By David A. Farenthold | Washington Post

President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club has applied for permission to hire 40 foreign workers to serve as waiters during the winter social season in Palm Beach, Florida, according to data posted Thursday by the Labor Department.

The posting showed that Trump’s club wants to pay the workers a minimum of $12.68 an hour and to employ them from October to the end of May. At the end of that term, the workers would be expected to return home.

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The application filed with the Labor Department signals that – despite Trump’s insistence that immigration is holding down wages and crowding out native-born American workers – his club believes it cannot find any Americans willing and able to hold the waiter jobs.

The application was first reported Thursday by BuzzFeed.

The Mar-a-Lago Club – a for-profit business that Trump has dubbed the “Winter White House” – has repeatedly used foreign workers in the past. Last year, his company applied for permission to hire waiters, housekeepers and cooks. The club’s competitors in Palm Beach, including other social clubs and hotels, have also used foreign labor.

The competitors have said the seasonal nature of resort work – which picks up in the fall and drops off in the spring when wealthy snowbirds leave Palm Beach – is not attractive to American workers.

On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other Trump businesses have hired foreign workers for temporary jobs. Earlier this year, the company asked to hire 14 foreign workers to be cooks and waiters at the Trump golf club in Westchester County, New York. And the Trump Winery near Charlottesville, Virginia, sought to employ 23 foreigners.

To comply with labor requirements, the Trump Organization will need to follow a set procedure to prove that it cannot find Americans qualified to wait tables.

Often, that means placing help-wanted ads in local newspapers, advertising at job fairs or contacting past applicants. If those efforts do not yield enough American applicants to fill the job, Trump’s clubs can ask the department to certify that it has tried and failed to find homegrown labor.

After that, the Trump clubs can ask the Department of Homeland Security to issue visas for workers from other countries. Mar-a-Lago’s application says the club is using a labor contractor, Petrina Group International, that it has relied on to recruit foreign workers in the past.