The J1s are then packed like sardines into houses where they pay rent by the week. Why by the week? To remind them they're expendable and can be deported at a moment's notice by the restaurant/hotel/amusement park/etc. they work at. The worst I've heard is 16 people living in a 3-bedroom, 1 bathroom house.

The J1s themselves are typically great people. A lot of them do everything they can to stay in the area via Green Cards or whatever. Business that treat their J1s like shit are usually blacklisted by locals, too. We'll actively tell tourists not to give those businesses any business and why.

For non-native English speakers it also has the advantage of providing a free total immersion language course as well. People pay for opportunities like that.

So yes, an Italian 19 year old is willing to work for less money for the chance to work in a water park for a summer, improving their English and boosting their resume, and if it gives them enough money to be able to fund a couple of weekend trips to New York or DC so much the better. It’s a life experience and a working vacation.

That local 19 year olds are not seeing the same advantages to that sort of work isn’t surprising.

Which should be pretty revolting for them if that's the case. Instead of American 19 year olds making some summer money at the waterpark to buy their first car, they get moved aside by disposable foreign workers, so then they need to stay supported by their parents for longer till they can get a "proper" job.

And I'm European not American, but I see the same issue here. Getting minimum wage jobs in the hospitality/service sector is super competitive now due to pressure from migrant workers who will accept anything. These are jobs that used to be done by teenagers in the past for summer money but not anymore.

Employers everywhere being able allowed to min/max wages against the most desperate labor on the planet should be banned.

And then governments have the audacity to complain about people not having kids anymore. Well no shit, my dad and his peers had summer jobs since he was 14 because there were no migrant workers to replace them, and after finishing high school he already had a job in the factory with housing benefits, he was already making enough money to have a family and 2 kids, not one.

If the government cut off the seasonal work visas, tourist destination hospitality businesses would have to increase prices, some would go out of business, and American tourists’ quality of life would be lower.

And where are 19 year old Americans getting money for water parks if they don't have jobs? Still having hobbies funded by your parents at 19 isn't really a societal win.

You say 30-50 years ago they couldn't afford that because labor costs were too high? Maybe they had jobs to pay those higher costs?

By finding a ready source of people willing to staff the water park at a lower price, more ‘water park amenity’ is available at a lower price.

This frees up the labor of local teenagers who can now be employed in other roles, producing other useful things for society, like… I don’t know what teenagers do nowadays. Provide market-clearing services on Kalshi by placing bad bets? Upload short form video to TikTok to enable ad buyers to find customers?

Or same prices but higher margins for the owner.

The appeal for foreigners is living temporarily in Germany, Switzerland, etc.

It's an exchange: the host offers a roof, pays next to nothing for a live-in nanny, etc.

It's tourism + work.

I don't think anyone would do this as a career, and locals just do it in another country.

Interestingly the 26 refers to the USA. But a similar career would be legally possible inside the USA (not under the program) but not in EU, due to heavy labour regulations.

Ep. 388

Locals like them, too - they're charming, generally well-behaved, polite, and it doesn't hurt that they don't have to pay them very much. I like to think the cultural exchange between the Europeans and the otherwise isolated locals is fantastic for broadening horizons, also.

There’s actually virtually nothing those two things have in common, except some unarticulated sense of grievance that in some unspecified way it would be better if Americans were doing those things.

And I didn't mean to give the impression that I have some grievance that these jobs aren't filled by Americans.

My curiosity was why aren't there more American kids having a working vacation in beach towns, not shame on these towns for importing labor.

Virtually all the hospitality staff there were European university students. Midway through the summer, they realized that they weren't earning enough to afford their return airfare and they threatened to strike. I don't recall how they resolved the issue, but I believe that they were netting less than minimum wage. Maybe things have changed since then, and maybe not.

  s/American/British/
  s/European/Polish/

  s/American/Canadian/
  s/European/Indian/

He's saying you can replace 'something' for 'other' in each of those patterns.

That American complaints of this form are not unique and therefore should be disregarded? That American complaints of this form are universal and therefore indicative of a global pattern that should be concerning?

