Trump’s company hired 566 foreign workers since 2021 while he slapped a $100K fee on H-1B visas, and nobody’s buying the excuse

The Trump Organization plans to bring in 184 foreign workers this year, the most it has ever requested. This number keeps going up every year since 2021. Data from the Department of Labor shows the company has asked to hire 566 foreign workers in total during this time. These people work at Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs, and Trump Vineyard Estates in Charlottesville, Virginia.

According to The Hill, the company hires these workers using H-2A and H-2B visa programs for short-term jobs. Most of them work as servers, farm workers, kitchen staff, clerks, and housekeepers. The number of visa requests has jumped a lot, going from 121 in 2021 to 184 this year.

What makes this interesting is that Trump signed an order in September that raised H-1B visa fees to $100,000. The whole point was to get companies to hire Americans instead of foreign workers. The big fee only affects new visa applicants, not people who already have visas. But now people are noticing that Trump’s own company keeps hiring more foreign workers while pushing this policy.

The excuse isn’t holding up anymore

Trump tried to explain why his company uses foreign workers during an interview with Laura Ingraham. He said America doesn’t have enough people with specific skills to do certain jobs. Ingraham told him that bringing in thousands of foreign workers makes it harder to raise wages for Americans. Trump said he agreed with that, but insisted companies still need to hire talented people from other countries.

“You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles,'” Trump said in the interview. He was trying to say some jobs need special training that unemployed Americans don’t have.

But here’s the problem with that argument. The Trump Organization isn’t hiring rocket scientists or engineers. They’re hiring servers, housekeepers, and farm workers. These are regular jobs that millions of Americans already do every single day across the country.

The administration has also faced criticism for its treatment of federal workers, with Trump recently making air traffic controllers pay the price for a past shutdown.

Even people who usually support Trump aren’t happy about this. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, who is normally one of Trump’s biggest supporters, seemed to push back against what he said. “I am solidly against you being replaced by foreign labor, like with H1Bs,” she posted on X after the interview.

Trump supporters on social media are also speaking out. One person wrote, “I didn’t vote for this. This is not America first.” Someone else responded to Trump’s claims about needing talent by saying, “We have plenty of talented people here.”

Another frustrated supporter posted, “This is insane. We are going to lose the midterms so badly.” These comments show that even Trump’s own voters are getting worried about how he handles immigration.

The H-1B visa program that Trump raised fees for started in 1990 and lets companies hire foreign workers for specialized jobs. The H-2A and H-2B programs his company uses are different because they’re meant for temporary farm workers and other seasonal jobs.

This comes as Trump has made claims about economic improvements under his watch that don’t quite match reality. Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization has said anything about this yet.