White House: Workplace Abuse of Teen Workers Better than Trump Policy

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that President Donald Trump’s policy of blocking teenage migrants was more harmful than the widespread workplace abuse of teenage migrants reported in the New York Times.

Pierre made her claim when reporters asked her Monday about the New York Times‘ jarring description of workplace abuse and deaths among the teenage migrants who were welcomed by Biden’s loose border policies and the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) border loophole.

“Look, the New York Times story is heartbreaking and it is completely unacceptable,” said Pierre, who then praised the administration’s January 2021 decision to reverse Trump’s near-shutdown of the UAC pipeline in 2020:

We’ve taken action to try and deal with a real issue — a really true issue that was exacerbated, let’s not forget, by the last administration [emphasis added]. And so, that’s what we walked into. HHS took action on day one … [because] when we came into came into office, migrant children were being expelled [by Trump’s deputies] to Mexico where they were subjected to gang violence and exploitation.

“They’re never going stop the problem … they just want positive media,” responded Jay Palmer, an Alabama-based immigration and human trafficking expert who works with lawyers on behalf of Americans and migrants.

Since January 2021, Buden’s deputies have imported roughly 320,000 “unaccompanied” migrant children and teenagers. Roughly 200,000 of them are working in jobs that would otherwise go to better-paid Americans who have the civic confidence and legal standing to walk away from employer abuse.

“We’re making slums [and] migrant camps in our own country,” instead of expanding high-productivity, high-wage workplaces to the poor countries that send migrants, Palmer said.

“We are creating Third World countries in our cities … We’re not helping the [migrants’] countries,” he added.

The Department of Homeland Security has not made a response in reaction to the New York Times article that was posted on Saturday, February 25. The department’s pro-migration chief, Alejandro May0rkas, however, posted a February 24 tweet about a meeting in D.C. as more migrants use the UAC loophole to get U.S. jobs.

In January, Mayorkas announced a plan to extend labor-protection laws to the growing illegal workforce that now holds jobs that would otherwise have gone to better-paid Americans.

The Monday after the New York Times posted its Saturday article, the labor department announced a laundry list of promised inspections, checks, promises, mandates, offers, and funding requests to oversee the continued employment of teenage migrants. It admitted:

Since 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor has seen a 69 percent increase in children being employed illegally by companies In the last fiscal year, the department found 835 companies it investigated had employed more than 3,800 children in violation of labor laws.

In the government’s 2022 fiscal year, the department found that 3,800 children had been employed by more than 800 companies in violation of child labor laws. Officials are currently overseeing over 600 probes into potential child labor exploitation.

Yet the department’s secretary, Marty Walsh, has been calling for more migration. “The issue of immigration is how do we make sure that companies and businesses have the opportunity to employ people,” said in December 2022.

Walsh is retiring, and Biden has nominated another pro-migration advocate in his place, Julie Su. The Washington Post reported on February 28 that she is the daughter of immigrants, and “served as labor secretary in California for seven years, where she earned a reputation as a fierce advocate for immigrants and low-wage workers.”

When the teen workers first crossed the border, they were classified as UACs and were placed in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, overseen by secretary Xavier Becerra. The New York Times showed how Becerra rushed the release of the migrants, so allowing many to work in abusive jobs.

On Monday, Jean-Pierre said Biden still has confidence in Becerra, and Becerra promised some fixes:

To protect unaccompanied children from exploitative child labor, HHS continues efforts to thoroughly vet sponsors, expand post-release services, and ensure unaccompanied children & their sponsors know their rights. pic.twitter.com/bUhZGaYaIW

— Secretary Xavier Becerra (@SecBecerra) February 27, 2023

Pierre’s blame-shifting and promising were likely enough to muffle the pro-Biden, pro-migration reporters in the White House newsroom.

For example, CBS’s Columbian-born correspondent reporter “echoed Pierre’s blame-shifting with the headline ‘U.S. takes action to prevent migrant child labor amid rise in violations.'”

Similarly, the labor reporter at the Washington Post played up the band-aid remedies promised by an administration that actively supports the use of an outlawed labor force in the U.S. economy:

The media reports portray the pro-corporate, cheap labor economic policy as a simple matter of migrants’ welfare, said Palmer, adding:

They’re not looking at it for what it really is … The [reporters] cover it like “We’re doing the migrants a favor,  Oh my God, look what we’re doing for these migrants, we’re putting them to work.”

But they really don’t say the [workers are] living in shacks, living 10 or 12 to a room, and …  having to pay [smuggling] fees back by working as indentured servants … or their families could suffer violence … Nobody wants to look at it as labor trafficking or forced labor– that’s exactly what it is.

No matter what progressives working in distant federal agencies might promise, he said:

These migrant children are without their parents … which means they’re very vulnerable. Often that turns into labor violations, it turns into human trafficking … It’s heartbreaking.

“All the progressives want to do is create a problem that they can try to fix,” he said, adding:

It’s still cheap labor, it’s still abuse. Kids can be maimed, they can be hurt and there are no repercussions. They have to [work to] pay their debts, they also have to work to eat, they have to work to make money for the [at-home] family.

Investors prefer that foreigners come to work in the United States because their Fortune 500 executives prefer not to risk creating jobs in poor foreign countries, he said. “If you send these jobs to Mexico, you have to deal with corrupt governments and cartels,” he said.

Extraction Migration 

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.