Human smugglers slash their $10,000 per-person price when migrants bring children up to the U.S. border to exploit asylum loopholes, says the Washington Post.

Reached by phone in Kansas City, [Denys Adelmo] Mejia said he saved thousands of dollars by traveling with a child. His smuggler would have charged $10,000 if he had been traveling alone, he said; with Elizabeth Dayana, it cost $4,500 for both of them. He has three years to pay this off — in monthly installments — or his mother could lose her house.

“When you come with a child, [the smuggler] only delivers you to the Border Patrol,” said Mejia. “When you’re coming alone, they have to take you all the way across the desert.”

The loopholes have been created, cheered, and widened by American progressives, including lawyers at the ACLU and many elite legal firms, activists at pro-migration groups, Democrats in Congress, and reporters in many media outlets. The resulting inflow of illegal immigrants is cheered on by business groups because it delivers new wage-cutting workers and more consumers to their doors.

The reward for bringing children is so high that villages are losing many children and migrants even are making deals to bring other people’s children, and then claim them as their own kids at the U.S. border, the Post reported:

“This is the most serious problem that we have,” said Juan Jose Arita Rivera, the town’s mayor.

Between April and Setepmber, U.S border officials separated 170 migrants from the children they incorrectly claimed to be their own children, the Washington Post said. The article includes two examples of children being brought northwards by migrants who are not their parents.

The rising inflow of faked families comes as Democrats continue their loud complaints that President Donald Trump’s policies are causing “family separation” among migrants.

The article notes that many of the migrants bring the children who are cousins and buy faked documents from corrupt officials. Once the migrants are caught at the U.S. border and then released from the crowded detention facilities, they head to towns and cities that contain populations of prior migrants. This practice helps the migrants quickly land jobs — and the ability to get childcare — from prior migrants.

For example, the migrant in Kansas City, Mejia, lives with in-laws in Kansas City:

He and the [smuggled] girl now share a duplex with Mejia’s brother and his brother’s wife. Mejia wears an ankle bracelet as he waits for his asylum case to move through immigration courts. Because he cannot work legally or get a driver’s license, he said he cannot enroll Elizabeth Dayana in school.

This form of chain-migration has delivered massive numbers of Central Americans into the United States — and has now produced the caravans of migrants either waiting at or traveling to the U.S. border.

In fiscal year 2018, for example, more than 100,000 migrants used this progressive-opened loophole to migrate into the United States, past the guards and fences at the border. Nearly all were released because of furious progressive opposition to Trump’s short-lived policy of holding adults at packed detention centers while sending the children to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Once released, migrants must convince judges to approve their asylum. The vast majority are rejected — but most remain in the United States because few are caught and sent home by immigration officers.

The growing population of illegal economic migrants hiding in the United States helps grow the economy for older investors by cutting wages and salaries for Americans, and by driving up real-estate costs for young Americans.

Read it all here.