Illustration by Tim Lahan

When it comes to America’s technology industry, Donald Trump takes a dim view of foreign workers. “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program”—it provides visas for technical and skilled employees—“and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program,” he said in a statement a year ago. “No exceptions.”

When it comes to the hospitality industry, though, Trump is much more, well, hospitable. His Administration recently made it harder to get H1-B visas, but he has expressed no objection to the visa category that hotels and resorts use—the H-2B—to attract low-cost, low-skilled seasonal labor. In fact, at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach club, the visas are still in active use. Why the exception to the no-exception rule?

Since the election, Trump has been using Mar-a-Lago as a weekend retreat, a situation room, a source of personal enrichment (the private club just raised its membership fee to two hundred thousand dollars), and a backdrop for press conferences and photo ops. Based on the frequency of Trump’s visits to the opulent club since he took office, Mar-a-Lago appears to be a place—unlike Washington—where he feels at home. It is also a business that, for the past decade, has taken advantage of the H-2B program (distinct from the H-2A program, which is for agricultural workers).

Hospitality businesses like Mar-a-Lago argue that they can’t find Americans to fill seasonal jobs at the wages they advertise. Trump himself has said that “getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible.” Sandra Black, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, suggests a possible remedy: increase the pay. “The idea that there’s a worker shortage means the firm isn’t raising wages,” she says.

The sixty-four foreign dishwashers, cooks, cleaners, and gardeners that Mar-a-Lago is expected to employ this year will be paid per hour roughly what they were paid last year. (The Palm Beach Post reported that the range is around ten to thirteen dollars an hour.) The foreign workers brought in to help staff the club tend to come from two countries, Haiti and Romania, according to someone who works at Mar-a-Lago as an employee of an outside contractor. Other clubs and resorts nearby hire even more H-2B workers than Mar-a-Lago does. “It’s very common in South Florida. He’s not the only one,” the person who works at Mar-a-Lago said. “But he is the President, and he has an example to set. Whatever they’ve said—‘We cannot find these people just for six months out of the year’—baloney. If you’re paying a decent wage, you’ll find people to work.”

Even Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, made a similar point. Sessions is a radical critic of immigration, so it’s no surprise that he would object to foreign-worker programs, but at a Senate hearing about the H-2B program, held last June, he argued that employers should offer higher pay rather than bring in foreigners. “Most Americans would like a permanent job and not a short-term job,” he said. “It seems to me that short-term jobs should pay more if they expect to get workers to work on a short-term basis.”

If your mantra is “America First,” there is actually a stronger case for the visas the tech industry uses than for the ones used by Mar-a-Lago. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, who studies labor and immigration, says that the H-1Bs can boost the employment prospects of Americans. In a 2014 report, Peri and his co-authors concluded that the tech industry in the U.S. would have recovered much more quickly after the recession had the government not pulled back drastically on H-1B visas in 2007 and 2008. The technology jobs offered to foreigners, they argued, would have created several hundred thousand jobs for American workers, including those without college degrees who perform support roles in the tech industry. “Many people say that Japan has lost its edge in high tech because of its immigration policies,” Peri said. “It’s very hard to immigrate to Japan.”

Tech companies, too, are mobile. If they can’t hire the engineers and the programmers they need in Silicon Valley, they can move to Vancouver or Mumbai. “The cutting edge of innovation is usually in a place that is very diverse and open, and if this place loses its edge there is relocation,” Peri said. There’s no similar justification for maintaining the visa for the hospitality business. Some hotels would have trouble finding workers without a big wage bump, but the businesses themselves wouldn’t move offshore; you can’t substitute a room in Vancouver for a suite at Mar-a-Lago. So why would Trump target one visa program but not the other? The answer, as with so much else that Trump has done, is hard to discern from the slew of contradictory messages, but it seems that, when it comes to his own businesses, he’s not eager to take a hit. And no one is making him. ♦