In the wake of shocking revelations about migrant kids working exploitative jobs linked to some of America’s biggest companies, Republicans and right-wing media figures have debuted a new claim: These horrors are the fault of President Biden’s “open border.”
The right’s case is that Biden’s 2021 decision to allow unaccompanied migrant children to enter the country — reversing a Trump-era policy — has led directly to those kids being exploited by unscrupulous employers.
“It is modern-day slavery — it is child labor,” Sen. Josh Hawley fulminated to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham this week. The Missouri Republican alleged that officials have lost track of almost 90,000 migrant kids and “don’t care” that this has led to “kids in slavery.”
“Where have they gone?” Hawley continued. “Right into the hands of smugglers, who are now making them work overnight shifts.” He called this “the biggest child smuggling and trafficking operation in American history.” Ingraham agreed, describing this as the administration’s “policy.”
Similarly, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) has blamed the revelations about kids working “illegal full time jobs” on the release of “unaccompanied alien children to poorly vetted sponsors.” Rep. Jake LaTurner (R-Kan.) has insisted kids are being “exploited for illegal child labor” thanks to our border “crisis.”
It’s true, as a New York Times investigation found, that underage teenagers are working long, brutal shifts in factories and other businesses in violation of child labor laws. When your kid eats Lucky Charms for breakfast or a Nature Valley granola bar for school snack, they might have been packaged by kids of roughly the same age.
What’s more, many of those kids are migrants from Central America. Those who arrive unaccompanied are placed with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services. And yes, soaring arrivals have compelled HHS to move them to sponsors quickly — sometimes too quickly, caseworkers say.
But here the right’s argument veers into deception. For instance, Hawley’s claim that HHS doesn’t care that nearly 90,000 kids have been “lost” to “slavery” is wildly absurd.
Here’s the deal: HHS does a follow-up call to sponsors to check on kids, and in the past two years, 85,000 such calls went unanswered. But an HHS spokesperson says sponsors and kids are not required to answer checkup calls; we only know sponsors didn’t pick up the phone, nothing more. (Hundreds of thousands of minors have crossed the border, and HHS says 81 percent of follow-ups are answered, so unanswered calls are not representative of the situation.)
Nor is there any basis to conclude that those unreached kids correlate with those who end up in exploitative situations. There is plenty of grounds to worry about those kids, but Hawley’s claims are unhinged speculation.
The right’s story is also disingenuous in a more fundamental sense. The claim is that the child labor problem shows the admission of unaccompanied kids to be inhumane in and of itself, as if they were deliberately admitted to create that labor. Hawley told Ingraham the administration is “happy to give” child laborers to corporations to drive down wages of U.S. workers.
That’s ludicrous on its face. But beyond this, the alternative to admission is not letting these kids into the country at all. Many of the parents and relatives who make the wrenching decision to send them unaccompanied into this country do so while knowing their fate in the United States will be uncertain, and weigh this against what they deem the worse alternative: Keeping kids in horrible situations at home.
Republicans such as Hawley want that worse option to be the only one available. They want a restoration of the Trump position that Biden reversed, one that largely banned asylum seeking for children as well as adults.
If Republicans actually care about the plight of migrant children in the United States, they might argue that HHS must do more to track them with, say, more follow-up calls or visits. They might argue that the Labor Department — which recently expanded enforcement against child labor law violations — must crack down even harder. Those are reasonable grounds for pressuring the administration to do better.
But Republicans don’t make those arguments. After all, this would entail calling for government to function better at settling migrant kids and policing unscrupulous employers — not things Republicans want to see happen.
This gets to the core of the deeper differences between the left and right: Each side defines the underlying problem differently. Most liberals believe barring migrant kids from entering is far more cruel than admitting them, even if admission in some cases leads to bad outcomes. For liberals, the problem is that more must be done to assure humane settlement of kids and crack down on their exploiters.
To some of these Republicans, by contrast, the problem is that unaccompanied kids are allowed in to begin with. Admitting them and settling them more humanely isn’t a solution; “solving” the child labor problem must inherently entail shutting that migration down.
If you wonder why the parties talk past each other on this issue, clarifying the actual Republican position explains a whole lot.
