Park City: American Workers Need Not Apply
Hotels and resorts in Utah’s gemstone mountain town now appear to be off limits for American citizens looking for work
By Mark Cromer
Perhaps as Park City becomes, so becomes the nation.
That thought crossed my mind as my wife and I recently enjoyed some rest and relaxation in this mountain town over the holidays as 2025 came to a close and I took a few moments to grimly assess the increasing dearth of American workers visibly on the job at places like Hotel Park City and The Waldorf-Astoria.
While anecdotal in nature, my daring to notice the obviously perceivable ethnonational status of workers ranging from desk clerks, concierges, porters, housekeeping, facilities, valets and others comes at a time when the national debate over the impacts of mass-immigration has boiled over into deadly street confrontations. While the Democrats continue to advance a pro-mass migration position, the GOP is locked in a vicious intramural brawl over large-scale visa lotteries and other legal foreign worker programs, with adversaries alternately hurling such sweet nothings at each other like ‘nativist troglodytes’ and ‘globalist traitors.’
I can accurately say that I saw all this coming, having written extensively about mass migration impacts for decades. My latest book, California Twilight: Essays and Memories of The End of The Golden State, chronicles in detail the chaotic transformation of my home state as immigration-at-scale surged across it and forever transformed it from its hallowed ground status as a wholly American Promised Land brimming with opportunity and open space to its End Stage incarnation of a crowded and corrupt Third World annex locked into permanent dysfunction.
I now recognize the signs of what happened in California as they begin to appear in Utah and in rustic places such as Park City and Summit County.
As a former activist Democrat (of a 1980s vintage), I certainly haven’t turned into a 21st Century Thurston Howell strolling about the fine grounds of Park City’s resorts, savoring the glorious plumage only to be befuddled by the ethnic composition of the staff and sniffing to my wife: “Oh dear me, lovey, look at all the exotic peoples they have imported to Park City as the help these days! Do you think our rickshaw ride will be safe? Where’s my cigarette holder?!”
Far from it, I wandered about these well-appointed establishments more like an amalgamation of an old Deadhead and Jeff Bridge’s ‘The Dude,’ albeit one who could see what is a clear replay of the massive transformation that had rolled across my native Southern California in the 1980s and 90s.
That was an era when entire industries were effectively cleansed of Americans of every racial stripe as a direct result of the sustained mass migration that was remaking the state.
Throughout job sites in landscaping, construction and hospitality, my generation watched as American workers were aggressively undercut and driven out by a cruel attrition. Then to add insult to injury, from the unemployment line citizens had to listen as corrupt politicians from both parties claimed Americans were simply too lazy, too soft or too stuck-up to do the work that they had in fact long been doing.
A second-generation Southern Californian, I had friends whose families worked at General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Hughes Aircraft during the halcyon days of the military-industrial complex at the apex of the Cold War, but I also had plenty of friends whose moms and dads worked at hotels from The Rodeway Inn and Hilton to Howard Johnsons and Best Western, from front desk positions to housekeeping. I also knew American professional landscapers as well as career employees at senior citizen ‘old folk’s homes’ too. These were white, black and Chicano Americans of a working-middle class background in the 1970s and 80s and they were all ultimately undercut and pushed out of their employment sectors by a migration-fueled demographic tsunami.
One of the essays in California Twilight was written at the height of the Great Recession that followed the subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. Entitled ‘Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Job?’ it explores what actually happened when I applied for a dozen basic labor jobs as a field test of what actually happens when Americans reach for what economists’ call ‘jobs of last resort.’ I made a point of applying at jobs I had actually worked through my high school and college years, so I did indeed have experience in each menial field I was applying to gain a foothold in: cook, busser, server, delivery driver, retail dock worker, valet and more.
The silence was deafening.
Suffice it to say, the results of those forays into the job market of the desperate were very alarming, and I didn’t even need the work. I shuddered when I considered the number of Americans feverishly seeking virtually any kind of emergency paycheck and having to endure the silence of the employers turning a blind eye to citizens even as they move migrants to the front of the hiring line.
The visible absence of Americans of every racial stripe on the job in Park City was jarring for me not because of a sudden arrival of foreign labor in Utah—the hospitality industry has been transforming into what is now be characterized as a migrant-preferred employment sector for decades—but rather because of the unvarnished dichotomy that this hiring pattern presents.
As an industry, hospitality is booming across the United States and the resort and hotel footprint in Park City surely reflects those lush opportunities that appear for investors, developers and brands. But as is the case in the construction industry, it’s a golden chance that pretty much stops for most Americans at the hiring desk, or whatever passes now for what used to be called Human Resources. Even as amenity-loaded destinations and ‘luxe’ experiences become the watchwords for a new generation of young elites, the resorts that cater to them while still delivering lavish profit margins for the investment funds that finance them are effectively ‘No-Go Zones’ for many working and middleclass Americans looking for entry-level positions that might come with a pathway of promotion through the company.
