Foreign students take summer jobs — crowding out US teens

Every summer, tens of thousands of international college students come to the United States under the State Department’s J-1 Summer Work Travel visa.

In theory, this is a cultural exchange arrangement fostering mutual understanding between Americans and foreigners.

In practice, it’s a backdoor work program that quietly supplies businesses with short-term seasonal labor — while undermining what was once a cherished American tradition: the summer job. 

Last year, close to 140,000 students from over 200 countries came to the US on J-1 visas to fill lifeguard chairs, take tickets at water parks, serve burgers at fast-food counters and mind children at summer camps — young, temporary employees who show up on time and disappear by fall.

The program is invisible to most of us. In fact, I’d never heard of it until I went on a Hinge date last week with one of its beneficiaries, a petite, curly-haired Colombian.

Dropping her back at her apartment, I stumbled upon a room with three unframed twin mattresses laid out on the floor. That’s when she explained she lived with her coworkers from the nearby pool park. 

She’s a full-time lifeguard, working six days a week. Her roommates are young women from Jamaica and El Salvador. In the next room, the same layout for four men.

The apartment next door? More of the same.

Dozens of young workers, packed in like sardines, all here under the J-1 program.

It hit me that this isn’t an issue of economics. Something more than jobs is being lost here — something quintessentially American.

For generations of US teens, the summer job was more than a paycheck. It was a proving ground.

It meant scooping ice cream, sweating in the sun, learning to show up on time, dealing with difficult customers. It wasn’t work for survival; it was work for shaping character. 

There’s something distinct about the American summer job, something it’s not possible to grasp unless you’ve spent time abroad.

From Peru to Cambodia, the idea of teens from all economic classes working during their school break is unheard of. Here, it has long been a rite of passage.

Yet by importing workers to take these roles, we risk nudging America closer to the societies from which they arrive — societies where social mobility is illusory; where middle-class teenagers lack an appreciation for physical labor, and view jobs like working a concession stand as beneath them.

We say we want our kids outside and off their screens; we bemoan their lack of work ethic.

So how is it that our government uses the fig leaf of “cultural exchange” to flood the summer employment market with tens of thousands of temporary workers from abroad? 

Culture doesn’t exist apart from structure. And here we have a very clear structural problem with an equally clear cultural consequence.

In the late 1970s, nearly 60% of US teens aged 16 to 19 held summer jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the numbers steadily dropped after that, down to about 30% by 2010, and hasn’t rebounded much since.

Now consider that in 2008, the J-1 summer program reached its peak with more than 150,000 participants — coincidentally or not, one of the worst years for American teen summer employment on record.

Adding to the problem, the pressure on the teen summer-job market is localized and intense. I can assure you, no neighborhood kids are working alongside my date. 

Combine the J-1 program with other foreign-labor pipelines, and the decline of the summer job starts to look less like a natural shift and more like a managed outcome.

The cold language of market efficiency makes us overlook conversations like this one. But I wonder if those who speak that language have ever walked through a townhouse packed with bunk beds, where seven strangers from four countries share rent to save a company a few thousand dollars. 

I did — by accident. And it made me wonder what kind of country we’ve become.

A nation must look after its own. It must build pathways for its youth — not sweep them aside for short-term gain.

There’s something deeply wrong when our summer economy can no longer teach our teens to work, while we outsource their character-forming jobs to kids from Bogotá and Kingston.

As we debate the grand consequences of mass migration, let’s not miss the quieter erosion of things that matter. 

The American summer job is as American as apple pie — and worth defending.

Juan P. Villasmil is a research fellow at the Center for a Secure Free Society.