The majority of American teenagers learned valuable life lessons about earning money and taking responsibility from the end of World War II until a series of immigrant amnesties in the late 1990s started replacing them with cheap immigrant labor.
The ‘Labor Participation Rate’ for teenagers 16 to 19 years old has plummeted by 36 percent, since 2000 from 55 percent to below 35 percent. The Labor Force Participation rate for 20-to-24-year olds has also fallen by over 8 percent, from 79 percent to 70 percent. Rather than some change in youth ambition, a published report by the U.S. Federal Reserve late last year, “Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects,” blames this crash on a flood of immigrant labor that has displaced native-born kids from jobs at higher percentages rates than adults.
The Fed stated that “the increase in the population of less educated immigrants has had a considerably more negative effect on employment outcomes for native youth than for native adults. At least two factors are at work: there is greater overlap between the jobs that youth and less educated adult immigrants traditionally do, and youth labor supply appears more responsive to immigration-induced wage changes.”
Liberals blame President Ronald Reagan for his 1985 Immigration and Reform Control Act that gave blanket amnesty to some 2.7 million illegal aliens, many of whom had been in the U.S. for many decades. But the majority of the amnesties happened during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
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