Summary

Donald Trump, who has pledged to crack down on immigration, continues to hire foreign guest workers for his businesses at record levels.

In 2024, Trump’s companies, including Mar-a-Lago, his golf courses, and a Virginia winery, hired 209 foreign workers, nearly double the number from a decade ago.

Most were employed under H-2B visas, meant for seasonal jobs when American workers are unavailable.

Critics argue these programs undermine U.S. workers’ bargaining power, while Trump’s allies, like Project 2025, advocate for restricting such visas. Trump has distanced himself from these proposals while continuing to utilize the program.

  • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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    11 days ago

    He doesn’t want them gone, and neither do any other oligarch.

    They want them in a grey legal area, so they can be exploited more efficiently, is all.

    Keep illegal immigrants working in farm work. Now, they have now labor protections, and BOOM! MOAR PROFITS!

    That’s all.

    • teft@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      I could see them putting immigrants in camps and then saying “oh their home country won’t take them back. We’ll just keep them in camp. Oh and they’ll have to work obv. Can’t be slackers in america.”

      Coincidentally an oligarch will own the camp and the work output.

      Schindlers list style,

    • Jesus@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      He just want to use immigrants to distract poor people from who is really screwing them over.

      It’s not the billionaires, it’s the guy doing landscaping 7 days a week so his kids don’t have to grow up in a cartel state.

  • WatDabney@fedia.io
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    11 days ago

    He doesn’t actually want them gone. He wants them oppressed and desperate.

    That’s actually been the standard Republican strategy for as long as I can remember, because they’re trying to serve two purposes at the same time. On the one hand they want to appeal to the racists in their party, but on the other hand, they want to ensure that American businesses enjoy uninterrupted access to cheap and desperate labor. And the two actually complement each other pretty well. They can and do foment hatred and promise mass deportations and all of that to appeal to the racists, but never quite manage to actually solve the supposed problem, or even really make any headway on it, which means that businesses can stil take advantage of cheap and desperate labor and there are still “illegals” for the racists to rail against.

  • EmpireInDecay@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    Talks of deportation are, mostly, dog whistles. He did the same thing during his first term with H2B labor

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 days ago

    Oh they don’t really want them gone, just for them to lose their legal status so they can be underpaid, and won’t dare to report any workplace violations under the threat of deportation.

    In fact, that’s already happening, they just want to convert more Americans’ status to “illegal immigrant”

  • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Trump doesn’t want anything except money and power. Saying he wants to deport immigrants gets him support from xenophobes and bigots.

  • SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Trump and those up top don’t want to deport all the immigrants, they just want a captive labor force too afraid of deportation to rock the boat.

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    There’s 7 comments so far saying Trump doesn’t actually want them gone. C’mon guys, he wants immigrants gone. It’s pure racism, he wants them gone and he wants a white Christian America. The only question is how far he gets before he croaks.

    *I think I know what’s going on, everyone here is in the bargaining stage of the 5 stages of grief.

    • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      He doesn’t care either way. All he’s really doing is rallying a community of people in his support who hate brown people.

      As long as there is a group of people willing to support him he will bend in any direction to get them. It turns out getting support from racists is the easiest group to manipulate.

      He’s using this for momentum. That’s how he got elected.

      • someguy3@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        …That doesn’t mean he’s not going to deport as many as he can. He can deport all illegal immigrants and there will still be plenty of POC to scapegoat. Then it’s on the next thing: Segregation. He likely won’t live long enough to do it, but the GOP will go for it.

        And I think he does care (not that I support what he cares about), he is racist through and through.

        • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          That doesn’t mean he’s not going to deport as many as he can

          Maybe he will maybe he won’t.

          It’s already illegal to be an illegal immigrant. You already get deported if you get caught.

          I can’t possibly see what else he can do about it other than kick in random doors. I don’t see that happening.

          • someguy3@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            What I’m reading is they don’t automatically deport you if you’re an illegal immigrant, as of now. Maybe hearings, DACA, all the jazz about “he has dependent family here”. They have addresses of DACA people, they know where a lot of illegal immigrants live.

            • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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              10 days ago

              Honestly sounds like fear mongering to me. They can’t pull this shit off even if they wanted to

              • someguy3@lemmy.world
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                10 days ago

                Geezus. He’s going to do what he said he’s going to do. What is going on with Lemmy in this thread.

                • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  He can try. It won’t work. It’s just basic logic.

                  Do you believe everything that comes out of that idiots mouth?

                  How’d that wall turn out?

    • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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      11 days ago

      make it 8. trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything but trump. everything he sharts out of his face anus is for the singular purpose of rallying his rabid cult followers to worship him. that’s it. he doesn’t give a fuck about “christian america.” or 100% white america. he wants cheap explloitable labor, which is what all of this 3 ring “deportation” shitshow is all about

      in case it’s not clear, he’s not deporting 11 million people. don’t be gullible

      • someguy3@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        It’s the ‘do as I say, not as I do’. He’s super racist, everyone knows this.

        As for the exact number, it depends on the courts blocking things, the basic logistics of getting enough ICE officers (this is where the court matters if they allow or block use of the military), and the legal hearing people get (also where the courts matter, I bet that Trump wants to bypass that). He will go as far as he can. Y’all need to wake up.

        • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Nobody is saying they’re not going to deport a lot of people or that Donald Trump and the GOP are not racist.

          They’re saying deportation isn’t the point, which it clearly isn’t. They want cheap, exploitable labor. Otherwise, they’d be attacking businesses who hire undocumented immigrants since that’s the whole reason people come here.

          They don’t want to alienate businesses: those people are their donors. They want to drive the cost of labor down for their donors by exploiting the reactionary hatred of their base.

          This has been the case for decades; Trump is being even more explicit, stupid, and cruel than his party had traditionally been, but he is very much in that same tradition.

          • someguy3@lemmy.world
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            10 days ago

            They literally ran on “Mass Deportation”. Not “targeted deportation”. Not “deport the criminals”. It was “MASS Deportation”. They made how many millions of those signs? They literally plastered it everywhere. When someone tells you what they are going to do, believe them. Cheap labor is a minor hiccup they will give up to fuel their deep seated racism. If they cared about costs they wouldn’t impose tariffs. They don’t care.

            I can’t believe you guys are jumping through hoops and grasping at straws to think they won’t do what they literally said.

            • Nougat@fedia.io
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              10 days ago

              It’s not that they don’t want to today. It’s that the logistics of deporting millions of people is a lot more than they realize.

              They’ll get started, all gung ho, realize they’ve bit off more than they can chew, notice that the oppression has made it so that the cost of undocumented labor goes down (because what are they gonna do, complain?), and then slow the roll of disappearing people to a manageable level while still keeping the remainder well oppressed.

              The tariffs just work another side of that equation. Tariffs raise prices on manufactured goods across the board, for foreign and domestic products, because if you’re a domestic manufacturer of widgets, all you have to do is set the price of your widget just under the price of foreign widgets.

              Put some cheap labor on top of that, your labor expense goes down, and you get more profit.

              • someguy3@lemmy.world
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                10 days ago

                It’s that the logistics of deporting millions of people is a lot more than they realize.

                I believe I already covered this when I said “As for the exact number, it depends on the courts blocking things, the basic logistics of getting enough ICE …”

                That’s the only limiting factor.

                realize they’ve bit off more than they can chew,

                This is where we disagree. They may be forced to be slow, but they will go hard and try to get around the obstacles.

                The tariffs just work another

                Sigh, I brought up tariffs because people keep saying (essentially) “they can’t deport that many people, our economy depends on it”. Well guess what the economy depends on trade and they don’t care, they will put in tariffs. Just like they don’t care about the hit to the economy from deporting people.

            • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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              10 days ago

              If you’re not going to care about what I actually said, then I see no reason to continue this discussion. I explicitly told you that I think they’re going to deport a lot of people. You know… En masse?

              Have fun arguing with yourself.

              • someguy3@lemmy.world
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                10 days ago

                You said deportation is not the point, and I discussed how deportation is literally the whole point.

                • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  I’m amazed at how skeptical you are that elites use reactionary resentment to enrich themselves as matter of course.

                  And you’re calling everyone else naïve.

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    He doesn’t care about immigrants.

    Not one way, not the other.

    He just needs a scapegoat to blame all the problems on, because he can’t afford for his base- who absolutely do hate immigrants- to realize he, and people like him, are in fact the source of most their problems.

  • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I want less work visas for foreign workers. The tech industry isn’t competitive for Americans because Indians will do the job cheaper for a visa. It’s giving companies too much power over employees