Democrats Blame CEOs for Abuse of Biden’s Migrant Teenage Workforce

A local girl walks near the higher new metal wall installed by US workers to replace fenci
HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Thirteen Cuban illegal migrants worked as prostitutes to pay the cost of getting through President Joe Biden’s loose border, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told reporters in Florida.

The migrants “told to us that they were paying off their transportation debt, that they were being smuggled into the United States to have sex, that their family at home was being threatened if they didn’t come here and … pay off the debts,” Judd said. The women are “paying a ridiculous, horrible price,” he added.

In Connecticut, federal agents arrested two labor traffickers who smuggled Mexicans into jobs that would otherwise be held by better-paid Americans.

“In most cases, the victims were required to [pay roughly $12,000 and] turn over a property deed as collateral before leaving Mexico,” the Department of Justice said on March 2. Once the victims arrived in Hartford, [the alleged smugglers] informed them that they would have to pay $30,000, with interest, and that they would have to pay her for rent, food, gas and utilities,” the statement said.

But congressional Democrats and national media are not interested in the widespread and normalized labor and sexual abuse.

Instead, they are reacting to the February 25 publication of a New York Times‘ admission that said many companies are hiring migrant teenagers for tough and sometimes “brutal” jobs.

Congressional Democrats are reacting to the embarrassing report by scapegoating the companies which hired the migrant job-seeking teenagers that were delivered to their recruiters by Biden’s loose migration policies.

“We were deeply disturbed by a New York Times report that large numbers of unaccompanied noncitizen children are being placed with exploitative sponsors and working long hours in dangerous conditions,” said a March 3 letter sent by 16 Democratic Senators to President Joe Biden’s deputies.

The small fines imposed on companies for hiring U.S. or migrant children “are so low as to be a joke,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) told the New York Times. “This is a growing problem and a perennial problem. We are playing with fire as a nation,” he added.

Other pro-migration groups are using the teenage-worker scandal to claim that young migrants deserve aid, novel work permits, more social services, an amnesty, and to have their parents move to the United States. “Give People Legal Status!” said a tweet by the head of FWD.us, a pro-migration group founded by West Coast billionaire investors who gain from the inflow of foreign consumers, renters, and workers.

But those reactions are intended to shift blame from Biden who imported the much-abused workforce of young migrants.

“There’s this idea that these teenagers just walk through Mexico and show up at the Rio Grande [because] they’re fleeing persecution,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “In fact, they’re smuggled into the United States” by cartel-affiliated coyotes, he said.

The smuggling route was created by a 2008 law. The law’s goal was to aid a small number of “Unaccompanied Alien Children” who were trafficked and abandoned migrants after working as prostitutes and abused labor. Congress did not offer work permits to the young migrants because they were expected to be few.

But that process is now used to smuggle hundreds of thousands of foreign teenagers to U.S. jobs. The workforce is delivered by a conveyor belt of migrants, coyotes, labor traffickers, border agencies, federal social workers, staffing companies, and international cash-transfer companies.

This smuggled teenage workforce is an open secret in Washington D.C. “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 in 2020.

“The well-meaning policies …. have created an incentive for mass migration of teenagers,” said Krikorian, adding:

By increasing the chances that they will be let go into the United States and be able to work, they’ve created an incentive for more to come to work. In fact, all of them are smuggled, and that smuggling fee has to be paid off.

So the government is enticing [migrant] people to go into debt to pay smugglers. And so, of course, they’re going to be working at cleaning companies or packing Cheerios … What did [politicians] think was going happen?

More than 320,000 young migrants have arrived since Biden’s officials ended checks set by President Donald Trump. Roughly 75 percent of the UAC arrivals are male teenagers searching for jobs.

The establishment legislators and media outlets recognize — but downplay — the reality that the migrants need to work to repay the debts accepted to exploit federal 2008 law.

The March 3 letter by the 16 Democratic Senators admitted that some migrants “need” to work:

Unaccompanied noncitizen children who are old enough to work—like many U.S. citizen children—may want or need to work part-time in safe and appropriate workplaces, but they are particularly vulnerable [to exploitation] because they do not have work authorization.

The New York Times reporter, Hannah Dreier, extended her breakthrough article on March 3 by describing how the youth migrants are seeking new jobs: 

I checked in this week with one teenager who had been working in Grand Rapids making auto parts used by Ford and General Motors …  I caught him while he was driving. His company had fired all of the minors [after the New York Times article was posted], he said. But there was still work at another plant nearby. Then he told me he had to go — he had just arrived and his shift would be starting soon.

