by Brett Stevens on June 24, 2017

“Correlation is not causation,” morons love to say, but when a contributing factor can be identified, so can causality. As immigration has bloated the third world underclass of the West, teenagers have found themselves displaced from jobs they normally took, resulting in a collapse of teenage labor:

Paul Harrington, Neeta Fogg and Ishwar Khatiwada of Drexel’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy studied average teen employment rates from June through August. They found that the percentage of employed 16-to-19-year-olds fell from 45 percent in 1986 to 30 percent last year. (Their numbers are lower than the July-only figures because teens are less likely to work in June and August.) They forecast that teens’ June-August employment rate will reach 30.5 percent this year, surpassing 30 percent for the first time since the recession year of 2009 and evidence of an overall improved job market.

Perhaps the percentage has jumped a whole half-point this year because of the improved job market, but another factor is the mass exodus of immigrants in response to the rise of the polices of Donald J. Trump regarding immigration. In the meantime, American wages remain stagnant since the 1970s, and in effect lowered because of the additional requirements of living now versus then. Economics would attribute this an influx of new people into the workforce, which has been achieved through women in the workplace, immigration and affirmative action.

Leftist policies of equality are designed to force a society where people share the wealth equally. When the workforce is swollen, few individual workers find themselves in a position to rise in compensation above the rest, producing a vast peasant mass who will do whatever government instructs them to, since it controls their compensation through regulation. That is the Leftist endgame here.

In the meantime, many Americans — especially those discriminated against by law, namely European-descended ones — find themselves dropping out of the workforce into the barter economy, part time gigs, and selling junk on eBay to make ends meet. As usual, Leftist policy benefits Leftism at the expense of normal, healthy people.

Tags: immigration, teenage jobs

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