Last week a radio host in Salt Lake City asked me a question I didn’t expect. We’d been talking about my “jobs Americans won’t do” article, which kind of kicked the anthill, and everything stayed within the usual lanes: illegal immigration, wages, hiring incentives, hollowed-out towns. Then, at the very end, he asked the only question that really matters:
“So how do we fix it?”
Not describe it or rant about it. Fix it.
My answer, essentially, was, "It's complicated." There isn’t a bumper-sticker answer. And there certainly isn’t a partisan one. The problem goes much deeper than illegal immigration, though illegal immigration made it far worse. The truth is brutal: We didn’t just lose workers. We lost a generation of training.
Kids stopped working. Old pros retired with no apprentices. And the entire ladder of skill transfer, the thing that turns kids into competent working adults, collapsed. Even if every illegal worker disappeared tomorrow, the skills wouldn’t magically reappear. You can’t fill a gap with people who were never trained to climb into it.
This is where the conversation really begins.
The Lost Workforce Generation
To understand why “Americans won’t do these jobs,” you have to start with the fact that millions of Americans never learned how to work in the first place. Not because they’re lazy, but because the culture that used to teach work simply vanished.
For decades, teens worked bagging groceries, bussing tables, mowing lawns, babysitting, or stocking shelves at the IGA. They gained skills and moved up into more responsible positions, all before college, and they saved money to go to college instead of taking out horrifyingly expensive college loans.
These weren’t demeaning jobs; they were developmental ones. They taught punctuality, resilience, communication, and responsibility. Everyone knew kids who did these things; heck, there were book series about some of these jobs. It was expected and normal. Then, practically overnight, teen labor cratered. Parents got fearful and overprotective. Schools treated jobs as distractions. Cities regulated teens out of the workforce. And culturally, work became something “unsafe,” “unnecessary,” or “beneath” ambitious kids.
Young people who never learn to work at 14 don’t magically learn to work at 22. Habits don’t sprout out of nowhere.
The Apprenticeship Ladder Snapped
While teens were drifting out of the workforce, older workers, the masters of their trades, were losing their apprentices. Construction, agriculture, landscaping, roofing, plumbing, electrical, hospitality, you name it — one industry after another abandoned training in favor of illegal labor that was cheaper, easier, and instantly available. And when a trained worker retires with no apprentice behind him, the skill dies with him.
You cannot grow a skilled workforce without a ladder.
Automation Was Coming Anyway
Even without illegal immigration, America was already facing trouble. Automation has been chewing through clerical work, warehouse work, manufacturing, retail, and call centers for years. Today, robots flip burgers and serve customers, AI answers phones and codes programs. Human beings are no longer required.
There are still jobs for humans, lots of them. They require skills no robot or AI could provide. Among other things, we need a renewed emphasis on craftsmanship, mechanical judgment, problem-solving, and repair.
Instead, we have built a society that has trouble changing a smoke detector battery.
Illegal Immigration Didn’t Start the Fire, But It Poured Gasoline on It
This is the part people hate hearing: illegal immigration didn’t cause the complete collapse we see today. It accelerated it, distorted it, and locked it into place.
Illegals Took the Jobs Teens Once Held
Teen jobs were displaced by industries that started relying heavily on illegal labor:
- construction
- roofing
- landscaping
- food service
- hospitality
- agriculture
- meat processing
- back-of-house restaurant work
Most of the jobs initially taken by illegals were traditional teen starter jobs; those that weren't teen jobs were the ones kids took right out of high school, like meat processing. They were low-paid, low-skills jobs, at least at the entry level, the training ground for American adulthood. However, with illegal crews willing to work cheap and immediately, employers stopped hiring teens, stopped training novices, and stopped passing down skill.
Training Became Optional, So Employers Stopped Doing It
Training takes time and money, things small businesses rarely have much of and larger businesses seek to economize on. Illegal labor made it cheap and fast to put minimally competent people on the job.
The result?
- apprenticeships withered
- wages stagnated
- skill transfer halted
- teens stopped entering these fields altogether
Once the ladder breaks, the whole culture of work collapses behind it. And even if every undocumented worker left tomorrow, the workers who should’ve replaced them aren’t trained. The mentors are retired. The skills are gone.
The “Learn to Code” Lie
Into this mess, the elite class, particularly reporters and politicians, offered the most tone-deaf slogan of the digital age:
“Learn to code.”
It was the 21st-century version of “let them eat cake.”
The idea that millions of displaced workers — welders, truckers, carpenters, machinists — could simply become software engineers was always ridiculous. Many weren't capable of the job — not stupid, just with minds that work a different way. I'm pretty smart, but if coding was all I could do, I'd burn out in months. Not every human can do this.
Which is why we have trained machines to do it. AI instances can write, debug, optimize, and refactor code faster and more accurately than most entry-level programmers and quite a few medium-level ones. The absurdity is here: We told an entire generation to “learn to code,”
and then built machines that do it better.
Besides, you cannot build a nation on white-collar fantasies. Someone still has to build, fix, maintain, grow, repair, haul, and make things. Robots can't do it yet, and by the looks of recent developments, they're still a long way from doing even simple tasks reliably.
