Migration is hurting migrants
Conn Carroll
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“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes,” Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified under oath in front of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Wednesday. “Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with being recruited in their home country, smuggled to the U.S. border, and ends when [the government] delivers a child to a sponsor.”
Rodas was one of thousands of federal employees who answered President Joe Biden’s call to help deal with the tens of thousands of migrant children that surged across the southern border after Biden made it easier for them to enter. She was deployed to the Pomona Fairplex emergency intake site in California to help HHS place migrant children with sponsors.
While there, Rodas “saw apartment buildings where 20, 30, and 40 unaccompanied children have been released” and “saw numerous cases of children in debt bondage” where “the child knew they had to stay with the sponsor until the debt was paid.”
“Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them into modern-day slavery with wicked overlords was a terrible revelation,” Rodas said.
And everything that Rodas witnessed is entirely the fault of Joe Biden and his catch-and-release border policies.
I used to think that although migrants hurt U.S. citizens by driving down wages, migration at least was beneficial to the migrants themselves because they could earn more money here than in their home countries. But after listening to Rodas and reading reports from anthropologists in Central America, I am not so sure. Now I think the mass migration caused by Biden is bad for both U.S. citizens and migrants.
Middlebury College anthropology professor David Stoll, who has interviewed many migrants and their families in the Guatemalan Highlands, correctly notes that cracking down on employers who hire migrant children will not be effective. “Most underage Central Americans are being sent to the US for precisely this purpose—to join the workforce as quickly as possible,” Stoll correctly reports.
But if the families of child migrants are being sent here to work, and they are finding work, aren’t they better off? That’s what I used to think. Stoll disagrees.
“Yes, the difference in hourly wages is large, and remittances can make a big difference for households that receive them,” Stoll writes. “But often only temporarily, because low-wage jobs in the US tend to create more problems than they solve.”
“One spiral is that, by sending their most energetic wage-earners to the US—often fathers and husbands at first, then ever younger teenagers—households make themselves dependent on remittances that soon become wobbly, then stop altogether,” Stoll continues. “Far more families have been separated by this high-risk endeavor than were separated by the Trump administration. As remittances falter, everyone in the fractured household tries to come north, including high-need mothers and small children. Once everyone has come north and is paying US prices, the same dollar wages that had lots of buying power in Central America provide only a penurious existence.”
“Remittances generate other spirals,” Stoll adds. “For example, they so inflate the price of real estate back home that only households receiving remittances can afford to buy land. This forces everyone else who needs to buy land to borrow money and join the migration stream. Far from alleviating poverty, remittances heighten income disparities and deepen feelings of relative deprivation. Even as they pull some Central American households out of poverty, they pull other households north.”
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Biden and the Democratic Party may think they are helping migrants by releasing them en masse into the United States. But not only are they stretching the resources of American communities such as El Paso, San Antonio, New York City, and Washington, D.C., but they are sentencing entire families to lives of bondage and disrupting communities around the world.
It needs to stop. And it will only stop once Biden is removed from the White House.