Rubio Campaign Press Release - Yes, Trump Tower Really Was Built by Illegal Immigrants

If Donald Trump builds his wall with Mexico the same way he built Trump Tower, Marco said last night, he'll do it with illegal immigrant workers.

Rubio: If Trump builds the wall the way he built Trump Tower, he'll be using illegal immigrant labor #GOPDebate https://t.co/DBVk3dFpIH

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 26, 2016

He was joking — since that's how you should treat Trump's plans — but . . .

It's 100 percent true that Trump Tower was built on the backs of illegal immigrant workers, Polish men who suffered horrible working conditions and, in many cases, never even got paid what they were due.

CNN looked into the matter after Marco raised it last night:

Here's a report from 1998:

Eighteen years ago, Wojciech Kozak helped build Trump Tower, the skyscraper jewel in Donald J. Trump's real-estate empire. Today, Mr. Kozak recalls that time with nightmare memories of backbreaking 12-hour shifts and of being cheated with 200 other undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe benefits.

"We worked in horrid, terrible conditions," Mr. Kozak said of the six months he spent in 1980 wielding a sledgehammer and a blowtorch in demolishing the Bonwit Teller Building on Fifth Avenue to make way for Trump Tower. "We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights."

Mr. Kozak, like other laborers on that job, has no hope of collecting about $4,000 in back wages from a contracting company that began the demolition and later became insolvent. But after almost two decades, the demolition workers are still struggling to compel Mr. Trump and his business associates to compensate a union's welfare funds and thus increase pension and medical benefits for some of the Polish workers.

Mr. Kozak is now a party and witness in a class-action lawsuit that has meandered through the Federal courts for 15 years and charges that Mr. Trump owes $4 million to the union welfare funds for the work the Poles performed. Filed in 1983, the suit has been bogged down by a torrent of motions and appeals of judicial decisions and by the deaths of a judge, a lawyer, the original lead plaintiffs, an important witness and two of Mr. Trump's co-defendants.

Mr. Kozak is one of thousands of working Americans whom Donald Trump has fleeced over the years.

He wants to convince them he'll fight for working Americans in the White House — but even if he knew how, he never has.