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Notes -
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The article notes one reason why:
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.
I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.
Well, that's not 100% true. I saw a single white teenager working at a Burger King around 2009 in Reston, VA. His coworkers were laughing and carrying on during the lunch rush flipping burgers, and he was all alone, head down, working the fry machine. Couldn't understand anything anyone was saying around him. One of the most depressing things I'd ever seen in my life.
Last time I was in Loudoun County, 2015-ish you could still find entry level work as a native English speaker. The Roy Rogers in Leesburg was staffed entirely by very polite local highschoolers. That may have changed in the last 10 years though.
I doubt this. DFW is much more heavily Hispanic than Fairfax(citation not needed) and white fast food workers are a dime a dozen. They seem to be concentrated in the front of house with Hispanics working the fryer, but McDonalds will clearly hire english-speaking cashiers.
I suspect white teens in Fairfax simply don't want to work fast food, either because their parents want them to do something else(maybe more school), or because they have less desire for spending money, or whatever.
I am spitballing here but I have definitely wondered if places with longstanding minority groups just are able to handle integration much better than places where the very same groups are new. In other words, in this scenario, possibly you are both right and it's just that DFW, which has ~always had a significant Hispanic presence compared to Fairfax, Virginia, is much better culturally at handling the situation.
It would be odd if it were not at least somewhat that way, imho.
As I suspect that none of us has done a formal survey, we're probably literally talking about one or two local fast food franchises, which might be a case of a particular owner with a preference for hiring hispanics (easier to schedule full time, not as flighty so I'm not retraining all the time, less likely to slack off) vs one with a preference for hiring white teenagers (easier to keep them on short hours making your labor pool more flexible, better customer experience, don't seek advancement).
I know in my hometown, the Taco Bell is all local teenagers, the Burger King is the most busted methhead trailer trash you've ever seen, and what's left of the Wendys is all black women from the local city, must be on a bus route.
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Probably. I have noticed that whites in certain fields(especially restaurant trades- cook, manager, stuff like that. Not the jobs students/kids do.) have mostly learnt Spanish, that there are self-segregated mostly-black kitchens and groceries, and that bosses expect to have to translate between different kinds of entry-level workers in certain places- construction in particular, but also sometimes warehouses.
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