President Donald Trump aims to hire 80 at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and 14 at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter.

President Donald Trump aims to hire dozens of foreign workers in Palm Beach County during the 2019-2020 tourist season, continuing his longstanding practice of recruiting laborers from Romania and elsewhere.

Trump has asked his Labor Department for permission to hire 80 workers at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach through the federal government's H-2B visa program, according to CareerSource Palm Beach County, the nonprofit job placement agency. That's up from 78 foreign workers Trump hired at Mar-a-Lago in 2018-19.

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Trump also asked for 14 visas for workers at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, up from 12 during the 2018-19 high season.

During the 2016 presidential primary, Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican rival of Trump, criticized the billionaire for not hiring American workers to cook food, wait tables and cut grass at his clubs. Since then, record-low unemployment has muted some of that criticism. Palm Beach County's jobless rate fell to an all-time low of 2.9 percent in April, and U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year nadir.

"The Palm Beach County job market remains very competitive, and employers overall are having a challenging time finding workers," said Tom Veenstra, a spokesman for CareerSource Palm Beach County.

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In May, the agency 30,559 job openings and just 22,591 workers considered officially unemployed.

As a result, some 30 hotels, clubs and resorts have asked the Labor Department for nearly 2,100 H-2B visas for the coming season.

Trump asked the Department of Labor for visas for 45 servers, who will be $13.28 an hour, up from $12.68 an hour in 2018-19. He wants to hire 15 housekeepers at $11.17 an hour, up from $10.68 last year, and 20 cooks at $13.86 an hour, up from $13.31 last year. Mar-a-Lago's pay for foreign workers matched that at most other clubs and hotels in Palm Beach County.

Palm Beach County's seasonal businesses long have relied on temporary foreign workers to serve guests during the high season. Boca West Country Club and The Breakers are among the employers that tap into the H-2B visa program for low-wage, low-skilled workers.

The Trump Organization doesn't comment about its hiring of foreign workers, guests who have dined at the club say foreign servers typically come from Romania.

Mar-a-Lago typically asks for permission to bring in foreign workers from Oct. 1 to May 31. Trump's Palm Beach club, which has doubled as the Winter White House since his election in 2016, closes for the summer.

jostrowski@pbpost.com

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