I’ve been making the rounds of the ice cream shops on Martha’s Vineyard this week and my cone is usually delivered by a 20-25-year-old with a Polish accent. This did not strike me as odd a few years ago when the U.S. economy was booming. Jobs on the Vineyard are plentiful during the summer, but affordable housing is not very comfortable. It was primarily foreigners who wanted to come here, work 12 hours per day, every day, sleep in a bunkhouse and bank a lot of money before returning home at the end of the summer (there is some sort of work experience visa program that was/is commonly used for these young people; it may be that they are studying hospitality in a school back in Europe). With millions of unemployed Americans, however, it seems odd to me that the summer of 2011 would still be one in which the employers of the Vineyard would look to foreigners.
Update: I did a little more research among the managers and employees of shops in Vineyard Haven. One shop owner said that she thought that the work ethic of young Americans was, on average, inferior to that of the foreigners who were motivated to pack up and cross the ocean. The cost of the temporary foreign workers was about the same as hiring an American, but the foreigners were more effective. A couple of Russian students (from Vladivostok!) working in an ice cream shop said that they were being well paid but mostly valued the opportunity to improve their English. I also found legal workers from Turkey and a couple of recently-arrived girls from the Czech Republic who were looking for cash jobs.
One would suspect that:
1) American citizens will not be shipped (back) to Poland if they are unemployed
2) American citizens get some level of free stuff that immigrants from Poland have no access to.
1 + 2 = the immigrants still have more ‘incentives’ to try and get the jobs available, over and above whatever ‘incentives’ might be motivating the local American citizen population.
Basically, both groups need money, but only one group might face deportation if unemployed, and only one group might cash in some freebies if unemployed.
Interesting.
I very nearly commented on your “Greek currency” post in response to speculation about limited labour mobility in Europe. I think there is actually quite a lot of mobility, but I suspect that we see proportionally more in the UK as English is a ‘lingua franca’ (!) for so many people. That would apply to the US too, of course.
A huge number of low-end service-sector jobs here are done by Polish people, who are generally efficient, attentive and have good English. I suspect – based on those English language skills – that many are well educated and massively over-qualified for the jobs they are doing. While the numbers have gone down a little since the econopocalypse kicked in, like you I’m surpised that rising local unemployment has not had more of an impact.
Interestingly, my little town has been without an NHS dentist (‘socialised medicine’ ) until recently. Now one has opened, and two of the four dentists there are Greek.
I’m very happy to see this variety of nationalities and cultures (amazing how Polish people go down to the river to catch a fish for dinner – why don’t we do that?), but like you I am puzzled by the economics of it.
It’s not so strange when you consider how many times unemployment benefits have been extended.
Maybe they are all the Polish people who left Ireland when their economy imploded. Things may be bad in the US but there’s usually somewhere worse. Although, I think these kids are probably all on J-1 visas, which are temporary.
This reminds me of a piece on Georgia’s farm situation: http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/06/17/gas-farm-labor-crisis-playing-out-as-planned/
Perhaps unemployed Americans find jobs like these beneath them, and allow pride to override economics.
You’re expecting people to give up never ending unemployment benefit checks to work at an ice cream shop and live in a “bunkhouse”?
Going back to the original question of why the employers would prefer foreigners – is it possible that there is something in federal and state law that allows these employers to pay a lower hourly wage than citizens would get?
Even if that is not the case, the business owners may have an attitude of “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The months of April and May, when they’re getting ready for the summer are probably very busy times for those ice cream shop owners. If they’ve been getting good workers from Europe for many years, why would they want to change their practices and try to recruit young Americans?
Actually, a better question might be why didn’t the government cancel this special visa progam for summer workers this year?
I do not at all believe the claim that costs/pay are comparable. The employers are saving a lot of money on these J-1 visas. It’s been getting much coverage in Florida where folks have noticed that alongside high unemployment tons of unskilled temporary labor is being imported.
Obviously these visas are great for employers, but I fail to see how they serve the citizenry at large.
I’m sure it takes a certain amount of money and sophistication for a Polish student to navigate the bizarre immigration laws that characterize western legal systems.
American students with similar abilities and backgrounds don’t need to work in an ice cream shop and live in a bunkhouse. They can do better than that even in the current shackled American economy.
Down in Rhode Island, there are already complaints that there are just not enough qualified scientists to hire:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43590587/ns/business-personal_finance/
“It took Ultra Scientific’s Russo more than half a year to fill one of those jobs. Until recently, he couldn’t find anyone to operate a specialized piece of equipment that performs high-pressure liquid chromatography, a technique that separates compounds in a solution.”
Did we already recover and are too dumb to qualify for jobs? Or do we Americans just not want to work?
Quagmire: “Did we already recover and are too dumb to qualify for jobs? Or do we Americans just not want to work?”
False dichotomy.
More than likely Scrooge passed up dozens or hundreds of reasonably intelligent people with reasonable background because they did not have YEARS of PAID PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE operating THAT MAKE AND MODEL OF EQUIPMENT in THAT EXACT INDUSTRY. Because it might cost Scrooge a few months of pay while the new guy gets up to speed. In his mind, unemployed people need to buy their OWN mulitmilliondollar machines and train themselves at their own expense. It’s the American way (leaving aside centuries of on-the-job training, especially when the equipment is monumentally expensive).
If there are only 1000 “qualified” (Scrooge definition) of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants, odds are that most of them are in China and India (>2 billion) than in the US (330 million).Far better to bring one, his/her spouse, and his/her elderly parents and their cousins in than to give one’s neighbor an opportunity to learn! Just curse the neighbor for being unemployed and suggest he buy a chromatography machine or an A380 to train himself on.
Philip, I’d almost forgotten about this when I stumbled across this new article Washington Post’s notorious “hate site” Slate.com:
http://www.slate.com/id/2298442/
* The majority of “lazy American” teenagers are involved in summer academic programs (competition for decent college slots is fierce)
* Mass immigration has lowered wages for unskilled labor and college costs have inflated to the point where a summer job doesn’t move the needle on a college fund.
So, yet again, it’s not really that these are “jobs Americans won’t do,” but rather “jobs Americans can no longer afford to do.”
Quotes:
…A number of factors suggest that teenagers are facing greater academic demands and pressures than in the past, which, together with the desire to achieve, may incline them toward placing greater emphasis on academics than on working,” economist Teresa Morisi of the Bureau of Labor Statistics explains….
Second, teenagers have faced increased competition for those poorly paid summertime jobs in the retail, service, and construction sectors. There are more immigrants, both undocumented and documented, to compete against for low-paying gigs. A model done by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies found that a 10 percentage-point increase “in the immigrant share of a state’s work force from 1994 to 2007 reduced the labor force participation rate of U.S.-born teenagers by 7.9 percentage points.” Studies by economists at the Federal Reserve and the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University have also found significant employment effects.