Editor's Note: Should teenagers be allowed to work? This once benign issue has increasingly become a topic of controversy on the socialist end of the political left, pitting a cherished American right of passage against a union push to standardize wages and drive supply from the labor pool, all dishonestly argued in the name of protecting children. Oddly less central to the question of ‘child exploitation’ has been the issue of child trafficking, which continues unabated, and which our purported human rights heroes have no current plan to combat.

A great Sunday feature from River Page.

-Solana

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My great-grandfather’s mother died in childbirth. When he was nine, skin cancer robbed his father of a human face. He’d lay awake at night screaming until he passed out from the pain. Then he’d wake up and start screaming again. My great-grandfather left school and got work on a railroad and worked as many hours as it took to buy enough morphine to knock the old man out for the night. When I was a kid, his youngest daughter, my grandmother, used to tell me that story over and over. Once, she showed me his old draft card, signed with an X, because he couldn’t write his own name. Now that she’s dead, my mother and my aunt tell the story — no baby cousin, or great-niece, or Yankee daughter-in-law can escape it.

I’ve been thinking about my great-grandfather a lot over the past year, as debates over child labor have erupted across the United States. In March, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill that eliminated the need for 14- and 15-year-olds to apply for a government permit in order to secure a job. A bill introduced in Minnesota would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work in construction. A bill in Iowa that recently passed the state senate would allow minors to work longer hours, serve alcohol in restaurants, and allow the Iowa Department of Education and the Iowa Department of Work to grant exceptions for jobs currently banned for minors as long as they are part of a training program with adequate supervision and safety precautions, and unions protested. A recently released investigation by the New York Times reported that child labor violations have quadrupled since 2015. This February, a high-profile violation involving children as young as 13 using “caustic chemicals to clean razor-sharp saws” during overnight shifts in slaughterhouses made national headlines. In recent weeks, NPR and HBO’s John Oliver have both called attention to the presence of minor workers in agriculture. With all of this attention, you’d think that substantial numbers of American children were being subjected to labor conditions not seen since the gilded age.

But they aren’t.

There is a broad cultural consensus in the United States that children should not work at the expense of school, or work in dangerous occupations. Summer and after-school jobs in retail, foodservice, and (at least where I grew up, agriculture) have long been seen as appropriate for teens. My own work experience started when I was 12, tossing 70-pound hay bales onto a trailer. It was hard, sweaty work that left me scratched and sunburned. I never thought much of it (still don’t) and was happy for the cash. At 16, my parents forced me to get a job at a grocery store. I was angry — not because I didn’t want to work — but because I was extremely shy, and the thought of being forced to talk to strangers all day petrified me. Within a few weeks, it didn’t petrify me anymore. The job helped me overcome my social anxiety and paid for my gas. The experience was not only harmless but actively positive.

My experience, and that of millions of other Americans, is entirely different than the sort of child labor that robbed my great-grandfather of the ability to write his own name. Child labor of this sort has been rightfully prohibited in the United States. However, such prohibitions are only meaningful because the sort of extreme poverty which sends a nine-year-old to work on a railroad to buy morphine for his dying father has been largely eliminated in the United States. However, such poverty persists in Central America, and it is fueling a child labor crisis here — one that has nothing to do with 17-year-olds in Des Moines serving mimosas at a Sunday brunch.

A recent exposé by Hannah Dreir in the New York Times revealed what Drier called a “new economy of exploitation.” This “new economy of exploitation” does not speak to the leniency of child labor laws, multiple violations of which were recorded by the Times, but rather an immigration policy that is tantamount to state-sanctioned human trafficking. Here’s how it works: 

Seeking remittances, poor parents in Central America send their children alone to the Southern border, often with the help of smugglers that the children will later be required to pay off. “The kids almost all have a debt to pay off, and they’re super stressed about it,” a former H.H.S. contractor told the New York Times. After they are apprehended by Border Control, typically after turning themselves in and claiming asylum, they are handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and remain in the agency’s care until they can be released to sponsors. The children then live with these sponsors until their asylum cases are adjudicated, which takes years.

The government insists that most of these sponsors are family members, but the New York Times report shows that many sponsors are unrelated adults who charge the children for rent, food, and other basic needs. Although sponsors are required to enroll the children in school, some never do, and others later allow, encourage, or even force children to drop out in order to work. HHS is supposed to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen, but they’ve completely failed, losing immediate contact with a third of the migrant children under its purview. The migrant children either work in the informal economy (such as day laborers) or in formal settings where they misrepresent their age to incurious employers. Caseworkers estimate that two-thirds of unaccompanied migrant children end up working full-time, according to The Times. 

Democrats have correctly assessed that the easing of restrictions on child labor is an attempt to loosen the labor market and keep wages low. That doesn’t make them particularly perceptive — some Republican lawmakers who support the bills have said as much. But how interesting that, after years of dismissing concerns over the deleterious effects of mass immigration on wages as little more than racist pretext, liberals have finally discovered the supply and demand principle in labor. When it comes to child labor of the objectionable sort — work which is dangerous or which requires long or late-night hours that interfere with school — Democrats have created the supply. The number of unaccompanied child minors released to sponsors exploded under the Biden administration, from under 17,000 in fiscal year 2020 to over 107,000 in 2021 and over 127,000 in 2022. The party which wept over “kids in cages” during the Trump administration is increasingly putting kids in slaughterhouses, sock factories, and the hands of human traffickers. The fast-tracking of discharges from ORR under the Biden administration is almost certainly working as an incentive for even more parents to send their children alone to the border, as the ability of those children to start working and sending money back home has now been expedited. 

There is no way to combat objectionable child labor without overhauling the asylum system, which has been abused to the point of uselessness. More specifically, discharge from ORR must be completely ended. Unaccompanied minor children should remain in ORR custody until their claims are adjudicated. Does this mean kids in cages? