This item from the Center for Immigration Studies interested me. It’s a backgrounder called A Drought of Summer Jobs: Immigration and the Long-Term Decline in Employment Among U.S.-Born Teenagers.
While CIS has acquired a reputation as an immigrant-bashing organization, what I took from reading through the study wasn’t so much the immigration aspect (although it is significant) but the general decline in the number of teenagers working. Their theory is that older immigrants, who are at the requisite skill level for entry-level work but don’t have to work around schooling, extracurricular activities, and other pursuits, are taking these jobs in increasing numbers.
One conclusion of the study suggests that these teenagers are handicapped later in life by not getting work. By that they mean they don’t get the experience of being on time and adjusting to a work schedule, providing customer service, and other job-related skills they don’t teach in school. Obviously that’s true because, while schooling is good, there’s truly no substitute for the good old School of Hard Knocks. Just ask any manager or customer about the service in certain outlets and you may hear horror stories about this generation. (Then again, I’m sure if you asked my parents’ generation about their recollections of us starting out you would get many of the same complaints.)
I can’t see fault in CIS’s theories but I think there are other factors at work. One intriguing finding is that teenagers from lower-income families aren’t as likely to be working as those in the upper starta of income. Now you would think that poor teenagers would be helping out the family’s economic situation and perhaps that was so a generation or two ago, but apparently that’s not the case anymore.
Obviously I wasn’t here on the Shore a generation ago to see what the young population did during the summer; perhaps readers can help me out. As it stands now, there are a number of low- or semi-skilled positions available in the area which seem to be filled by nonnative workers – picking crabs, processing chickens, or other agriculture-related work was probably a stepping-stone job among the youths of an earlier time while my generation likely grew up with the rise of Ocean City from a sleepy seaside town to the regional resort it has become. Now those jobs in the agricultural, food service, hotel/motel, and amusement fields seemingly fall more and more to imported workers. Anymore you can’t walk in Ocean City without tripping over a worker here for the summer on a visa – even here in Salisbury a couple years back we had a charming young Slovakian lady who was the lifeguard at the apartment pool.
However, it seems from some anecdotal reports that the employment situation in Ocean City has changed a little bit – but it’s still not to the advantage of teenagers looking for work. They’re being bumped out by displaced older workers from other fields who are desperate to keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads.
So the CIS backgrounder isn’t necessarily surprising given what we know about the local situation, but it is worrisome. These days teens seem to have a lot of idle time on their hands; time which some fill with camps, classes, sports, or sitting in their living room playing video games. But too many who would like a job can’t get one, and that’s something which may affect their financial and employment status for the rest of their life.