Munro: Joe Biden’s Open Border Supplies Child Workers to U.S. Slaughterhouses

Federal investigators have found many migrant children working in three slaughterhouses — but both the government and the New York Times are hiding President Joe Biden’s role in delivering foreign children to employers nationwide.

The Department of Labor reported the children were formally employed by the meatpackers’ subcontractor. That workplace hand-off minimizes legal risk for the owners of the slaughterhouses, including Brazilian-owned JBS Foods.

The agency said:

an investigation by the department’s Wage and Hour Division that discovered that [Packer Sanitation Services Inc] had employed at least 31 children – from 13 to 17 years of age – in hazardous occupations. The jobs performed by children included cleaning dangerous powered equipment during overnight shifts to fulfill sanitation contracts at JBS USA plants in Grand Island, Nebraska and Worthington, Minnesota, and at Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall, Minnesota.

Investigators also learned that several minors employed by PSSI ­– including one 13-years-old – suffered caustic chemical burns and other injuries.

In its filing, the department alleges the food sanitation contractor interfered with an investigation by intimidating minor workers to stop them from cooperating with investigators. PSSI also allegedly deleted and manipulated employment files.

The department’s press release ignored the immigration angle, so portraying the children as if they are Americans: “The [federal law] prohibits minors under the age of 14 from working and 14- and 15-year-old employees from working later than 9 p.m.”

But on page 11 of the legal complaint to a judge, federal officials wrote, “Investigators conducted all interviews in Spanish, with Spanish-speaking investigators, as the minor children [only] spoke Spanish.”

The investigation was conducted by the labor department. The department’s secretary, Marty Walsh, is a pro-business advocate for the migration of wage-cutting replacement workers into American workplaces, despite the huge pool of several million non-working American men. “The issue of workers has to be addressed and the only way you can do it is through immigration,” he said in September. [Emphasis added]

The New York Times wrote up the department’s investigation but did not mention the role of Biden’s easy migration policies.

However, the newspaper report included this passive-voice sentence: “The mix of boys and girls were not fluent English speakers and were interviewed mostly in Spanish, investigators said.”

The newspaper’s editors did not allow any comments on the article and buried the article on page 6 of the newspaper’s second section, with the dull headline, “Labor Dept. Finds 31 Minors Were Employed In Meat Plants.”

The labor department’s complaint cited several examples of young children who work overnight shifts while they are legally required to attend school:

Minor Child A reported they had worked for PSSI at age fourteen (14) at the JBS facility from 11 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. or 7:00 a.m. cleaning machines with chemicals that gave them a burn injury …

Minor Child B reported they worked for PSSI at age fourteen (14) at the JBS facility from 11:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m., five to six days a week, from December 2021 to April 2022, cleaning machines “used to cut meat” while attending Walnut Middle School in Grand Island …

WHD Investigators interviewed Minor Child E at the facility. Minor Child E reported their date of birth, a early 2022 hire date, hours of work of 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., five or six days per week where they cleaned conveyor belts …

Minor Child I reported they clean in Area 3 of the kill floor. Minor Child I recently quit high school because they are “working and was tired.” …

In summary, PSSI is employing, or has employed, at least twelve 17-year-olds, fourteen 16-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, one 14-year-old, and one 13-year old across three slaughterhouses/meat processing facilities …

Officials are checking employment records at 47 other worksites.

Meatpacking wages have declined steadily since President Ronald Reagan broke the unions in the 1980s. However, they rose sharply under President Donald Trump, who also curbed migration and forced the meatpacking companies to invest in more wage-boosting automation.

But wages have sagged under Biden’s mass migration. Also, incomes have been hit hard by rising inflation and housing costs, so companies are reinvesting some of their payroll savings into company-owned housing:

Congratulations to the Hernandez family in Cactus, Texas, on their future home. We are investing $8 million to develop affordable housing in the area. To date, 128 lots have been approved for development in Dumas and Cactus. #JBSHometownStrong pic.twitter.com/eNUI0tF3er

— JBS USA (@JBSFoodsUSA) November 10, 2022

Thirty-five percent of respondents in an August poll said immigration makes the United States “Worse off.” Thirty-one percent said immigration makes the U.S. “Better off,” according to the July 23-26 poll of 1,500 citizens.

The companies denied culpability for the child labor.

The staffing company “has an absolute company-wide prohibition against the employment of anyone under the age of 18 and zero tolerance for any violation of that policy — period,” it said in a statement to the New York Times.

One of the meatpacking firms, Turkey Valley Farms, points blame at the staffing firm: “We expect all contractors to share our commitment to the health and safety of any individuals working in our facilities … [and] to all applicable federal and state labor laws.”

Progressives have served as cheerleaders for Biden’s policy of aiding businesses with waves of imported foreign workers, consumers, and renters.

Since January 2021, Biden and his progressives have extracted roughly three million migrants from poor countries, with the tacit support of Fortune 500 companies and the establishment wing of the GOP.

That haul includes 300,000 child migrants who were smuggled in via the 2008 loophole for “Unaccompanied Alien Children.” Biden’s border chief Alejandro Mayorkas has encouraged that migration by refusing to apply the Title 42 barrier to foreign workers who claim to be 17 or younger.

Most of those 300,000 young migrants were teenagers who had already quit school in Central American countries to join parents or relatives already working illegally in U.S. workplaces.

The young migrants’ actions are rational and often honorable — they are making more in U.S. workplaces in their home countries, and often, support siblings and parents in their poor home countries. Such child labor was the norm in the United States until the 1920s immigration cutbacks created what was then a huge, prosperous, and politically powerful middle class.

The progressives’ imported child workforce is being found in meatpacking lines, auto factories, hotels, egg farms, package-making, restaurants, and many other sectors.

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a ProPublica reporter. “They want to help their parents,” she said in a November 2020 article.

The New York Times‘ flat-toned, low-drama article downplayed the shame of Biden’s growing child-labor workforce. In contrast, it posted a September 2020 news article that dramatically described the rise of child labor in India:

The children do work that is arduous, dirty and often dangerous: hauling bricks or gravel, scavenging for recyclables, begging or chopping weeds on plantations. Much of their employment is illegal.

It is a catastrophic shift for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, undoing years of gains for education and against child labor, and undermining their prospects of climbing out of poverty. Countless promising students have had their educations cut short, and it remains unclear when schools will reopen. But even when they do, many of the children are unlikely to go back to the classroom.

The top editors of the New York Times are very pro-migration. For example, Jia Lynn Yang is the top editor for domestic news  at the New York Times, and the author of a 2020 pro-migration book titled One Mighty and Irresistible Tide. She wrote:

The image of the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus poem at the statue’s base, the notion of America as an eternal “nation of immigrants,” — these make up an intoxicating part of this country’s mythology. Set against all the sins of America’s past — from slavery to the removal and genocide of American Indians — the arrival of open-hearted immigrants, grateful for a chance at a new life on our shores serves as a constant renewal of hope in the American project. If there is salvation for this country, it very well may lie in the underlying gratitude of a refugee whose life has been saved by the granting of a visa.

The federal policy of allowing easy migration has many disastrous results in the United States and in the migrants’ home countries. But progressives may soon offer to repair some of the damage they recklessly created — in exchange for votes in 2024.

Extraction Migration

It is difficult for government officials to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, or the birth rate. So the federal government instead widens the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.

This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It also makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.

Extraction Migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

So far, progressives have not apologized for their civic and economic wreckage. “I’m not going to change anything in any fundamental way,” Biden told a November 9 post-election press conference.