Trump granted visas to hire 70 foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump has won permission to hire 70 foreign employees to work as maids, cooks and waiters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida during the tourist season next year.

The US president has been granted visas for 70 foreign workers, according to data released by the US Labor Department. Last season, Trump brought 64 people from overseas to work at his 5-star hotel and golf club in Palm Beach.

Management at the resort applied for the visas in July, according to the Palm Beach Post. The Trump Organization is not the only US company hiring overseas. Nearly 134,000 foreign workers were granted visas for 2017-18, compared with 119,000 in 2016-17.

In the run-up to the presidential election, Trump was criticised by Senator Mark Rubio for hiring workers from overseas, rather than giving the jobs to Americans.

During a debate in March 2016, Trump defended his organisation's policy, saying: "It's very, very hard to get people. Other hotels do the exact same thing."

Trump has publicly condemned US organisations including Ford Motor and Carrier Corp. for moving manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

Last week, Trump vowed to end the "diversity visa lottery program", which awards green cards to around 50,000 people each year, after terrorist Sayfullo Saipov drove a car into pedestrians in New York. Trump blamed the attack on the programme, through which Saipov entered the US. He wrote on Twitter that he wanted to introduce a "merit based" system rather than a lottery.

Hillary Clinton criticised Trump's comments following the attack. "What you want in a president, is to bring a country together, talk about what happened with the event they're concerned about but not point fingers, not scapegoat and not try to set Americans against each other," she said during an interview on Trevor Noah's The Daily Show.