Trump’s Dilemma: A Generation Sidelined

“Can I help you, sir?” The young guy behind the counter was very polite.

“Yes, please,” I replied.

“I’d like a couple of those salmon filets,” and I pointed to a tray behind the glass.

Salmon filets. Courtesy the Fresh Market store.

“Absolutely,” said the man. “Great choice, by the way,” he added.

I smiled. “You sound like the server in a restaurant. Whatever you order, they say ‘Great choice.’ I guess that’s modern marketing; to make you feel good about your decision.”

The fellow behind the counter smiled back. “Maybe,” he said. “But let me tell you about this salmon. It’s right off the truck this morning, and it’s really top of the line.” Then, he gave a detailed description of the difference between wild-caught and farmed salmon, about fishing, food preservation, transportation and logistics, and how this particular fish wound up on the shelves at Fresh Market.

All in all, this grocery store associate came across as one sharp cookie. So, I asked how long he had worked at the supermarket.

“This is my third month,” he said. “I’m here for the time being, I hope. I need to earn a paycheck. I graduated from college last May with dual degrees in chemistry and computer science, but I couldn’t find a job.” He added that he had sent out a couple of hundred resumes, but received no replies.

“What about your classmates?” I asked.

“Ha,” he chuckled. “Almost nobody I know has a real job in their field. Companies aren’t hiring. Growing up, all I heard was that STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) will help you get a leg up in life. But that’s not what we’re finding in my age group.”

We spoke some more about his background. I thanked him for his help, said a few encouraging words, and wished him well.

As I walked away, I thought… President Trump wants to reindustrialize America. He wants to bring back jobs-jobs-jobs. And here we have smart kids who major in chemistry and computer science selling fish.

In other words, President Trump has a problem. In fact, it’s a sociological-political dumpster fire that will lead to disaster.

Let’s dig into this…

Youth Unemployment Epidemic

From what I’ve learned, this story isn’t just an isolated anecdote. It represents a national phenomenon that is rapidly changing the economics and politics of the country. Indeed, here’s a graph that shows real numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as reported by Bloomberg News:

As you can see, over 25% of America’s unemployed are college grads, an all-time high. The trend is up sharply in just the past couple of years, and has been rising for a generation and more.

Not all unemployed college grads are STEM, to be sure. Not all are chemists and computer science majors. Then again, don’t dwell on the granular aspects of who studied what in college, because the fact is that large swaths of a generation of young Americans are missing out on the first couple of rungs of the employment ladder.

Corporate America has scaled back hiring at colleges, junior colleges and even trade schools. Entry level jobs are vanishing for young Americans. Internships are scarce; on-the-job training programs are drying up; and early-stage career pathways are thinning out.

According to Associated Press, many businesses “are at a no-hire standstill.” If they do hire, it’s limited to a very few specific roles, and often they look for low-cost labor via foreigners (see below). Absent that, many companies are pausing all new openings. Meanwhile, per AP, “sizable layoffs have continued to pile up, raising worker anxieties across sectors.”

In a macro sense, the young, post-college generation owes over a trillion dollars of student debt, yet their degrees – whatever the major – no longer protect them from the realities of the tightened job market. And what are those realities?

Face It: We Have a Weak Economy

First, the overall national economy is not nearly as strong as politicians and government statisticians want to portray. It’s definitely not the “Rah-Rah-Bestest-Economy” cheerleading we hear from the Trump administration; although Democrats offer nothing either, besides anti-Trump bellyaching and spend-spend bromides.

Some of these weaknesses are due to lingering effects of the pandemic, 2020-22. And along these post-pandemic lines, President Trump likes to blame relatively high interest rates for dragging the economy down; although by historical standards current rates are rather low. For example, here’s a chart of mortgage rates that goes back over 50 years, and the present isn’t all that bad by comparison.

And not that mortgage rates matter to young people; the average age of a new, first-time home buyer is about 40 which is historically off the charts high.

Other aspects of the generally weak job market relate to international issues; for example, shifts in trade patterns due to sanctions on Russia, de-dollarization in the Global South, a widespread move in the West to break away from Chinese supply chains, and tariff and retaliatory-tariff politics. All this, and more.

Of course, there’s the glib excuse that artificial intelligence (AI) is displacing entry-level jobs. It’s all those doggone, allegedly “smart” AI programs out there, wrecking the job market for young people. Indeed, CNBC recently headlined a story that “AI isn’t just ending entry-level jobs, it’s ending the career ladder.”

And while AI supposedly robs jobs, the U.S. is has embarked on a costly building boom for data centers. And sure, these massive beasts require small armies of working people to construct; trades people who pour the concrete, erect steel, run wiring, etc. But at the end of the day a vast data center employs only a small number of highly technical employees, many of whom may not even be Americans.

And this last point leads to another angle on the weak job market for American youth, namely the giveaway, runaway, out-of-control system of foreign work visas. For convenience, these are called “H-1B” visas, but they also cover other types of documentation that allow U.S. companies to hire foreigners to work in-country instead of Americans. And let alone the long-term trend to offshore jobs from U.S. sites to foreign venues.

Indeed, even in this country American workers must compete against foreigners who are “legal” to work here under an alphabet soup arrangement of H-1B, J-1, L-1, OPT and much more. And if the foreign worker doesn’t come to the U.S., often as not the U.S. job goes to the foreign worker.

Thus, it’s no wonder that many young people fresh out of school can’t find jobs and get moving in life. They are being displaced and replaced, and politically they know it.