I don't know their living situation, but I did see them both walking and riding bikes to the grocery store. It's a somewhat unique situation as the grocery store probably does 90% of their yearly business between June and August each year. I couldn't tell if they all knew each other from home or just from working together.

Do you mean that you are surprised that young Americans aren't working at the boardwalk in the USA or that young Americans are not working at the beaches in Europe?

I think it just depends on the location? But also yes - if I'm worth my salt, why would I take these jobs over higher paying internships? At 19 I was able to land $25/h jobs in tech. Maybe we should rethink the pay scales in terms of sustainability. Unfortunately we live in the US where short term gains are the sole motivator for most companies.

For those European workers, a US wage more than pays for the rent for their vacant rent back home.

Do they have work visas for this, or are they abusing a travel visa? All the people I knew that did this were doing it illegally.

And now that there's less of them, the jobs will be replaced by higher wage americans, which will increase inflation from the higher payroll costs.

companies do stuff like this because american young people won't tolerate it

You don't get to experience much of the country because you're located in some dorm building that's not near much. So your summer ends up looking like 12 hour days standing around in the sun watching other people have fun.

A number of companies have been hit with slap-on-the-wrist fines for actually violating labor policies doing it.

I did this for a summer, worked my butt off, got back home, paid all my expenses with the paperwork and the plane tickets, bought a laptop and came back with about 500$. It was not much, but it was much more than I ever got the opportunity by that point to make.

The people I worked with treated me quite well. Everyone I met was welcoming and warm.

I did not manage to see a lot, but I did visit Yellowstone, had a couple of adventures, and overall was a positive experience for me.

A friend I was with did not manage too well and had a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to wash toilets.

But my point is, it can be a great experience and I don't buy for a second this feigned concern for "ooh, the poor kids are exploited". No, I think it's just job protectionism.

There's no feigned concern, this is actually a labor system that gets abused time and time again. Still happens today. These people have no advocates. A similar situation happens on cruise ships.

the idea is that foreigners will do the temp/seasonal low value work, while Americans were supposed to educate and upskill using federal student loans and get a high value jobs.

unfortunately American education system made it impossible, ue to stupidity.

Only China is able to do that: massively educate population and upskill and go up the value chain of manufacturing and industrialization.

Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"

You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)

Due to the jobs not existing in the number required.

same for microchip manufacturing (Micron and TSMC factories in US) and every other high value industry.

heck even Submarine production cannot find welders and machinists.

It's still incredibly hard to hire skilled devs.

More than half. Everyone is talking their book here, and the book that isn't blind to this problem belongs to the overwhelming majority.

The resentment is absolutely understandable.

What I am trying to explain is that, if magically, all foreigners are expelled, H1B/OPT banned, all Indian visas canceled, this will NEVER result in Americans getting more jobs. Quite the opposite. Global Capability Centers already are offshoring everything possible outside the US, just because of trump rhetoric.

American capitalist is not stupid, the billionaires are not idiots. Why should they hire and overpay for unskilled Americans just because they happen to be born here, instead of hiring the most qualified person? Any anti-immigrant legislation will simply accelerate the offshoring, or even worse, will create competing tech giants outside the US.

It is this entitlement attitude is whats going to ruin the US tech sector and scare the talent away.

A lot of tech jobs are paying six to seven figures, you cant really demand employers to train and lower barriers. Why should employers lower their barrier and increase salaries even further?

Where do you get this feeling of entitelement for other people’s money ???

What else do you want at this point, maybe just plain UBI and a million to everyone just for being white american ?

Just like farm labor: without importing foreigners, legal or otherwise, wages would go up, food prices would go up, prices, wages, and property values would normalize to market rates.

the reason why America wants to suppress low value jobs, is because they are input to the actual output of American economy: agriculture, high value industrial goods, tech services, financial services, real estate, financial asset s and services.

These are the actual components of US GDP and American government does everything possible to keep the input to these sectors stable/low, in order to protect the profits of these industries.

Do you see how wages seasonal workers are lower priority to the profits of Vail Corporation?

https://rusticpathways.com/blog/how-many-americans-have-a-pa...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/40-of-americans-one-step-from-p...