day to hire cheaper foreign workers instead of Americans, and he needs to be asked about that as well.

More specifically, Trump has been, and continues to be, an all-too-frequent user of several foreign visa programs.  This is not conjecture but fact: according to Business Insider, an earlier Reuters investigation determined that U.S. Department of Labor records show that nine companies that are majority-owned by Trump have imported at least 1,100 foreign workers on temporary visas since 2000.  While some of these visas are for fashion models, he has brought hundreds of others in to do jobs that Americans would do: waitresses, cooks, event managers, and even an assistant golf course superintendent.

For those who are curious, Trump is still using these visa programs to bring in foreign workers, his campaign rhetoric aside.  According to this same report, Trump’s posh Palm Beach, Florida luxury resort, Mar-a-Lago, filed paperwork with the Department of Labor last July—in other words, in 2015—to bring in 70 foreign workers to work at Mar-a-Lago.  These are jobs that Americans could have right now.  (Mar-a-Lago appears to have brought in as many as 787 foreign workers since 2006, by the way.)

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