A March 3 follow-up story by the Washington Post focused on one 13-year-old migrant worker in Green Island, Nebraska:

Local prosecutor Sarah Hinrichs said she reviewed a March 2022 report about another 14-year-old girl who fell asleep in class after working the night shift cleaning the JBS [meatpacking] facility. In the 2022 case, the girl told authorities she was abused and forced to work for Packers to repay an $8,000 bill for smuggling her north from Guatemala.

Besides, migrants want to earn money for themselves. In a case described by the Post, a 14-year-old child said she applied for the job by herself:

The illegal migrant] mother, who has seven children, said she wanted the girl to focus on school. But the girl said she grew bored in Grand Island and last summer applied online for the job at Packers [sanitation company] so she could buy nice clothes and an iPhone 13.

“I like money,” the girl said with a shy smile during a recent interview in the family’s sparsely furnished living room, which is dominated by a large shrine to Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe. “I like to buy things.”

The establishment’s feigned protest about the teenagers serves as a smoke screen for the establishment’s reluctance to recognize its own creation of the problem.

Migration “is being allowed [and] encouraged” by the federal government, said Judd.

A lot of the [migrants] are just trying to get to the land of milk and honey. And as a result, they’ll be trafficked and then they get here and find out that it’s not just that you pay and go [to the city of your choice]. Now you’ve got to work it off. And when is it worked off? When you pay. When is enough [payment] enough? … You’re going to prostitute here.

If the federal government wanted to solve the problem it would stop the supply of migrants instead of trying to minimize the damage after their arrival, said Judd:

We don’t do what we need to do … I suggest to you that what we are doing with the immigration issue today is simply this: It’s like you go home this evening, and [discover] ‘Oh my gosh, a pipe is broken and I’ve got water all over the floor.’

The federal government has got water all over the floor and they’re in there trying to mop it up. At least they say they are.

But at the same time, the pipe is still pumping more water onto the floor. The first thing you do if you go home this evening and find a pipe is broken and you’ve got water on the floor is — you go find the source and turn the valve off. Then you mop up and you fix the problem.

In Washington, politicians and journalists are “saying the government has to clean up the floor, but they’re not paying any attention to the faucet,” said Krikorian:

They need to deal with that [faucet] because the root cause is the bad policy that is incentivizing illegal [teenage] immigration. If they deal with that, then the child-labor problem would be much smaller and way easier for government to deal with.

Bidne’s deputies, business groups, and progressives have little incentive to turn off the faucet, he said.

They’re saying that we have to let all these teenagers in, and if they end up being released by [a federal; agency] to bad circumstances, well, that means we need additional child-welfare bureaucrats. And if they end up working, then we need a bigger labor department bureaucracy — on top of what we already have to regulate child labor. All of this would be much more simply and effectively dealt with by reducing the incentives to sneak across the border in the first place.

Business groups gain because the UAC pipeline helps the illegal chain migration of families into the U.S. labor force.

Since January 2021, Biden’s deputies have allowed roughly 320,000 UACs into the United States, along with 1.2 million “gotaways who were allowed to sneak across the border, plus 800,000 people traveling in family groups, plus 1.2 million single adults.  That adds up to 3.5 million welcomed migrants since January 2001 — not counting the February 2023 arrivals. The huge inflow has delivered roughly 1 southern for every American birth in 2022.

GOP leaders have said little about the workplace and sexual abuse, and little about the thousands of deaths caused by Biden’s migration.

The journalists who cover the migrant misery dare not follow the problem back to the political faucet, he said:

To question the narrative that [the teenage migrants] are “fleeing persecution” would be to indict the whole Biden approach to immigration, and they just can’t do that. Whether it’s their editors saying “You’re not allowed to do that,” or — what I think is more likely — they’re just psychologically unable because that would mean they’d be helping Trump and they must not do that. They have to hide things, avoid addressing issues, and avoid asking questions — no matter what it takes — because they have to avoid being seen as helping Trump.

Instead, they are focusing on personal tragedies, not national policies. The Washington Post‘s March 3 article, for example, carried the headline “A cleaning company illegally employed a 13-year-old. Her family is paying the price.”

In contrast, Krikorian said, “the migrants are acting rationally …. they have to pay the bills each month, pay off their smugglers, feed their kids, and all the rest of it.”

“They are operating in the real world in a way that over-educated journalists are not,” he added.

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, reduces beneficial trade, 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 lethal 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.

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