This isn’t the first time PJ Media has reported on the sad fates of the human beings trafficked into our country by cynical globalist-socialists, and it won’t be the last. Still, it’s particularly disheartening when minor children, placed in peril by the Biden administration’s extralegal immigration and national transformation machine, are taken advantage of.
To its credit, Reuters has been conducting real journalistic investigations into the growing problem of illegal child labor at U.S. factories. The news outlet conducted hundreds of interviews and documented several cases of third-world labor abuse. On Friday, Reuters reported on underage illegal aliens staffing auto parts factories across Alabama and into Georgia. They highlighted a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl who crossed the border with her father four years earlier:
When the Guatemalan girl’s father contacted the recruiter, he said he asked whether his daughter’s age would be an issue. No, the recruiter told him. On the black market, the girl’s father procured a fake ID, seen by Reuters, that says she is an 18-year-old California resident. The name and picture on the card are the daughter’s, but the birth year is phony.
By May, the father said, he and his daughter were both working at Hwashin, each earning about $11 per hour. That’s higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 – Alabama doesn’t impose a state minimum. But the rate is below what many other industrial jobs in the region pay, including poultry processors, where workers usually earn at least $14 per hour.
Father and daughter worked long shifts, commuting 90 minutes each way from their home, the cost of van rides deducted from their weekly pay, the father said. Many staffing agencies operate van fleets and provide transportation to companies for which they recruit labor.
Another case involved two teen brothers:
…a team of state and federal authorities conducted the Aug. 9 inspection at [auto parts manufacturer] SL, in Alexander City. They discovered seven minors there, including the two Guatemalan brothers, among employees making lights and mirrors for Hyundai and Kia. …
Both of the young Guatemalan brothers crossed the southern U.S. border alone last year, said family members and an official familiar with their entry. They are now at a shelter in Kansas operated by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, according to government documents and interviews with family members. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, houses unaccompanied children after they have entered the United States. A spokesperson said the agency can’t comment on cases involving migrant minors.
Among the issues state and federal investigators are now probing is whether children who worked among Hyundai suppliers may have gotten there through human trafficking networks, three people familiar with the investigations said. “Minor is part of a child labor trafficking case,” read notes reviewed by Reuters from one of the brothers’ ORR case files.
In the notes, authorities wrote the children described “exploitation from debt bondage (repaying smuggling debts).” They added that an unnamed “third party labor service company” made the youths believe it could have them removed from the United States.
“Some children expressed fear of deportation based on comments made by company officials to them,” the notes said.
Related: Super-pimp Joe Biden Keeps America’s Sex Traffickers Well-staffed
Last February, Reuters reported on the same phenomenon occurring in the chicken processing industry:
At age 16, when most kids in the United States are halfway through high school, Amelia Domingo found herself working on chicken processing machines in this farm town and deep in debt to loan sharks in her native Guatemala.
After borrowing $10,000 for smugglers to get her through Mexico, Amelia crossed into Arizona last February and turned herself over to immigration officials. They led her, she said, from a crowded border facility to a shelter for unaccompanied minors. After about a month, officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees shelters for migrant children, released her to a sister here in Alabama. …
Both sisters work in the Alabama town, using false identities and fake dates of birth obtained for them by illegal brokers who forge or otherwise secure such documentation for undocumented migrants. With those credentials, they got jobs through staffing agencies of the type that help poultry plants here, like industries elsewhere across the United States, recruit staff and fulfill paperwork meant to ensure that employers comply with state and federal regulations.
These stories involve a chain of illegal activity, from human smuggling and document and identity forgery to oppressive child labor — all set in motion by the initial act of entering the country illegally. In a sort of broken windows theory of social collapse, lawbreaking begets lawbreaking begets lawbreaking. Massive systemic industries of criminal activity and abuse have been built up around Democrats’ treasonous (in my opinion) subversion of U.S. law and facilitation of mass, culture-obliterating immigration.
America used to be better than this.
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