Does Illegal Immigration Facilitate Teenage Obesity?
Can we logically link the following three phenomena: • massive illegal immigration, • historic high rates of teenage unemployment, and • historic high rates of teenage obesity? My colleague Steven Camarota’s recent backgrounder entitled “A Drought of Summer Jobs: Immigration and the Long-Term Decline in Employment Among U.S.-Born Teenagers” made it clear that illegal aliens and U.S. teenagers play much the same, low-skilled roles in the U.S. labor markets, and that a flood of the illegals has led to the drought in jobs for resident teenagers. So the first two phenomena are clearly linked. What joins the second and the third? Let’s look at that question from both a macro and a micro (neighborhood) focus. The big picture, which Dr. Camarota captured, is that government statistics show that the kinds of jobs that teenagers don’t have any more are largely those requiring strong backs and low skill levels, the kinds of jobs that are often physically taxing and thus obesity-shrinking. As he
