The article, maybe unintentionally, frames this in an interesting way by starting with a first-generation 20-year-old immigrant.
In the US, you're in "Gen Z" whether you're a 20-year-old first-generation immigrant, like the carpenter in the lede, or a 20-year-old 10th-generation American.
But immigration's changed dramatically over the last 20 years. Before the pandemic, the number of immigrants has increased, but the age, class, and education levels of those immigrants have also. Asia overtook Hispanic regions as a source of immigrants in 2009; more than half of 2018 immigrants from Asia had a bachelor's degree or better, compared to more than half of 2018 immigrants from Mexico not completing high school. The proportion of undocumented immigrants has also dropped, while non-criminal deportations have increased.[1]
This largely translated to a relative decline of younger, less-educated, poorer immigrants for whom the trades are the most accessible means of financial security, and a shift toward most total US immigrants (51%) having already lived in the US for more than 20 years. There's also a much larger proportion of recent immigrants age 25+ with at least a bachelor's degree (more than 45% from 2014-2019, vs. less than 35% for both US- and foreign-born immigrants prior to 2014). And when counting both immigrants and their children — whether immigrants or US-born — the population dropped by nearly 1 million between 2020 and 2021.[2]
Which leads to the pandemic: net immigration, across the board, cratered so hard in 2020 and 2021 that there were fewer total foreign-born immigrants in 2021 than there were immigrant visas — not work visas, not student visas, but just permanent resident visas — in 2016.[3]
The easy framing is to pin it on "Gen Z", but the missing context that the lede just hints at changes the story dramatically.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...
2: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
3: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/net-internati...