The Modern Visa Scam

Back in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, the prevailing business fad in America was to close an old mill or factory at the edge of an urban area, or in some whistlestop town on the railroad line or riverbank and move production to China. Corporate icons like “Neutron” Jack Welch and “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap were famous for closing facilities, laying off workers and selling off the assets.

The idea behind closing U.S. facilities was that companies would gain advantages from lower wages overseas, with fewer environmental and workplace regulations, and a generally friendlier business climate. Over two generations, America lost probably 250,000 factories and over 10 million manufacturing jobs.

In fact, this style of close-it-down business management was taught at the country’s (self-styled) finest business schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Chicago and many more. Personally, I have dozens of acquaintances who could tell you stories of what they heard in class. And of course, there’s what actually happened when these armies of MBAs went out into the world and practiced what they preached. It was human carnage and national deindustrialization.

The legacy of this university-inspired offshoring effort was destruction of America’s working class, plus a big chunk of the American middle class. From sea to sea, solid, well-paying jobs went away, as did peoples’ paychecks, their ability to support a lifestyle, and local, regional state and even federal tax bases. All this, while industrial skillsets and services died out, wrecking legacies that had evolved over the previous 150 years of the country’s history.

Through it all, America collectively suffered from innumerable human tragedies that came from what sociologists and medical personnel call “deaths of despair;” that is, rampant alcoholism, drugs, suicide and related pathologies of social decay.

Of course, also out of this carnage in 2015 came New York real estate developer Donald Trump, who had the temerity to raise the issue of offshoring, and who campaigned to “bring back jobs,” and also a related promise to “close the border,” another white-hot issue comparable to a suppurating, sucking chest wound in the body of the American populace.

As you surely know, Trump’s message resonated enough for him to win election in 2016; and to put on a solid show in 2020, although he “lost that election,” as the saying goes. And then, of course, he staged a historic comeback in 2024.

Now in 2025 it’s clear that the U.S. is undergoing another massive, decade-long assault on its working population. This time it’s the loss of middle class and professional jobs that used to go to American college grads fresh out of school and offer a pathway to the middle or higher class of jobs and lifestyle. But not anymore because the first few rungs on the ladder, so to speak, are just not there for them anymore.

Instead, Americans must compete for even so-called “entry level” jobs against H-1B and related visa holders, and those visas are handed out with near abandon. Yes, there’s supposedly a “limit” of 85,000 such visas per year, but apparently something over 200,000 are issued.

Recently, no less than Eric Garcetti, former U.S. Ambassador to India from 2023-25, noted that over five million (yes, million with an “M”) Indians hold U.S. work visas. And he said this in the context of how proud he was to see such robust U.S.-Indian development in relations.

Meanwhile, according to U.S. Treasury statistics, Indians in America remit about $130 billion (billion with a “B”) back to India every year via bank and other wire transfers.

So apparently, H-1Bs allow foreigners to snatch away literally millions of jobs from Americans and then decapitalize the U.S. by astronomical billions per year. And this is good for America… umm… why exactly?

The business press is replete with tales of major U.S. corporations that have laid off American workers and hired visa-carrying foreigners. And it’s almost always at lower wage scales in the U.S., or in many instances they replace Americans with foreign workers in a boiler shop on the other side of the planet.

One facile excuse is that foreign workers allegedly have skills that Americans lack. Even President Trump said something like that in a recent interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham. Well, it is certainly possible that someone out there, amongst the millions of visa-carrying foreigners, knows something that no other American can do. Yeah, sure… Anything is possible.

Then again, a review of H-1B applications by many U.S. firms reveals immense numbers of just plain entry-level jobs, definitely work that could and should go to Americans before foreigners. And the only reason for seeking a foreigner via work visa is to pay a lower wage, as well as not to cover, say, health care or pay things like Social Security taxes.

In short, America’s middle and white-collar jobs are being destroyed by visa abuse, perpetrated at wide scale across the corporate landscape and abetted by national law and policy. And to its shame, even President Trump’s administration appears to be part of the game, a situation that has already alienated wide swaths of youth against his presidency and the Republican Party. (Not that Democrats are any better.)

Can Trump Fix This Mess?

On the bright side… I sense faint hints that the Trump administration might be thinking about possibly doing something eventually to maybe perhaps tighten up on the visa scam and abuse. (I’m being subtle, right?)

It seems that some slight message is leaking through to the White House that young people have lost all faith, let alone patience, in the idea that the current U.S. government gives a cr@p about them.

In other words, and from all manner of reputable surveys, young people appear to think that big tech and corporate America get everything they want out of Washington, no matter which political party is in power. And America’s youth seem to believe that Boomers want to condemn them to a life of smart-phone serfdom, in long-term debt, never able to buy a car let alone a house, and not able to have a family. Shocking, right?

Well, the Trump administration has less than a year to address the issue. Because next November the Trump agenda will get blown out in the 2026 midterms, and we’ll see political combat akin to hand-to-hand fights between tunnel rats in Cu Chi, Vietnam.

If the administration needs any advice, here’s mine:

Stop issuing these scammy visas. Just stop. Full stop. Zero. None. But I’ll settle for a 95% reduction if “zero” is too extreme.

Then yank-yank-yank current visas and tell business to hire Americans.

And when companies shift jobs offshore, require that they pay Social Security tax on foreign workers, either direct employees or those hired through cutout, third party body-shops. The point being not to make it “cheaper” to go offshore.

There’s more that could be done, but these ideas above are more than good for now.

So, that’s all… and thank you for subscribing and reading.

Have a great Thanksgiving Holiday.