Tomorrow Donald J. Trump is expected to make his big, giant, huge, immigration speech. He’s finally going to clarify the clarification of the correction of the modification of what the heck he’s been talking about for 15 months now. Not that anyone can expect him to get any of it factually right.
And still somehow I really don’t think he’s going to mention this yuuge clusterfrack.
Mother Jones has just published a big report about foreign-born women who once worked for Trump Model Management and who are alleging that the modeling agency regularly broke immigration laws by getting them into the U.S. and having them do work without obtaining proper visas.
Canadian-born model Rachel Blais gave Mother Jones detailed documentation showing how she worked for Trump Model Management for a whole six months before the agency obtained a proper visa. Additionally, two models from other countries — given the pseudonyms Anna and Kate to protect their identities — told the publication that the agency never even bothered to obtain work visas for them.
“I was there illegally,” Anna said.
What’s more, two of the models claimed that Trump’s agency “encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live.”
It seems to me that most illegal immigrants come here to find a job, build a life and ultimately a future for themselves and their children. That’s only possible because some employers here are willing to look the other way and skirt our visa and immigration laws to employ low-cost labor whom they can manipulate, control and keep compliant by threatening to have them deported at any moment. It’s quite literally like modern-day slavery.
See?
Among other things, the agency forced its models to live in expensive apartments whose monthly rents chewed through their earnings.
“I only got one check from Trump Models, and that’s when I left them,” she said. “I got $8,000 at most after having worked there for three years and having made tens of thousands of dollars… It is like modern-day slavery.”
$8,000 for three years work. Wow.
Perhaps if companies that did this kind of thing could be sanctioned and forced to pay back wages, provide healthcare and workers compensation protection for all the people they hired illegally under the table, plus punitive fines, we might not see this kind of thing.
I mean it’s not like Donald Trump was sued for hiring and refusing to pay illegal immigrants before, I mean, except for when he was.
Sullivan had been helping Trump negotiate a casino deal in New Jersey at the time, and he testified that he was shocked by Trump’s admission. “I think you are nuts,” Sullivan testified that he told Trump. “You are here negotiating a lease in Atlantic City for a casino license and you are telling me you have got illegal employees on the job.”
...
Sullivan put it more bluntly in 1990 to People magazine. “It was disgusting how he used people,” Sullivan said. “I said, ‘Don’t exploit them like that. Don’t try to f-ck these poor souls over.’ It baffled me then, and it makes me sick even now that he knowingly had these Poles there for the purpose of Trump Tower at starvation wages. He couldn’t give a sh-t because he’s Donald Trump and everybody is here to serve him. Over time he became more and more monstrous and arrogant. I asked myself, ‘How long is it going to take for all of this to catch up with him?'”
Yep, disgusting, that’s Trump.