The Child Labor Machine Keeps Rolling on the River

The New York Times has another report on the ongoing child labor crisis being fed by the human trafficking calamity at the border. This one focuses on children working at dangerous slaughterhouses. It includes the story of Marcos, a young man brutally injured while working at a poultry plant. Readers will know that the poultry industry has been implicated in a decades long conspiracy to suppress wages in their industry, of late. The rot at the core of some of these industries must surely leave a stench that eventually will waft the way of an impotent Congress. 

The facts of these child labor cases are as sad as they are familiar–Desperate children trafficked by cartels to the United States, shipped off without a care by the government and put to work paying off the debts to the cartels. While there is a lot of talk about being humane and compassionate, the Biden Administration’s results paint a far uglier picture.

“The belt caught the sleeve of Marcos’s baggy jacket and pulled him across the floor. Hard plastic teeth ripped through his muscles, tearing open his forearm down to the bone. By the time someone heard his screams and shut off the power, his arm was limp, a deep triangular gash running down the length of it. A rope of white tendons hung from his elbow to his wrist, horrifying the workers who gathered around him. He understood from their faces that something was badly wrong but didn’t feel any pain as the wound began gushing blood and he started to lose consciousness.”

Young Marcos is the victim here. The victim of cartels and circumstances, sure. However, he’s also the victim of the Biden Administration and the unscrupulous employers that pretend they didn’t know he was a desperate teenager working off a cartel debt. 

“Marcos and Antonia said H.H.S. officials never came to check up on him after he arrived in Virginia. But they decided to enroll him in school anyway, just in case. “I had to go to school, but I only came to help my family,” he told me in one of many conversations in Spanish during the past year.”

Of course Health and Human Services (HHS) never followed up. Over 300,000 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) have been trafficked into the United States under the policies of the Biden Administration. They’ve lost track of tens of thousands by the official numbers, but the facts suggest they have not really lost track so much as just stopped looking for most of the kids in their care. 

Perhaps they prefer losing track of the kids to seeing the horrors they are facing.

“But as more children come to the United States to help their families, more are ending up in these plants. Throughout the company towns that stud the “broiler belt,” which stretches from Delaware to East Texas, many have suffered brutal consequences. A Guatemalan eighth grader was killed on the cleaning shift at a Mar-Jac plant in Mississippi in July; a federal investigation had found migrant children working illegally at the company a few years earlier. A 14-year-old was hospitalized in Alabama after being overworked at a chicken operation there. A 17-year-old in Ohio had his leg torn off at the knee while cleaning a Case Farms plant. Another child lost a hand in a meat grinder at a Michigan operation.”

And what is all of this border catastrophe in the service of exactly? For what reason are communities overrun and children exploited? It cannot be compassion for we see the results are the opposite of that. Is this the price of cheap goods and services? Inflation bursts that bubble. Could it be the supposed labor shortage that is solved? They are still crying about it even though they have thousands of desperate children at their beck and call. 

While we are slouching backwards to the 19th Century with increasing velocity, the same winners exist from that time. Namely, the big businesses are exploiting all the workers for their profit and in return we get pain. The same industries suppressing wages are decrying American willingness to work. Industries with the highest rates of labor violations and the lowest rates of pay suggest we should import as many desperate workers as possible because American workers are lazy. 

This stuff just keeps happening. Tony Downs Food Company was fined $300,000 in Minnesota for hiring minors in their meat-processing plants. Casa Tequila LLC of Pewaukee was fined for employing minors in violation of Federal law, among other violations. Thirteen Sonic Restaurants in South Carolina were found to have employed 91 children. The State of Pennsylvania reported a 276 percent increase in child labor reports in 2023 from last year. The Federal Department of Labor is reporting increases as well. 

For some this is simply a fact of life that we must accept. They say that the border has always been overrun and nothing can be done to stop it. Marcos, and millions like him, are just doomed to be trafficked to the tune of billions in cartel and big business profit. A President that claims his government can reduce global temperatures simply has no control over the human slavery industry using our border like a public transit turnstile. Congress, in yet another shutdown skirmish, seems to take it as a foregone conclusion that they cannot pass any meaningful policies that could curtail this crisis. None of it is the truth. The asylum system designed to help the desperate is being abused in service of their exploitation. Our UAC laws designed to help trafficking victims are being used as the final link in the child trafficking chain. There are simple policy changes that, if enforced, would stop these egregious human rights abuses. Our government isn’t helpless, it is complicit in what is occurring.