The problem is people are still living in the past, thinking that teens still make up a large portion of the work force. They're trying to shoehorn today's reality into a mould from their memories.

And those people tend to be Boomers (your comment about paying .25 for a can of coke in college makes me think you fit this demographic) who don't think about two really important details.

1. The Boomer generation was the largest ever, so just by sheer force of numbers, they had a much larger teen workforce than any other.

2. They then decided that THEIR children wouldn't have to work as teens and actively discouraged them from looking for a lot of work as teens, and instead work on their education to be able to get into a good college. And no, not EVERY Boomer parent did this, but it was by FAR the norm growing up as a Gen X kid with Boomer parents than not. It was a point of pride for them that their kids didn't have to work and their kids should be able to have things they didn't growing up. And this has been passed on to the younger generations.

This isn't a conversation about how things SHOULD BE, but how things ACTUALLY ARE. I'm not saying that it's right. I'm pointing out the reality of the situation instead of reminiscing about the good old days of their past and thinking that's still how the world works.

And this should have been realized and taken into consideration if people were expecting teens to fill in the labor gap when foreign workers were booted.

Obviously, if they were expecting teens to fill those roles, they were seriously wrong, since we have such a huge labor shortage that we're importing MORE foreign workers to take those jobs, thus starting this very expensive cycle of booting then importing all over again.