SAN DIEGO — This Labor Day, let's accept the fact that Americans tend to do this holiday all wrong. We think it is about beaches, barbecues and being with family. Oddly, we decided that the best way to honor workers was to take a day off from work.

Ideally, this day should be about reflection. It's the appropriate time to hit pause and ask ourselves: What the heck happened to the American work ethic? Has anyone seen it? It's been missing in action for at least the last couple of generations.

I'm not surprised. It figures that Americans don't understand the meaning of Labor Day. After all, many of us seem to misunderstand the whole concept of labor.

The fish rots from the head, as the old saying goes. And, in this case, the president is part of the problem.

It's no secret that President Donald Trump loves money. Yet what isn't often talked about is how much contempt he seems to have for the lowly folks who generate much of it. I'm talking about the working-class people whose toil and sweat make rich people richer. As Trump sees it, those of us who work for a living are suckers. If we were smarter, we could be out on the links playing golf while our money works for us.

So it's not a total surprise that Trump — who is already fighting battles against Iran and Canada — has also declared war on the U.S. workforce.

According to recent analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics done by Data4ThePeople, the United States is bleeding foreign workers. Since Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, the foreign-born male population of the United States has fallen by 2.1 million people. Some of those folks were deported and others left the country voluntarily because the constant harassment became such a headache.

Either way, the vast majority of the vanished or the vanquished were working. And guess what? Despite the familiar gripe that immigrants take jobs from the native-born, the job vacancies that were created were not filled by U.S. citizens.

Imagine that. The dirty and dangerous jobs that immigrants do, Americans look down their noses at. We think we're too good to do that kind of work. Of course, the truth is that, in many cases, we lack the skills necessary to get the job done.

How did the U.S. worker become so useless? The easy explanation is that we are victims of our own success. The country we live in now is much wealthier and more comfortable than the one that our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents fled to search for something better. That "something" was supposed to mean an easier road for our children — shorter hours, better conditions, softer hands, etc.

Yet too much progress can be a bad thing. The pendulum swung so far toward Easy Street that we now have two generations — Millennials and Generation Z, roughly between the ages of 18 and 45 — who see work as a chore and jobs as a nuisance. That's a recipe for a lack of national productivity.

At 59, I'm a member of Generation X. We can't relate to that. In high school, my friends and I all had jobs — after school, on weekends, during the summer. Geography was a factor. We grew up in the farm country of Central California. Sitting on the couch and playing video games in the middle of the day was not an option. There were two words you never dared say to your parents: "I'm bored." They had a remedy: hard work.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of Millennials took a sabbatical from adulting. They dumped their jobs as part of the Great Resignation and traveled the world to find themselves. Others kept working, but they brought their job performance down a notch or two in a phenomenon that became known as "quiet quitting."

How precious. Of course, the U.S. workforce abhors a vacuum. When American workers clocked out, immigrants clocked in. Just like they have throughout history.

Employers can tell the difference. U.S. workers often fail drug tests, show up late to work and sprint to the exits at closing time. They know their rights, but they are only vaguely acquainted with their responsibilities. And curiously, U.S. workers — who, despite their subpar performance, are rarely short on self-esteem — act like they're doing the employer a favor just by showing up.

See the problem, my fellow Americans? It wasn't difficult. All we had to do was look in the mirror.

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Fernando Strabuli at Unsplash