The Reuters news agency has exposed one small corner of the federal government’s extraction of debt-trapped child workers from poor countries for use in low-wage, low-tech, dangerous workplaces.
From Enterprise, Alabama, the news agency reported on a teenager who was delivered by federal officials to an Alabama home close to a chicken processing company:
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 [Customs and Border Protection] 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.
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One day, she said, she hopes to return to Guatemala. First, though, she must continue wiring most of her wages home, where her parents pay off the loan sharks and what she said is a dizzying interest rate of 10% per month. She’ll return, she said, “if I ever have the means.”
The government-delivered extraction and delivery of cheap migrant labor allows companies to avoid hiring Americans at decent wages. It also allows them to avoid buying the productivity-boosting, labor-saving machines that would allow Americans to get more work done each day.
Progressives justify Congress’s 2008 “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC) pipeline by saying it offers safety and education to endangered teenagers from Central America. But that claim means little to a poor girl from Guatemala.
“School isn’t for me,” Amelia told Reuters. “I have debts.”
Agents find a large group of migrants in the Arizona desert near Sasabe. The group included more than 50 percent classified as migrant children. (Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/Tucson Sector)
In a sidebar, Reuters described the abusive treatment of the semi-legal UAC child workers within the larger population of exploited migrants:
Poultry industry workers in and around Enterprise told Reuters that migrants, including minors, easily obtain fake credentials and supply those to staffing firms who help them find work in area plants. The firms, they said, sometimes dock workers’ pay for services, including transportation to and from the workplace, and deny them benefits like overtime pay, sick days, time off and medical coverage.
The youth labor trafficking pipeline was largely stopped in 2020 by former President Donald Trump amid loud opposition from Democrats and immigration reporters.
But President Joe Biden quickly reopened and expanded the pipeline. In fiscal year 2021, Biden admitted 125,000 UAC migrants, up from 33,000 under Trump in 2020. Two-thirds are male, and roughly 70 percent are older than 15, according to federal data .
The labor trafficking via the UAC program has been an open secret in Washington, DC, for many years — but it is ignored by pro-migration officials, advocates, lobbyists, and the Democratic legislators who are eager to portray border enforcement as racism.
“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.
ProPublica described the case of Garcia, a child from Guatemala:
He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the “coyote” who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn’t repay it, the family could lose its home.
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Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an air blow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. “I didn’t like it, working with so many oily parts,” he recalled. “And it was dangerous.”
Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an “oficina, ” the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the [migrant] teens interviewed by ProPublica — all but one of them male — say they don’t even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it’s just the place where someone told them they could find work.
Many of the UACs are seeking to join illegal migrant parents living in U.S. cities. But many are seeking work, often to help their poor parents. In September 2021, the Congressional Research Service reported that “in April 2018, during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, an [agency] official testified that [it] was unable to account for 1,475 of the 7,635 unaccompanied children placed with sponsors between October and December of 2017.”
Law enforcement agencies shut down some trafficking operations , including trafficking for prostitution, but are under pressure from politicians to preserve the labor migration.
Most Republicans ignore the inflow of child labor, despite the obvious political advantage of being able to portray their political rivals as complicit with child trafficking. But many business groups donate to GOP politicians and state campaign committees.
The reality is periodically acknowledged by some migration advocates. In February 2016, the Washington Post ‘s editorial board warned officials of labor trafficking into a hidden child labor economy:
A recently released Senate report confirmed that HHS in 2014 placed at least six children with a ring of human traffickers, who then forced them to work at Trillium egg farm in Ohio for as little as $2 a day. According to a 2015 criminal indictment, the children were subjected to inhumane treatment — forced to work six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and the traffickers “repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks.” The children were housed in trailers with “no bed, no heat, no hot water, no working toilets, and vermin.”
Even Biden’s border security chief admits the children are being trafficked through his agency. Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told Univision anchor Jorge Ramos in a March 2021 interview :
What we need to do as a nation is, we need to invest and address the root causes so that parents do not need to send their children alone to leave their countries of origin, to leave their homes, to traverse Mexico, only to get to get to the southern border and to be placed in the hands of traffickers.
But Mayorkas is a pro-migration zealot and he is willing to ignore child trafficking while he continues to encourage more migrants to risk their lives to get into the United States. In March 2021, he declared :
We will also not waver in our values and our principles as a Nation. Our goal is a safe, legal, and orderly immigration system that is based on our bedrock priorities: to keep our borders secure, address the plight of children as the law requires, and enable families to be together. As noted by the President in his Executive Order, “securing our borders does not require us to ignore the humanity of those who seek to cross them.” We are both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. That is one of our proudest traditions.
Many migrants die while trying to reach Mayorkas’s welcome.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, testifies during a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing May 13, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee is hearing testimony about the Biden administration’s plan to deal with unaccompanied minors at the Southern U.S. border. (Photo by Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images)
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point , and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs .
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states. The growing gaps mean that midwestern states lose investment, jobs, and wealth to the migration-inflated coastal states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing , anti-establishment , multiracial , cross-sex , non-racist , class-based , bipartisan , rational , persistent , and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
NY Times: Immigration, If Not Reduced, Driving U.S. to Records Last Seen in 1890 Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for ReedPop 2:54
Overall immigration to the United States, if not reduced, is set to drive the nation’s foreign-born share of the population to records not seen since in over a century, the New York Times admits.
In 1890, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population stood at a record 14.8 percent. According to the Times , current legal and illegal immigration levels — more than 1.5 million legal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens arrive each year — are on pace to match and potentially outpace that record high.
Stated another way, foreign-born residents could begin to account for 3 in 20 of all U.S. residents. Already, the nation’s foreign-born population continues to hit historic highs, now standing at 46.2 million . Compare that figure to 1970, when the foreign-born population was just 9.6 million.
The Times reports :
As of December, immigrants represented 14.1 percent of the U.S. population , matching the peak of the decades-long immigration boom that began in the 1960s and approaching the record 14.8 percent seen in 1890 , shortly before large numbers of Europeans began disembarking from vessels at Ellis Island. [Emphasis added]
The foreign-born population is increasingly concentrated among middle-age groups , with a large number of immigrants having lived in the United States for many years. About 1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 40 and 64 was born overseas. And two-thirds of foreign-born residents have been in the country more than a decade , the census data shows. [Emphasis added]
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If immigration returns to even its relatively modest pre-pandemic pace, it is possible the share of Americans born overseas could reach the record 14.8 percent from 1890 . [Emphasis added]
Migration Policy Institute
U.S. Census Bureau data released last year showed that the nation’s population has hit a record 331.9 million , driven mostly by legal immigration levels that have gone unreduced in more than five decades.
Previously, the agency projected that overall immigration will bring the U.S. population to more than 400 million by 2060, when 1 in 6 residents will be foreign-born.
The U.S. population does not have to rapidly increase to record highs. In the past, legal immigration moratoriums have been implemented . Research has shown that halting all immigration to the U.S. would stabilize the population to a comfortable 329 million residents in the next four decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.
DANIEL GREENFIELD
CNN Poll: Americans Rank Biden’s Open Border Among Top Problems this Year Brendan Smialowski/Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images 2:57
American adults say illegal immigration at the United States border under President Joe Biden is among the top problems facing the nation this year, a CNN poll reveals.
The poll, released on Thursday, reveals that Americans — including swing voters — consider securing the U.S. border the third most important problem that Congress and Biden should address this year.
The issue of illegal immigration at the border ranks behind reducing inflation and protecting voting rights for American citizens.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas agreed , in a closed-door meeting last month, that illegal immigration is “worse now than … ever.”
Among registered Republicans and self-described conservatives, illegal immigration at the border is the top priority that Congress and Biden must address. Democrats and those who “lean Democrat,” in contrast, consider illegal immigration their last concern.
White working class Americans, those without a college degree, consider illegal immigration at the border and reducing inflation the two biggest problems facing the nation at the moment.
Non-college-educated Americans, of all races, see illegal immigration as the second highest priority just behind reducing inflation.
Migrants exit a Border Patrol bus and prepare to be received by the Val Verde Humanitarian Coalition after crossing the Rio Grande on September 22, 2021 in Del Rio, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The poll is only the latest that suggests Americans, by and large, take issue with Biden’s massive expansion of Catch and Release at the border, a policy that has released hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens into the U.S. interior and incentivized nearly two million border crossers last year alone.
Most of those released into the U.S. interior can apply for work permits.
Biden’s operation includes using American taxpayer money to bus and fly border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities — with destinations including Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, South Carolina, and other states.
The Catch and Release initiative has been paired with Biden’s gutting of interior immigration enforcement via so-called “sanctuary country ” orders that ban federal immigration agents from arresting and deporting most of the nation’s 11 to 22 million illegal aliens.
Most recent data published by Breitbart News shows that Biden cut deportations of illegal aliens by more than 85 percent in his first eight months as president. Compared to 2019, Biden has cut deportations by nearly 90 percent.
The CNN poll was conducted from January 10 to Feburary 8, 2022, and surveyed more than 1,500 American adults. The margin of error is +/- 3.3 percentage points.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
Biden Eyes Plan to More Easily Free Young Adult Illegal Aliens into U.S. John Moore/Getty Images 2:27
President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) top officials are shaping up a program that would more easily allow young adult border crossers and illegal aliens to live freely in the United States, Breitbart News has learned.
The Biden administration is currently seeking bids for a DHS contract that will ensure border crossers and illegal aliens ages 18 to 19 years old — who officials say “pose a low flight risk” — are hardly monitored by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency after their release into the U.S. interior.
Whereas existing DHS programs have stricter compliance guidelines, the new program would allow border crossers and illegal aliens to be monitored by “community-based services” and would not require participants to be monitored by GPS tracking.
