Migration advocates claim to be shocked by the New York Times‘ admission that many teenage migrants are working in sometimes “brutal” jobs, but they also are trying to keep the migrants coming
“I was particularly alarmed to learn that some of these children are working full adult shifts in food processing facilities and factories after school,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), who is the son of hard working illegal migrants in California.
But then Padilla told Attorney General Merrick Garland that companies hire the children because there are few other migrants to hire in an economy with roughly 160 million workers:
I also can’t help but acknowledge some of the dynamics that lead to these situations, right? … There’s a report that [companies have] 11 million unfilled jobs, many of which have historically been filled by immigrants … So with no migrants to fill these jobs … since 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor has seen a 69 percent increase in children being employed unlawfully by companies … So it seems like employers — particularly unscrupulous employers — they’re gonna find their workers somewhere and it’s they’re not finding it through traditional lawful means, children become the victims,
A recent @NYTimes report exposed an underground network of migrant child labor exploitation happening across states and industries. We have a responsibility to protect our young people—and I called on the @TheJusticeDept to do just that. pic.twitter.com/mf3cZ0OPh6
— Senator Alex Padilla (@SenAlexPadilla) March 1, 2023
The New York Times described the child labor on February 24:
Cristian works a construction job instead of going to school. He is 14 … Carolina packages Cheerios at night in a factory. She is 15 … Wander starts looking for day-labor jobs before sunrise. He is 13,” are the newspaper’s captions of photographs showing young teenagers admitted via the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” border loophole.
The administration is trying to shrug off the scandal, and its allies are trying to shift the blame from the administration’s welcome for the desperate and cheap teenage migrants — many of whom need to quickly pay off high-interest loans to criminal labor traffickers.
“Horrifying that this [child labor] is happening on American soil,” said a tweet by Jina Krause-Vilmar, the CEO of a firm that helps migrants get into white-collar jobs. She pointed fingers at the employers, not immigraiton advocates, saying “It’s important to stress employers’ outsized role in hiring … Companies must be held accountable.”
“We know too well that this is not the first time children who fled their countries have been subjected to new violence after arriving here,” said a tweet by the Young Center. So the center offered a series of claimed remedies, including a plan to make it easier for each wave of teenagers to get jobs: “Expedite processes to provide work authorization to eligible youth.”
Migrant children in custody are reportedly desperate to flee the appalling conditions in some of the disease and sexual abuse-prone shelters set up by the Biden administration, where the food can also be dangerous. https://t.co/YFjxxUAoCs
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 28, 2021
The government should help the teenagers by allowing their parents and siblings to migrate into U.S. and jobs, responded Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a pro-migration director at the American Immigration Council. He told the New Yorker:
This is not a new issue … When we focus on the protections for unaccompanied children, it gets into this question of how Republicans would like to strip those protections from them and make it easier for these kids to be sent back to their home countries. Personally, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. What we should be doing is making it easier for families to come here.
The advocates’ defense of teen migration and teen employment spotlights the critical role that teenagers play in the chain migration that provides U.S. employers with millions of extra wage-cutting illegal and quasi-legal workers.
The chain relies on a unanimously passed 2008 law that protects trafficked teenagers, such as child prostitutes. U.S. lawyers recognized the loophole, and by 2011, coyotes in Mexico were ferrying teenagers and children to the border.
Currently, border agents grant “Unaccompanied Alien Child” legal status to teen and child migrants, even if they have been delivered to the border on a coyote-rented, air-conditioned bus. The young migrants are quickly sent to social workers at the Department of Health and Human Services where they are handed over to lightly unsupervised “sponsors,” most of whom are known to be illegal migrants.
This bus-to-sponsor UAC process is very useful for illegal migrants who have sneaked into the United States. They use it to have their children safely delivered to their U.S. homes via the chain of coyotes, cartels, border agents, and social workers.
The UAC chain also allows at-home parents to first put their teenagers into U.S. jobs, and then the wages to support the at-home family — and eventually, to move the family into the United States.
Migrants are also using the UAC process to slip through the Biden administration’s recent border revisions. On February 21, for example, MyRGV.com published an interview with Priscilla Orta, an attorney working with an elite-backed advocacy group, Lawyers for Good Government:
On Monday, Orta said about a dozen people crossed [the border], but all of them had already sent their kids as unaccompanied minors without them by that point.
“Dozens of migrant families are splitting up at Mexico’s northern border,” Reuters reported on February 27.
Since January 2021, Biden’s deputies have allowed roughly 320,000 UACs into the United States, along with 1.2 million “gotaways who were allowed to sneak across the border, plus 800,000 people traveling in family groups, plus 1.2 million single adults. That adds up to 3.5 million welcomed migrants since January 2001 — not counting the February 2023 arrivals. The huge inflow has delivered roughly 1 southern for every American birth in 2022.
The massive inflow of migrant workers, consumers, and renters is welcomed by investors, retailers, employers, and their progressive allies.
For example, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights posted a link to its “funding partners” donors, which includes banks, progressive foundations, wealthy donors, and some companies, such as Costco and Sony Music,
Extraction Migration
The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.
The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
