President Joe Biden is expanding the nation’s population of imported child workers, but the establishment media — and D.C. politicians — are hiding this child workforce from voters.
“One of the largest food sanitation companies in the United States illegally employed at least 102 children in dangerous jobs cleaning meatpacking and slaughtering plants,” said a New York Times report that did not mention most of the child workers are teenage economic migrants.
A report by the Associated Press downplayed the mention of the teenagers’ migrant origin, relegating it to the sixteenth paragraph. However, it quoted a labor department official saying:
[T]he Wage and Hour Division has seen around a 50% increase [emphasis added] in child labor violations since 2018, including minors working more hours than permitted in otherwise legal jobs, using types of equipment they shouldn’t while doing legal jobs, and children working where they should never be employed in the first place.
“The company, Packers Sanitation Services, allegedly employed minors as young as 13 to use caustic chemicals to clean ‘razor-sharp saws,’ head splitters and other dangerous equipment at meatpacking facilities in eight states,” the Washington Post, which buried the lede in the 17th paragraph, said, adding, “Many of the children spoke only Spanish, and at least some Labor Department interviews with minors were conducted in Spanish, investigators said.”
Most forms of child labor were outlawed in 1938 by Congress.
But since January 2021, roughly 320,000 more “Unaccompanied Alien Children” have been welcomed by Biden and his pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Roughly 75 percent of the young migrants are work-ready teenage boys. The vast majority quickly take a wide variety of low-wage jobs at factories, hotels, and farms. They work because they want to work, need to pay smuggling debts to the cartels, and because even small payments are a huge help to their families at home in Central America.
“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 growing workforce is so large that officials at the Department of Labor have begun investigating some of the many reports about teenage workers throughout the United States. On Friday, the agency announced that it was imposing a fine of $1.5 million on a staffing firm that supplied teenage workers to meatpacking plants around the country:
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law.
The division began the Packers Sanitation Services Inc. investigation in August 2022, and on Nov. 9, 2022, the Solicitor’s Office filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court of Nebraska based on evidence that the company – which provides cleaning services under contract to some of the nation’s largest meat and poultry producers – had employed at least 31 children, from 13 to 17 years of age, in hazardous occupations to clean dangerous powered equipment during overnight shifts at JBS USA plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Worthington, Minnesota, and at Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall, Minnesota. U.S. District Court Judge John M. Gerrard responded by issuing a temporary restraining order on Nov. 10, 2022, forbidding the company and its employees from committing child labor violations.
The agency statement did not say if the children were migrants or natives.
The media silence about the fast-growing child workforce is a strong contrast to media coverage during President Donald Trump’s presidency. Back then, the establishment media produced many emotional stories about migrants who were temporarily separated from their kids, often because the parents chose to leave their kids with relatives in the United States.
With Mayorkas’ loose border, migrants are increasingly visible at many United States workplaces, Jay Palmer, an Alabama-based immigration and human trafficking expert who works with lawyers on behalf of Americans and migrants, said.
“They’re working everywhere,” he said, adding that companies gain because they prefer cheap and compliant migrants and because some executives get bribes to ignore the illegal hiring.
But state and federal investigations are launched after complaints from Americans and from migrants who hope to get green cards from Mayorkas’s agency, Palmer said.
“It’s reactive,” he said, adding, “I’ve got a case right now where an HR manager is complaining that he feels like he might go to jail because he’s aware of third-party [staffing] contractors that are hiring illegals.”
Republican politicians face pressure from donors to say little or nothing about the exploitation of young migrants — or even about the employers’ hiring of illegal migrants. Instead, many GOP leaders — and Fox News — try to focus voters on border chaos, drugs, and the illegality of Biden’s border policies — despite the rising opposition to immigration among swing voters.
The staffing firm fined by the labor department is owned by the Blackstone investment firm, according to the Washington Post. Blackstone donated $34 million to the GOP for the 2022 elections.
Alongside the GOP, the media’s coverup of Biden’s child-labor policies is routine and nationwide. On February 11, for example, a Washington Post article tried to shift the blame for the growing child-labor workforce to Republicans, saying:
The Iowa bill, introduced by state Sen. Jason Schultz (R), would permit children as young as 14 to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers, provided they are separate from where meat is prepared, and work in industrial laundry.
At 15, they would be able to work as lifeguards and swimming instructors, perform light assembly-line work after obtaining a waiver from state officials, and load and unload up to 50 pounds of products from vehicles and store shelves with a waiver “depending on the strength and ability of the fifteen-year-old.”
However, a February 17 report by NBC News spotlighted the underlying cause in the tenth paragraph: “Advocates and lawyers for the children say some of the child workers for PSSI were unaccompanied minors who recently came across the southern border.[emphasis added].”
“People I spoke to there said it was common knowledge that there were children working at this facility and going to school during the day,” NBC reporter Julia Ainsley said on-air. “There were even some police reports where teachers and school officials said that there were children falling asleep in class because of their work overnight at the slaughterhouse.”
The NBC report added:
In January, three officials from the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News that federal investigators were looking into whether any of the children were victims of labor trafficking.
Homeland Security Investigations agents have interviewed children who worked cleaning a slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, they said.
There is no indication DHS is investigating PSSI for human trafficking. Instead, two DHS officials said, DHS is investigating to rule out the possibility that outside traffickers may have forced children to work for PSSI and profited off their labor
In recent months, teenagers have been found working for a company that makes auto parts for Hyundai. In August, Breitbart reported on a criminal case in central Illinois:
Throughout the approximately five years Victim I resided [in Champaign, Ill.] with Catarina Domingo-Juan, she was subjected to regular physical abuse by Catarina Domingo-Juan including being beaten, stabbed with a kitchen knife, and burned with a pan of oil. Additionally, Victim 1 was sexually assaulted by four male members of Catarina Domingo-Juan’s extended family. Victim 1 told Catarina Domingo-Juan about the sexual assaults. Victim I initially went to school but then starting at the age of 12 was forced to start working, initially cleaning hotels, when she was not in school.
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. The inflow has also contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
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.
