One thing you can say about Trump is that he’s absolutely clear on his furious opposition to immigrants taking American jobs.

Except, of course, when the corporate honchos profiting from cheap immigrant labor are billionaire funders of Trump’s campaigns – or, hello, when Trump himself is doing the hiring!

Upgrade your subscription

A work-permit program called H-1B actually allows corporate giants to import foreigners to take US jobs. Trump loudly denounced this in his first term, but that was pre-Elon. When gabillionaire Elon Musk became Donald’s campaign Sugar Daddy last year, he turned out to be a mass abuser of the H-1B loophole – apparently even firing workers in his Tesla corporation and replacing them with cheaper foreign imports.

Yet, far from scolding his new Best Buddy, Trump did a full-body flip-flop. Now hailing H-1B as “a great program,” he admits that he, too, has long used it, even when he was denouncing it as a shameful rip-off of American workers.

Trump’s use of the foreign hire scheme is even chintzier than Musk’s for he uses a companion H-2 loophole to import hundreds of low-paid foreigners to take jobs as cooks, waiters, housekeepers, and farmworkers in his luxury resorts and hotels – including at Mar-a-Lago.

Amazing. These are lordly billionaires reducing themselves to sleaze by exploiting a corporate scheme to shortchange American and foreign workers alike. Moreover, whether trying to import engineers or waiters, the law requires these über-rich applicants to lie. They must swear that there are no American citizens available who can do these jobs.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Welcome to Don and Elon’s phantasmagoric wonderland, where nothing is a lie if they say it’s true.

Leave a comment

Share

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.