Posted on 02/12/2006 10:13:52 AM PST by A. Pole
WEST DOVER, Vt. -- College student Lorena Lama once spent a good part of her school vacation on the beaches of her native Chile, where summer lasts from December to March. But two years ago, she decided to try a new summer experience: a Vermont winter.
While it may sound crazy to New Englanders, Lama, 26, is just one of hundreds of seasonal workers who each year leave the 80-plus degree weather of the Southern Hemisphere's summer to work at ski resorts in some of the coldest places in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire.
Recruited from countries such as Chile, Brazil, South Africa, and Peru, these international workers account for anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent of the peak seasonal workforces of the region's ski areas, according to figures from several resorts. Most are college students like Lama, hoping to improve their English or just wanting to see the States.
In many ways, it's a match made in heaven -- if your idea of heaven includes wind chill. Ski resorts, which double and triple their employment for the winter season, need to fill lots of jobs that last from December to March. These students, on summer break, want to work from December to March.
International workers provide a critical supply of labor for the ski industry, resort officials said. It's difficult to fill all the short-term restaurant, hotel, retail and operations jobs, particularly when US students are still in school.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
I'm surprised this is even a story. Seasonal resorts all over the U.S. have been hiring foreign workers for years. Businesses up and down the Jersey Shore, in fact, have had a hard time getting enough workers even after they started paying their travel and lodging expenses.
Granted it was a long time ago, but when I looked for a summer job, easy access to booze and women was more important than glorying in the setting's natural beauty.
If you couldn't find the job with the booze and women bennies, you looked for one that would pay, say like in construction.
Unemployment in Maine is:January 24, 2006 - Maine Unemployment Rate 4.8% in December
Maine ranks No. 2 in the nation in tax burden and No. 37 in personal income.
The Census Bureau estimated that in July 2004 Maine’s population had increased by an annual average of about 9,845 residents since 2000 (to 5,558,058 residents). Over that period immigration was adding about 975 persons each year through net international migration (more immigrants arriving than leaving).
There are many so described "cottage industries" or "extra/self-employed jobs" in Maine where I am quite sure "cash" is passed hand to hand for services and not reported. Fire wood now reaching well over $200-$250 a cord often unreported and a very thriving business. Many services escape the revenue radar as Mainers survive by throwing "the bird" to the "State Taxaholics" in Augusta.
A Lincoln, Maine resident was quoted as saying, "Here in Maine you either work for the State or you're on the State."
We've always been multi cultural. Yankees in New England, Dutch/Germans along the Hudson, French in the mid Alantic, Scots in the South, Spanish in Florida, French in New Orleans, and Canada. As late as 50 years ago, these peoples cultures where at each others throats.
....I am curious who are those "unemployed who DO work"? ...
It has been reported to me that they are those who come around once and a while and attend a job for briefly but lack the wherewithall to report regularly. They sign up, attend briefly and are either fired or just fail to continue.
It also crossed my mind from reading the "entire" article you posted; that young foreign student workers are more "comfortable" coming to the United States and working than American young and adventuresome travelers/workers/students are in relation to the "security" of working overseas as Americans.
Good Lord!!! Will the last real American please turn off the lights, shut the generator down and take the flag? B-P
Two points...Planned Parenthood and their comrades murdered 50 million of the young people who might have otherwise filled these positions. Secondly; a lot of young people in New England have seen the long-term writing on the wall (higher taxes, astronomical heating and electric utility costs), and are heading south while the 'gettings good'.
The only place there was no booze on that trip was in the Mormon Temple in SLC. And some of those eastern European girls would knock your socks off.
Shhh... don't try to inject logic to a shouting match.
Besides, we're supposed to be this homogeneously Anglo-Saxon culture, you know??? After all, Rudy Giuliani's ancestors came on the Mayflower. /sarc
You folks out there who picture short fat Mexicans on the slopes have obviously never met ladies (or gentleman) from the Southern Cone countries, many of whom are whiter than I am.
"They while away their days not working, lazily allowing others to do for them that which they are unwilling to do for themselves in their drug fog. They lack the gumption to get up every day and earn their keep. They are the dregs, the scummy film at the bottom of the American barrel. They report, get in a day or two and then somehow can't make it a third in a row. They have endless excuses for what is actually just plain laziness. "
Yeah and so who exactly wants to hire these people? And who wants to be served by these people? I'll take a hard-working LEGAL foreigner over a lazy American any day of the week. Just because you happen to be born in the US doesn't give you the right to a paycheck. You have to earn that paycheck with an honest day's work. I keep hearing about Amerians losing work to immigrants, but I never actually met one. There are plenty of jobs for anyone who wants one and is competent to do the work.
Strange that nature should create a species--in this case, homo sapiens--that is loathe to make a living for itself.
Any other animal that refused to earn its keep would soon become extinct.
And yet how is it that so many humans are born who do not want to earn their living?
One would think such genes would have become extinct.
Or perhaps the way our industrial world expects people to make a living is too artificial for many to adapt to it.
And the "fault" may not be laziness, but the unnatural lifestyle imposed by industrialization.
What's worse, we are becoming increasingly industrialized, ensuring more unhappy workers who are forced to do artificial jobs--
Jobs that are really a kind of industrial slavery.
And expected to do those job for many, many hours longer each day than did their hunting and gathering ancestors--
Which ancestors likely provided all their food and keep with two or three hours of work a day.
After all, how many hours a day do lions work?
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