Unemployment in the construction industry was sky high in 2010. But somehow Donald Trump’s fancy Westchester County golf development needed Ecuadorean stonemasons, for whom the company tried to get permanent work certifications while admitting they’d entered the country “without inspection,” i.e. illegally.
Trump Briarcliff Manor Development LLC was required to try to get American workers to fill the stonemason jobs. Its efforts were … underwhelming, Will Evans reports:
The golf development company’s applications from March 2010 say the jobs were advertised in the local newspaper twice in December 2009.
Stonemasonry is a specialized job. A couple of ads in the local paper are not likely to do the trick, even when there are lots of unemployed stonemasons who would love to work—although the wages the Trump company paid might not have been much of a draw. The Ecuadorean workers got less than $14 an hour:
“That’s even low for an undocumented worker,” said Michael Clifford, president of the bricklayers union local that covers Westchester County.
By contrast, a first-year apprentice on a government-funded construction project would have made around $30 per hour at the time, including benefits, and an experienced mason made double that, [International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers spokeswoman Prairie] Wells said. The Ecuadorean laborers all had several years of experience as stonemasons in South America, according to the Labor Department records.
Gosh, it sure looks like this Trump luxury golf development was using immigrant workers to get skilled work done on the cheap.
That’s not fair to the immigrants who did the work, or to the unemployed stonemasons in the U.S. legally who didn’t get a real shot at the jobs. And, of course, there’s the rank hypocrisy of Trump’s anti-immigrant presidential campaign given his record of doing stuff like this. Maybe, in the end, the way Trump’s candidacy can shine a light on immigration abuses is by drawing attention to the ways Trump-as-businessman has gamed the system to the detriment of workers.