IMMIGRATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP BUSINESS: “Behind the clipped hedges of President Trump’s sumptuous private clubs in South Florida, including his Mar-a-Lago estate where he has spent many getaway weekends, there has long been a built-in contradiction to the policy the president has repeatedly described as ‘America First.’ Many of his employees have foreign passports. Romanians serve dinner in lavish banquet halls. South Africans tend to guests at the spa. Britons bake elegant pastries. Most are young people hired as guest workers on special visas, living over the winter high season in a gated community with a sand volleyball pit and a movie theater. In the mornings, they dress in trim uniforms and are chauffeured by van over a bridge to the luxury compound six miles away in Palm Beach. But that’s only part of the Trump resort work force in South Florida. Alongside the foreign guest workers and the sizable American staff is another category of employees, mostly those who work on the pair of lush golf courses near Mar-a-Lago. Not offered apartments, they have been picked up by Trump contractors from groups of undocumented laborers at the side of the road; hired through staffing companies that assume responsibility for checking their immigration status; or brought onto the payroll with little apparent scrutiny of their Social Security cards and green cards, some of which are fake.”
–Miriam Jordan, Annie Correal and Patricia Mazzei, “At Trump’s Florida Resort Empire, a Quiet Effort to Eliminate an Undocumented Work Force,” The New York Times online, April 9, 2019