Mike Rowe Warned Us — And America Didn’t Listen
Long before the collapse, one man was shouting the truth where everyone could hear it:
Mike Rowe.
He didn’t stand behind a podium or issue whitepapers or theorize about labor markets.
Instead, he got dirty. He crawled into sewers, shoveled muck, collected bloodworms, climbed onto roofs, and discovered how disgusting submarine bilge water really is. He worked alongside the welders, farmers, mechanics, crab fishermen, and machine operators America pretends not to see. He turned American blue collar work culture into entertainment, honoring the ones who do the dirty jobs while showing America just how hard they worked. Viewers saw the dignity, the skill, and the honor in hard, dirty work, and they were informed of the shortages we were going to face in the future. They applauded and praised the workers.
And then they sent their kids back into the “four-year degree or bust” machine.
Rowe was one voice shouting into a hurricane of credentialism, cheap shortcuts, suburban status anxiety, and a labor market distorted by illegal employment. One man cannot reverse a trend that strong, even if the whole country is watching. It takes industry and government and media buy-in, and it especially takes a shift in the way America views work and education. Fortunately, those shifts are toward some very old ways of doing things.
Rebuilding America’s Apprentice Culture
The solution isn’t complicated, but it's also not easy. We must rebuild the culture of competence America once took for granted — one apprentice at a time, one mentor at a time, one rung at a time.
Bring Back Teen Work
Starter jobs aren’t exploitation — they’re preparation. If 16-year-old kids can drive a vehicle at highway speeds, they can mop a floor, bag groceries, or bus a table. We need to get it into our heads that work isn't harmful but learning that work is somehow shameful can destroy our culture.
Restore Apprenticeships Across the Economy
Trades, utilities, machine repair, fiber installation, logistics, agriculture, manufacturing — all of these need systematic apprenticeships again, preferably starting with high school vocational education. A society that doesn’t pass down skill is a society that dies.
Replace “Learn to Code” With “Learn to Learn”
Coding isn’t the universal path forward. Adaptability is. Americans need to revive the old autodidact habits: reading widely, picking up new skills, studying outside of school, treating education as a lifelong project. Too often we look at 12 or 16 years of education as the end of education; after high school or college, you can just go get a job and not worry about more education or retraining or anything else. The truth is, our world is changing faster every day. We're likely to need to retrain for a new job two or three times in our lives. We need a lifelong learning mindset. And we can do it at home.
In the 1950s, our grandparents, fresh out of World War II, created learning centers at home with Encyclopedia Brittanicas and sets of The Great Books, hi-fi stereos stocked with classical music, mini libraries focused around elevating their minds. We have the best system ever invented for this today: the internet. Khan Academy, Coursera, Duolingo, MikeRoweWorks content, Prager U, Instructables, Grammarly, and online courses from local and nonlocal universities and community college provide a world of knowledge right at our fingertips. All we need to do is shift attitudes: instead of vegging out on the couch to watch the latest stupid show, spend an hour learning a new skill or language, read a foundational book, or even get a certification in a useful skill. It only takes willpower and sometimes a small investment. And it's what our forefathers did. Even Abe Lincoln was a self-taught frontier lawyer.
Focus on What Humans Still Do Best
Machines still can’t make judgment calls, improvise in real time, diagnose physical problems, ensure safety, handle tactile work, lead teams, or earn trust. The more automated the world becomes, the more valuable these skills become.
Finally, Reorient Traditional Education Toward Capability, Not Credentials
If a kid graduates high school or college with straight A’s but can’t work, communicate, or take initiative, their education failed. A diploma should signal capability, not seat time. A kid with a diploma or degree should be ready to enter the workforce and learn the skills he or she must have for a new job.
This isn't a problem American citizens can fix on their own; public education needs to finally be held accountable for the malpractice they have been perpetrating for decades. Lawmakers need to stop listening to the teachers’ unions and start listening to the only people who actually know whether students are capable: parents and employers.
What Ordinary Americans Can Do Right Now
We can't wait for Washington. This fix must begin in our own homes and towns.
- Get your kids working early.
- Treat trades with respect.
- Teach basic work habits.
- Support businesses that train Americans.
- Model curiosity, skill, and competence.
- Tell kids the truth: work is dignity, not degradation. College is not the only path to prosperity, and it might not even be the best path.
This isn’t abstract. It’s practical. It’s immediate. It’s how a culture rebuilds the thing it once did best.
The Reconstruction of Competence
When radio hosts Rod and Greg asked me how to fix the labor crisis, I didn’t have time to give the full answer. Here it is:
We rebuild by restoring the culture that once produced skilled, confident, capable Americans. Not with slogans. Not with political fantasies. Not with shortcuts.
Rather, with the long, steady climb back up a ladder our leaders and employers and, yes, sometimes ourselves tore down years ago.
The crisis was never that “Americans won’t do certain jobs.” The crisis is that we stopped creating Americans who could.
And that is something we can repair.
Editor’s Note: Help us continue to report the truth about why America has a job crisis, and other critical topics that affect our lives and American culture.
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