A recent NYT exposé on migrant child labor in the U.S. is essential reading, both for its enraging descriptions of exploitation and for its portrayal of the systemic elements that enable this abomination. We’re not talking about a few isolated incidents — rather, the piece describes “a new economy of exploitation,” with migrant kids “ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”
Exhaustion, injury, and even death are the fate of these children, who have often been abandoned on multiple fronts: by corrupt sponsors who get them into the country only to exploit them; by amoral businesses that flout the law by hiring on a child workforce; by a federal government that has allowed this systematic exploitation to mushroom; and by parents who sent their children northward with the intention that they work in the U.S. in the first place. As the Times notes,
The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.
But I would argue that when the results are so egregious, “willful ignorance” risks missing the depravity of some of those involved. Particularly glaring is the general absence of caring by the companies that hire these children — to wit, a broad absence of incidences of adult employees and managers taking a stand and reporting their companies for child exploitation. As others have pointed out, both the Times’ reporting and the behavior of those involved make it seem as if this as a story mainly of non-criminal violations, punishable by fines and other financial penalties. Instead, it seems far more reasonable to trust your gut here, and label those who “turn a blind eye” or knowingly hire child workers as monstrous, criminal figures who have broken the basic societal contract of ensuring the young are protected from harm.
Indeed, “child abuse” is a truer description of what’s going on here than the more generalized “child exploitation.” This is activity that abets or directly results in physical and psychological harm to children. One’s culpability in turning a “blind eye” is just the same as if one were to see a parent beating a child in a parking lot and choosing inaction. On this point, it’s important to note that the law does reflect these basic values of protecting children from abuse; the problem is that it has not been sufficiently enforced and that the penalties are far too light. The Times writes that:
Federal law bars minors from a long list of dangerous jobs, including roofing, meat processing and commercial baking. Except on farms, children younger than 16 are not supposed to work for more than three hours or after 7 p.m. on school days.
But these jobs — which are grueling and poorly paid, and thus chronically short-staffed — are exactly where many migrant children are ending up. Adolescents are twice as likely as adults to be seriously injured at work, yet recently arrived preteens and teenagers are running industrial dough mixers, driving massive earthmovers and burning their hands on hot tar as they lay down roofing shingles, The Times found.
One positive development in the wake of the Times’ exposé is that it apparently got the attention of the Biden administration, with a subsequent article reporting that, “Officials plan to initiate investigations in parts of the country more likely to have child labor violations and ask Congress to increase penalties.” Yet given the systemic nature of the problem, it seems a far more fundamental re-thinking is called for. As Jeet Heer writes at The Nation, “Against the background of repeated failed attempts at immigration reform, many American companies have become reliant on the cheap labor that migrants provide whether they have legal status or not.” Addicted to this cheap labor, companies will have a continued incentive to flaunt the law unless the punishments are sufficiently strengthened.
Heer also points out the key role that years of failed immigration reform have played. He writes:
The normal pattern of immigration is for parents to go abroad and send money back to their families. But the United States government, since passage of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act in 2008, has created a perverse incentive structure that makes it easier for children to gain entry than for adults. The Trump administration exacerbated this problem with its child separation policy. The Biden administration was unwilling to change the reality of child separation, but didn’t want the bad optics of children in cages. Under Biden, therefore, the Department of Health and Human Services settled for a policy of rapidly and carelessly releasing child migrants to sponsors. This easy-release policy coupled with the current labor shortage (itself partly intensified by the Trump era tightening of immigration) created both the supply and the market for child workers.
Even as we can heap justifiable scorn on the Republican Party for its racist and nativist opposition to humane and economically beneficial immigration reform, it’s important to note that no one forced the Biden administration to engage in a policy of “rapidly and carelessly releasing child migrants to sponsors” or otherwise continuing bad Trump-era immigration policies (all the more perverse given the labor shortages the U.S. is currently facing that are contributing to inflation and thus threaten Biden’s likely re-election effort).
Likewise, it’s worth considering the immoral tendencies in American capitalism that make such exploitation likely and even inevitable absent clear laws and stringent penalties. Jared Yates Sexton has written a great piece homing in on how the broader pro-child labor movement (of which exploitation of child migrant labor is an important part) rooted in the GOP should be seen in the context of a broader pushback against labor rights. He notes that, “Putting children into these positions is a perfect and insidious way to begin lashing out against and undermining the developing labor movement that is scoring victories with every passing day,” and that effort to deregulate child labor are of a piece with an assault on the minimum wage and 40-hour work week.
The Times exposé shocks the conscience, and raises multiple red flags about the ethics of many American businesses and the sufficiency of current laws that fail to deter abusive behavior.