Mackinac Island’s Workforce Offers a Preview of the Grim Job Market Facing American College Grads

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On a recent road trip through Michigan, I made a detour to Mackinac Island. I was hoping for a day of charm and quiet—horse-drawn carriages, Great Lakes trivia, and maybe some fudge. I got all that. But I left frustrated by what my trip revealed about the state of the American labor market.

Nearly every worker I encountered on the island—waitstaff, hotel clerks, bike rental attendants, even the carriage tour guides—was a foreigner. Some were seasonal guest workers. Others were international students, ostensibly in the U.S. for a “cultural exchange.”

After leaving the island, I looked deeper into this. What I discovered is that Mackinac Island is a case study in how the U.S. outsources jobs to a rotating cast of temporary foreign hires. Employers rely on both H-2B visa holders—seasonal workers brought in for jobs supposedly “Americans won’t do”—and J-1 visa students, who are nominally here to learn but mostly come to work.

In 2023, one of the island’s hotel CEOs, Todd Callewaert, penned an op-ed urging the federal government to expand worker visas. He described how his business relied on a Jamaican family who return each summer under the H-2B guest worker program.

“We have about 250 employees and supplement them with 50 to 60 foreign workers,” Callewaert wrote. “About 1,000 H-2B workers come to Mackinac Island every year, comprising an estimated 20 percent of the seasonal workforce.” (Considering my experience, I suspect foreign workers make up more than 20 percent of the workforce). Callewaert says he hires these foreign workers because Americans are unwilling to do the jobs.

But this is a common excuse and a lie.

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As the Center for Immigration Studies puts it: “There are no jobs Americans won’t do … Many occupations often thought to be worked overwhelmingly by immigrants … are in fact majority native-born.” The problem isn’t laziness—it’s wages. Americans who can afford to wait for better opportunities won’t settle for jobs that don’t pay a living wage, especially not on an island where the cost of living is significantly higher than in mainland Michigan—or most of the country, for that matter.

I spoke with one of the rare American students holding a summer job on the island—a University of Michigan undergrad working the register at a gift shop. The student earns $15 an hour. Though seasonal housing is provided, the student said any money saved quickly disappears once the season ends. (Adjusted for inflation, a minimum-wage worker from the 1970s had far more purchasing power—some estimates suggest today’s equivalent would be $24 to $40 an hour). Meanwhile, for workers from abroad, that same job could be a financial windfall.

Reports indicate that most seasonal roles on Mackinac Island pay between $15 and $25 per hour. Even at the low end, that wage goes a long way in a lower-cost economy. For many foreign workers, one summer’s earnings in the U.S. can fund an entire year back home.

Consider the Jamaican family mentioned in Callewaert’s op-ed. If a family member earns $15 an hour for a standard 40-hour workweek over a typical season, they’ll gross around $15,600. After Michigan and federal taxes—about 17.5 percent—their take-home pay comes to roughly $12,870. In Jamaica, where living comfortably would costs between $1,000 and $3,000 per month, that’s enough to place the family in one of the country’s higher income brackets. This doesn’t even account for the fact that many workers can secure jobs back home, allowing them to retain a significant portion of their U.S. earnings. Some workers also send a portion of their income abroad while they are still residing in the United States. A young woman I spoke with at a clothing store on the island said she remits most of her paycheck to support family members in Latin America.

It’s frustrating to watch the U.S. treated like an itinerant piggy bank—dollars earned here, spent elsewhere, with little reinvestment in the communities that provide these people an income. But even more frustrating is that this setup exists by design, enabled by employers who cut costs by cutting Americans out.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the J-1 visa program, which disguises labor importation under the guise of “cultural exchange” for international students. International students come to America for cultural exchange, but often find themselves caught in a web of economic exploitation. Marketed as a way to broaden horizons, the J-1 program brings over 130,000 students/workers to the U.S. each year, many of whom pay thousands in fees to sponsoring agencies and overseas recruiters.