But investors and employers are undercutting and bypassing that altogether by using staffing agencies to provide a workforce for their enterprise that they don’t actually employ. Staffing agencies have become the backbone for foreign workers to achieve employment in the United States, allowing employers to access a malleable workforce they aren’t actually responsible for or pay taxes on.
I doubt it is much different in Park City.
Columnist David Brooks wrote recently in The New York Times of his alleged astonishment upon learning that American college graduates are increasingly applying for hundreds of positions for which they meet or exceed the basic qualifications and yet are left staring into a silent void of zero response to even one of their applications. A multigenerational despair has fallen like a shadow of death across the American heartland as deindustrialization hollowed out entire regions, leaving few options outside of some remaining retail positions and the so-called ‘gig work’ of illusory ‘side-hustles’ that often produce less than minimum wage.
Millions of Americans have been left to seek shelter in bars and prescriptions of Alprazolam.
Brooks is right to sound the alarm over the generation that’s emerging from college into a far more desolate landscape, but he continues to avoid the issue of surging migrant competition for limited and often high-skilled, critical jobs, perhaps because he considers it too distasteful for the refined palate of his fellow upper-eastside Manhattan dinner party socialites.
But the fact remains that Americans are continuing to be shut out of industries that are booming cash registers for private equity and their honchos in C-Suite management positions across sectors ranging from elder care to resort-focused hospitality, which brings me back to what I saw in Park City.
According to the Park City Chamber of Commerce, the hospitality industry employs nearly 10,000 workers in Summit County, or more workers than there are people living in Park City. That figure surely fluctuates significantly during ski season, in which case it seems much more than likely that the temporary service positions are equally weighted with a preponderance of foreign labor.
This cannot continue if the nation is to survive in at least some recognizable remnant of its previous incarnation, this cannot hold if the country is to avoid dissolving into the Post-American Age.
To be sure, the phenomena is not unique to Park City hotels and resorts.
Down the hill at the Asher Adams Salt Lake City, the historic Union Pacific Railroad station that has been gorgeously restored to an upscale hotel while maintaining its ornate stained glass windows, murals and terrazzo floors. But the hotel also features the same visible anemic presence of American staff in many departments and the apparent total exclusion of them across others. There’s nothing quite stepping into a wonderland held over from America’s western land rush, to behold the grandeur of the American man’s magnificent ascent in the land of his making, only to be welcomed by two foreigners working the front desk. The same goes for the Mariott City Center downtown.
The troubling trend of Americans disappeared from entire sectors is now apparent most everywhere.
There is one notable exception to this otherwise pervasive rule of Americans being mostly absent from the visible employment positions at upscale hotels and resorts across Utah: The Advenire in St. George, Utah. A small hotel that opened in 2020 and tucks its 60 rustic-chic rooms into the downtown of St. George, which is now one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, the luxury hotel is also part of the Marriott’s Autograph Collection and for the past five years my wife and I have pleasantly noticed that plurality of its staff across all departments is decidedly American—and more often than not its employees are locally sourced residents.
The Advenire, however, appears to be the commendable exception.
The question must be asked: How is it with so many Americans desperate for even a toe-hold in a wage-paying position that some of the biggest and most reliable cash registers serving the investment class can’t seem to bestir themselves to even prioritize hiring Americans?
Charging the rates that they do, is there to be no expectation for some reinvestment in the American construct that names the American worker as the primary beneficiary?
Efforts to deflect this fundamental question by resorting to tired tropes dismissing Americans as not wanting or needing these jobs must be confronted with the fact that Americans have always worked in these industries and in these jobs. And they long populated the ski resort employee base as well, from lodge bartender to lift line docent and every single job in-between.
I witnessed that first hand as well, when I started skiing in places like Mammoth Mountain as a kid in California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada during the mid-1970s and the mountain was staffed and operated by Americans who were paid enough to even afford living in a town that was then still a mix of granolas, upscale retirees, outdoorsmen and ski bums. The same could be said at the ski resorts that I grew to know through the late ‘70s, 80’s and into the 1990s across Southern California—when the climate still provided the region with a ski season that could extend past four months—and Northern Arizona.
From Mt. Baldy, Mountain High in Wrightwood, Waterman and the Snow Bowl in Flagstaff, I encountered, navigated and sometimes partied with a virtual All-American cast and crew on the mountains.
Imagine that.
Of course, in 1977, a full-day lift ticket ran about $10 or $15 and the lines were such that you were able to make runs throughout the day pretty much to your hearts content. Those days are long over and the Mammoth of my youth disappeared long ago in an avalanche of money and its associated commodity of exclusivity.
This is happening all over the nation and it is the American worker who is being left outside in the cold, peering in at the gleeful faces from foreign shores who now proudly work the jobs that were once theirs.
Perhaps as Park City has become, so becomes the nation.
But judging by what’s happening across the nation today, Park City may want to reconsider its future and rather quickly. The alternative will be grim.
