ABSTRACT
The US government's deregulation of the program in the late 1990s and its decision to maintain its legal construction as a cultural exchange has given rise to a program that makes the price of hiring Summer Work Travel (SWT) participants artificially low. On August 17, 2012, the Public Broadcast Service (PBS) program NewsHour aired an investigative report entitled Making Sense of Summer Work Visas for Foreigners. But enrollment in the SWT program had exploded to 152,726 participants annually and enrollment had shifted to Eastern Europe. Given what appears to be a connection between the decline in youth employment and the rapid expansion of the SWT program, some lawmakers and policy experts have expressed their concern about its unchecked growth. Cataloguing a long list of criticisms, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report specifically noted that it displaces Americans from the workplace at a time of record levels of youth unemployment.
