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Martha’s Vineyard Newspaper Lists 50 Job Ads Despite Claims of No Work on Island

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MARTHA’S VINEYARD, Mass.—While some locals have claimed that the illegal aliens who arrived on this wealthy island should go elsewhere since there won’t be work for them with the summer rush gone, the local newspaper listed 50 help-wanted ads in a recent issue, and the local supermarket chain is known to need help all year long.

The classified section of The Vineyard Gazette listed more than 50 jobs in the same issue that ran a story about the illegals, referring to them as “stranded migrants.” The job ads included positions for laborers, custodians, landscapers, bakers, cooks, dishwashers, technicians, library assistant, and several retail positions.

The local YMCA also listed several job openings, including housekeepers, ice arena workers, and a front desk administrator. The spacious Y, near where the immigrants spent the night at the St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, shares a complex with The Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS), which also ran a help-wanted ad in the paper including a job for administrative assistant “bilingual preferred.”

The MVCS did not return phone calls from The Epoch Times. The outreach center and the island’s homeless shelter told the media that they didn’t have room for them.

On a Saturday afternoon, the large MVCS complex had several doors to its buildings wide open, but no staff could be found. One of the open buildings consisted of two floors with several empty rooms, including rooms with full kitchens and couches.

A group of friends enjoying an outdoor lunch at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport told The Epoch Times that while the plume of summer jobs is over, there are still enough job opportunities on the island.

The women, year-round residents who grew up on the island, pointed to Stop & Shop, a grocery store chain with three locations on the island. According to the women, the stores always look for help and own worker dormitories, which they said are “now empty” with most of the summer help gone.

“Martha’s Vineyard is a tale of two cities,” said one of the women who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But Charles Rus, music director for St. Andrew’s, an episcopal church in Edgartown where the migrants were housed, told The Epoch Times there weren’t any jobs for them on the island.

“There’s space, but there’s no job,” Rus told The Epoch Times. He had offered to put some of the immigrants up in his two-bedroom apartment, “if they had come four months earlier, every one of them would have had a $20/hour job.”

In response to criticism that the immigrants were forced off the island, Rus said the Venezuelans had to leave the island for “practical reasons,” including the need to attend scheduled court hearings.

According to a Sept. 16 story in the Vineyard Gazette, the Island Counseling Center provided each of the 50 immigrants with individual legal counseling from an immigration attorney.

The Baker Call

The seemingly ample jobs on Martha’s Vineyard are not the only point of contradiction to the narrative spun by some locals and picked up by establishment media outlets.

Some locals question whether local officials were unaware of the plane of illegal aliens chartered by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and who called Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to remove the uninvited visitors.

“I don’t think Baker woke up in the morning, said, hey, I think I’ll take those 50 immigrants off the hands of Martha’s Vineyard,” Richard Rooney, who lives and owns a real estate agency on the island, told The Epoch Times.

Less than 24 hours after their arrival to Martha’s Vineyard, a self-proclaimed sanctuary community for illegals, Baker, a Republican, approved the transfer of the migrants, mostly Venezuelans, off the island to a military base in Bourne, which is located within minutes of the ferry terminal to Martha’s Vineyard. The group is given shelter, food, clothing, and other supplies in Bourne. Baker committed 125 members of the Massachusetts National Guard as part of the transfer.

Rooney, a Republican who has been active in local government on Martha’s Vineyard for about 30 years, also joined others who pointed to the notification requirements by the Martha’s Vineyard Airport for unscheduled flights.

Democrats have attacked DeSantis, a Republican, for sending the immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard in what they have characterized as an ambush.

“We were given no notice,” Massachusetts state Rep. Dylan Fernandes, a Democrat representing Martha’s Vineyard, said on TV the day the immigrants arrived on Martha’s Vineyard.

Massachusets Public Safety and Security Secretary Terrence Reidy, appointed by Baker in 2021, also called their arrival on Martha’s Vineyard “unexpected” in a Sept. 16 press release announcing the Baker Administration’s plans to take the migrants.

The island airport’s flight notification requirements state that 24-hour notification before take-off is required for any plane with more than nine passengers and suggests that a passenger list must also be provided in advance. Video footage from Fox News shows immigrants unboarding the plane shortly after arriving on Martha’s Vineyard.

Rooney wonders why someone was at the airport filming the debarkation, especially if a plane was “secretly” sent.

On Sunday, a man answering the phone line for airport operations refused to provide general information about the airport’s notification requirements, initially telling The Epoch Times there were no notification requirements. When The Epoch Times read the 24-hour notice policy for flights with nine or more passengers, the person said he was not to speak to the press.

Martha’s Vineyard Airport is funded with tax dollars and receives sizeable state and federal subsidies.

The airport received $1.2 million in COVID aid in 2020. In 2019, Dukes County, the county-level government on Martha’s Vineyard, gave it $1.2 million for “improvements.”

Airport General Jeffrey Freeman could not be reached for comment.

To the charge Democrats made that DeSantis used the immigrants as political pawns, Rooney told The Epoch Times that he sees “the move by DeSantis to fly the immigrants to the island as no different than Biden sneaking millions of illegal immigrants all over the country in the dark of night by bus and plane.

“At least DeSantis did it in the daylight,” Rooney said.

Speculation about who contacted Baker, a Republican, from this Democrat-dominated island is widespread.

Names locals threw out included Joseph Solmonese, a well-known political strategist who was the CEO of the 2020 Democratic National Committee, a former transition chairman for Planned Parenthood, and past president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT advocacy organization.

Solmonese lives year-round on the island in the especially affluent town of Chilmark. He could not be reached for comment. No evidence has surfaced that Solmonese had anything to do with contacting Baker.

Amanda Orlando, campaign manager for Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl, told the Epoch Times on Friday that Diehl, also curious about who made the call to Baker, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama, who owns a 6,982-square foot mansion and a 29-acre farm on the island, also came up routinely as a possibility.

Within 12 hours after the arrival of the immigrants on the island, social media posts on Facebook and Twitter were riddled with criticism aimed at wealthy Democrats for not offering up their empty summer rentals.

Rus, the music director at St. Andrew’s, told The Epoch Times that there were locals who did derisively call for “putting them in Obama’s House.”

“But they were in the minority,” he said.

Alice Giordano

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Alice Giordano is a former news correspondent for The Boston Globe, Associated Press, and New England bureau of The New York Times.



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