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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is where we disagree. They may be forced to be slow, but they will go hard and try to get around the obstacles.
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.
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.
You said deportation is not the point, and I discussed how deportation is literally the whole point.
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.
They can enrich themselves pretty damn well without needing to rely on illegal immigrants. Trump will use them if he can, but he wants them out even more. That’s the difference.
The real enrichment will come from union busting, destroying the NLRB, FTC, FCC, FDA, etc, deregulation, privatization of government departments (postal service, NASA), sweetheart court decisions, tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, etc, which they will go full ham on. Illegal immigrant wages are next to nothing.