To be clear, I can’t say definitively whether the J-1 students I met on Mackinac Island are being exploited. They may well be in the same position as others—earning American wages with far greater spending power back home. But on the island, they fill hotel, restaurant, and retail jobs, and one site, Mackinac.jobs, openly recruits J-1 students by selling the island’s charm. But Mackinac isn’t one of America’s cultural capitals. It’s not New York, Chicago, or any other major U.S. city. It’s a remote tourist hub in the middle of Lake Huron. What real exchange is happening here?

For employers, presumably ones like Callewaert, J-1s are a dream: no payroll taxes, no union threats, and a guaranteed seasonal exit. That’s an automatic eight percent savings on every hire, at least according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And broadly speaking, for the students, the “exchange” often means debt, overcrowded housing, and long hours with hidden fees for rent, uniforms, or transport. It has also been reported that some make less than minimum wage, and that some need a second job just to stay afloat.

The program was designed to build international goodwill, but it’s actually a conveyor belt of cheap, exploitable labor facilitated by unaccountable recruiters abroad, sanctioned by the State Department, and embraced by American businesses. Interestingly, even Hillary Clinton—who once “slimed fish” in Alaska during her college years, as reported by the Center for Immigration Studies—later expanded the very program that outsourced those jobs. As Secretary of State, she oversaw the growth of the J-1 visa, and by 2011, those same positions in Alaska were being filled by foreign students.

To be sure, this isn’t a blanket indictment of international study. I studied abroad in Italy and gained a great deal from the experience. But I wasn’t on a payroll. There’s a crucial difference between academic exchange and economic extraction. When a college or university cultural program becomes indistinguishable from a work visa pipeline, it stops serving its stated mission. The J-1 program has crossed that line.

Further, jobs on the island could support American students if employers paid fairly. Profit margins on Mackinac Island are difficult to determine, but the U.S. tourism industry generated $2.8 trillion in 2024, and luxury hotels routinely report margins of 25 percent to 35 percent. Employers on Mackinac, home to several luxury hotels and other highly profitable businesses, can undoubtedly afford to pay higher wages. They just don’t want to.

Instead, they rely on foreign guest workers and international students, who gratefully accept wages too low for Americans to live on in the U.S. And this is precisely the model being replicated across the country, and what awaits college students when they graduate. Mackinac Island is a microcosm of the national labor market. America’s college graduates will increasingly be forced to compete with foreign nationals for jobs on their soil—not because they’re less qualified, but because our system prioritizes profits and savings over citizenship.

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As I’ve reported previously, U.S. universities are central to this shift. They enroll thousands of foreign students each year, raking in millions in tuition, and then directly integrate these students into the workforce through the H-1B visa. Indian nationals, for example, fill many tech jobs thanks to this pipeline. The excuse is always the same: America doesn’t have enough qualified workers. But plenty of computer science grads can’t land jobs. The so-called shortage is a smokescreen for wage suppression.

This smokescreen, moreover, is a bipartisan betrayal—pushed by the left in the name of diversity and by the right in the name of free markets. Simultaneously, and perhaps most devastatingly, is that the cultural elite on U.S. campuses brands anyone who objects to this worker displacement as racist or xenophobic, ensuring that Americans remain silent as they’re pushed out of their own labor market.

Since mid-2023, college graduates—who represent just five percent of the labor force—have accounted for 12 percent of the increase in unemployment. (As AI gets better at doing jobs, unemployment rates will only accelerate).

Mackinac’s nostalgia hides a labor system that bypasses American workers under the guise of diplomacy, diversity, “Americans won’t work,” and cultural exchange. This isn’t about blaming foreign students or guest workers, but rather critiquing a system shaped by employers, policymakers, and educational institutions that steadily erodes opportunities for Americans. Mackinac Island exemplifies the labor market that many recent graduates will face nationwide—one where domestic opportunities are sacrificed to cost-cutting and outsourcing.

The longer we ignore this rigged system, the more young Americans will be left wondering why their own country no longer seems to have a place for them—and when that question takes hold, many troubling consequences follow.

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Image by Jared Gould, taken on Mackinac Island