Trump golf club employed enough undocumented workers to support a town

Trump has built his brand on vilifying undocumented immigrants, appealing to the GOP base’s bigotry to build support for his anti-immigrant, nationalistic policies.

Yet despite railing against undocumented immigrants and calling for an unnecessary border wall to keep them out, Trump himself has profited off undocumented labor at his ritzy golf clubs across the country.

And according to a report published Friday by the Washington Post, Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey employed so many undocumented workers that “Trump money” helped residents of one entire town in Costa Rica buy houses and support their families.

“My whole town practically lived there,” said one former Bedminster maintenance worker from the town of Santa Teresa de Cajon, which over the years has supplied Trump’s New Jersey club with dozens of undocumented workers, former employees told the Post.

The hiring of undocumented labor at the Bedminster golf club was “systematic” and an “open secret,” according to the Washington Post’s report, which was based on interviews with more than a dozen people from Latin America who worked at the club.

News of undocumented labor at the Bedminster club first broke in December, when two undocumented housekeepers who had worked there told their story to the New York Times.

But the Post’s new report reveals the shocking scope of the matter. Trump essentially had a pipeline of undocumented workers from Costa Rica who helped build and later maintain the club in New Jersey — as the Trump Organization demanded more and more cheap labor, and as more and more workers shared news of the opportunity with their friends and family back home.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” one undocumented worker living in Costa Rica told the Washington Post. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

Trump also benefited from drastically underpaying the workers for what their labor was actually worth.

The work performed ranged from groundskeeping to operating heavy machinery such as bulldozers and excavators. The Trump Organization only paid the undocumented workers $10 or less per hour for the heavy machinery work — far less than the $51 to $55 dollar per hour salaries that workers who were licensed to operate heavy machinery would have made, according to the Washington Post.

That means Trump was arguably taking away jobs from the blue collar workers he claims to support, and profiting off of the undocumented workers he has attacked.

You don’t have to go far back to find Trump comments that lay out how hypocritical his practice of profiting off undocumented labor is.

In fact, just go back to his racist State of the Union address from Tuesday night.

“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate; it is actually very cruel,” Trump said in the speech, in which he lied about the supposed ill effects illegal immigration has on jobs and society.

Eric Trump, who now “leads” the Trump Organization, and the White House both declined to comment to the Washington Post on Trump’s practice of hiring undocumented workers at Trump’s Bedminster club.

For a group of people who normally lie with ease, even the Trump family can’t seem to lie its way out of this hypocritical mess.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.