“This program will not include GPS or other monitoring technology,” an ICE release on the program states.
Instead, the program will only require that most border crossers and illegal aliens check in monthly with ICE agents via telephone. The program would also “develop and maintain a network of age-appropriate and culturally sensitive community resources” for border crossers and illegal aliens.
Sources close to Breitbart News said the Biden-linked federal contractor Endeavors is almost certain to score the contract to carry out key provisions of the program. Endeavors won a $530 million contract with DHS last year after hiring a former Biden administration official.
Endeavors is funded by a number of corporate-backed organizations like the Bob Woodruff Foundation, United Way, and the Hispanic Federation — all of which have ties to multinational corporations and the nation’s biggest banks.
The federal contractor also takes taxpayer money through a variety of contracts with the federal government, the state of Texas, and local governments in North Carolina.
The program would be the latest measure initiated by the Biden administration to briefly detain border crossers and illegal aliens before quickly releasing them into the U.S. interior — often by buses or commercial domestic flights.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
AG Brnovich: Arizona Can Defend Itself from ‘Invasion’ by Cartels ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP via Getty Images 5:02
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich determined that the crimes committed by transnational cartels at the southern border constitute an “invasion,” which Arizona can defend itself from, according to a legal opinion issued on Monday.
Brnovich wrote :
The violence and lawlessness at the border caused by transnational cartels and gangs satisfies the definition of an “invasion” under the U.S. Constitution, and Arizona therefore has the power to defend itself from this invasion under the Governor’s authority as Commander-in-Chief. An actual invasion permits the State to engage in defensive actions within its own territory at or near its border.
Brnovich’s opinion argued the definition of “actually invaded” includes actions by “hostile non-state actors” and is not limited to hostile actions by foreign states.
Furthermore, the commonly understood meaning at the time of the word “invade” covers the activities of the transnational cartels and gangs at the border—they enter Arizona “in [a] hostile manner”; they “enter as an enemy, with a view to … plunder”; they “attack,” “assail,” and “assault”; and they “infringe,” “encroach on,” and “violate” Arizona.
His opinion relied on two constitutional clauses: Article I’s State Self-Defense Clause and Article IV’s Invasion Clause. The State-Self Defense Clause allows states to “engage in war” when “actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay” without Congress’s approval. The Invasion Clause states the federal government “shall protect each [state] against invasion.”
Brnovich cited cartel involvement in drug smuggling, sex and human trafficking, and border violence as proof of the invasion at the southern border. “In 2021, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office encountered 43,229 unauthorized aliens and 51 drug smugglers,” he wrote.
The Arizona Attorney General bolstered his argument with a quote from James Madison, who cited “Virginia using its militia to stop smugglers as an example of a valid exercise of the invasion power.”
“The principal activity of transnational cartels and gangs at the border is to smuggle people and drugs for profit,” he wrote. “Indeed, using the state militia to suppress smugglers was Madison’s paradigmatic example of a justified and Constitutional use of the state militia.”
Former Director Russ Vought of the White House Office of Management—a Cabinet-rank officer—and former Acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Ken Cuccinelli called on Arizona Governor Doug Ducey (R) to invoke the Invasion clause to secure Arizona’s border last October.
Republican Arizona state Rep. Jake Hoffman requested Brnovich’s legal opinion on whether cartel activity at the border constitutes an “invasion.”
Brnovich’s opinion made clear that the decision to act under these constitutional powers is left to Gov. Ducey.
Thus, while this Opinion has concluded that transnational cartel and gang activity in Arizona would meet the legal standard to justify exercise of the State’s power under the State Self-Defense Clause, only the Governor of the State of Arizona has the power to make a final determination that such exercise is justified.
After Brnovich issued his opinion, Cuccinelli again called on Ducey to invoke these powers. “Now we call on Gov. Doug Ducey to use this very clear legal and constitutional authority to protect the people of Arizona from the invasion they’re suffering through their southern border,” he told Fox News.
“It’s not enough for states like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California to complain about Joe Biden’s failure to do his job, they have the authority to protect themselves,” Cuccinelli added .
In response to Brnovich’s opinion, a Ducey spokesperson called out DHS Secretary Mayorkas and noted that the governor deployed the National Guard to the border.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas admitted himself the border is the worst it’s been in over 20 years. He needs to be held accountable. This administration needs to be held accountable. They have totally failed to address this very real public safety and humanitarian crisis,” said Ducey’s communications director CJ Karamargin. He continued:
Arizona has and will continue to protect our communities with our National Guard, our Border Strike Force and in partnership with local law enforcement. For Attorney General Brnovich to imply the Guard is not on our border does them a serious disservice and shows that he fails to appreciate the commitment these men and women have to protecting Arizona.
Immigration officials apprehended more than 1.7 million migrants in fiscal year 2021 and encountered 178,840 in December alone.
Other attorneys general from border states are yet to issue their own analysis on this issue.
