The Reuters news agency has exposed one small corner of the federal government’s extraction of debt-trapped child workers from poor countries for use in low-wage, low-tech, dangerous workplaces.
From Enterprise, Alabama, the news agency reported on a teenager who was delivered by federal officials to an Alabama home close to a chicken processing company:
At age 16, when most kids in the United States are halfway through high school, Amelia Domingo found herself working on chicken processing machines in this farm town and deep in debt to loan sharks in her native Guatemala.
After borrowing $10,000 for smugglers to get her through Mexico, Amelia crossed into Arizona last February and turned herself over to [Customs and Border Protection] immigration officials. They led her, she said, from a crowded border facility to a shelter for unaccompanied minors. After about a month, officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees shelters for migrant children, released her to a sister here in Alabama.
…
One day, she said, she hopes to return to Guatemala. First, though, she must continue wiring most of her wages home, where her parents pay off the loan sharks and what she said is a dizzying interest rate of 10% per month. She’ll return, she said, “if I ever have the means.”
The government-delivered extraction and delivery of cheap migrant labor allows companies to avoid hiring Americans at decent wages. It also allows them to avoid buying the productivity-boosting, labor-saving machines that would allow Americans to get more work done each day.
Progressives justify Congress’s 2008 “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) pipeline by saying it offers safety and education to endangered teenagers from Central America. But that claim means little to a poor girl from Guatemala.
“School isn’t for me,” Amelia told Reuters. “I have debts.”
In a sidebar, Reuters described the abusive treatment of the semi-legal UAC child workers within the larger population of exploited migrants:
Poultry industry workers in and around Enterprise told Reuters that migrants, including minors, easily obtain fake credentials and supply those to staffing firms who help them find work in area plants. The firms, they said, sometimes dock workers’ pay for services, including transportation to and from the workplace, and deny them benefits like overtime pay, sick days, time off and medical coverage.
The youth labor trafficking pipeline was largely stopped in 2020 by former President Donald Trump amid loud opposition from Democrats and immigration reporters.
But President Joe Biden quickly reopened and expanded the pipeline. In fiscal year 2021, Biden admitted 125,000 UAC migrants, up from 33,000 under Trump in 2020. Two-thirds are male, and roughly 70 percent are older than 15, according to federal data.
The labor trafficking via the UAC program has been an open secret in Washington, DC, for many years — but it is ignored by pro-migration officials, advocates, lobbyists, and the Democratic legislators who are eager to portray border enforcement as racism.
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