Best way to stop child labor is to secure the border
Washington Examiner
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On the same day Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra was grilled by Congress for failing to vet immigrant family sponsors, the Department of Labor announced a 44% increase in the number of children it found working illegally this year.
Both of these issues stem from the same problem, a problem not created by either HHS or the Department of Labor. Child labor, and deaths from child labor, are surging in this country as a direct result of the catch-and-release policies implemented by President Joe Biden at the southern border. These problems will only get worse until all child immigrants are treated equally when encountered by Border Patrol.
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The trafficking of immigrant children across the southern border was almost nonexistent until 2008, when President George W. Bush signed the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Before 2008, immigrant children were treated equally when apprehended at the border, no matter what country they came from. Nearly all were returned to their country of origin.
After the Wilberforce bill, children from countries other than Mexico and Canada were guaranteed not only a hearing from an immigration judge but also an automatic transfer from Border Patrol custody to HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which would then release them to a sponsor in the United States, usually a family member.
Central Americans quickly learned about this loophole, and by 2013, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso warned that if the catch-and-release policy continued, Border Patrol facilities would be overwhelmed by immigrant children. That is what happened in 2014, leading to those first pictures of children in cages at the border.
President Barack Obama solved the child immigrant problem by getting Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to make it harder for immigrants to cross into the US.. But when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current president, fulfilled his campaign promise to guarantee immigrants safe passage through Mexico in 2019, the border crisis resumed. President Donald Trump solved that with his “Remain in Mexico” policy.
President Joe Biden then ended “Remain in Mexico” on his first day in office, and child immigrant apprehensions on the southern border immediately increased. Almost 400,000 immigrant children traveling alone have been apprehended on the southern border since 2021. And that number does not include immigrant children apprehended while crossing with their parents.
Both Democrats and Republicans hammered Becerra for not doing more to ensure that immigrant children were placed with either family members or vetted sponsors. But the focus on vetting sponsors is misplaced. As Becerra pointed out, the vast majority of immigrant children are placed with a family member.
But placing immigrant children with their families in the U.S. is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem. Immigrant families expect their immigrant children to work. That is, the entire reason they paid human traffickers thousands of dollars to smuggle their children across the border: so that they can work and send money back to their native country.
The 16-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who tragically died at a chicken processing plant in Mississippi earlier this month was here with his family. They knew he was working. That is why he and hundreds of thousands of others are here.
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Yes, there are some bad employers out there who are knowingly employing immigrant children. And more could be done to punish bad employers. But employers are not, nor should they be expected to be, immigration enforcement officials. There is a billion-dollar industry in producing fake documents for immigrants of all ages, and there is only so much employers can do to spot fakes.
The better solution would be to secure the southern border so that tens of thousands of potential child laborers are not released into the country every month. It’s been done before. It can be done again. It is only a matter of finding the political will to do it.