Remember the good ol' days, when teenagers had unskilled jobs available simply if they had the gumption to show up? Yes, even know-nothing, lay-about teenagers were valued way back when. Mostly, the jobs involved busing tables, washing dishes, and harvesting food crops.
And particularly during the harvest season, farmers couldn't hire enough teenagers: they sent buses around neighborhoods to pick up the teenagers and transport them to the fields. Young Fredd was one of those teenagers who boarded the Saunder's Bean Farm bus Monday through Friday, (and Saturday's too: we got a 1/4 cent per pound bonus for showing up on the weekend).
Me and my bean picking buddy would pick blue lake beans near Eugene, Oregon in the late 60's and got paid by ol' man Saunders 2 and 1/4 cent for every pound we picked. If we lasted through the entire season, ol' man Saunders would sweeten our entire season's production by another 1/4 cent a pound. This money paid for school clothes and a little something-something for the upcoming year, perhaps 200 bucks for a season.
Not bad for a teenager in 1968.
But one summer, my bean picking buddy and I noticed some Mexicans show up, in their own car, and out-pick us slouching teenagers by two or sometimes three to one. My record for a single day of picking was 212 pounds, and these Mexicans would pick four and five hundred pounds - every day!!
These illegals were just as unskilled as us American teenagers: only they were in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, and understood that the more they picked, the more money they took home to Guadalajara. No bean fights, no 'King-Bean' contests, no chitty-chat, like us teenagers were prone to do. Nope, they busted their asses, from dawn to dusk, and ol' man Saunders LOVED those guys.
Before we knew it, the Saunders Bean Farm bus no longer showed up on our block, and it never returned. All of our jobs, ALL OF THEM, the bean picking gigs were given to Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans. Some of them legal, most not. But they snagged every bean picking job available.
And sent lazy ol' Fredd and his bean picking buddy packing. We really never even knew what hit us. Does anyone wonder why the unemployment rate among teenage Americans is now probably around 50%? Is there any question?
No. These illegals have snapped up the formerly widely available teenage labor market gigs, and now our teenagers roam the streets, looking for trouble with no scratch in their pockets, instead of working for ol' man Saunders.
It just ain't right.
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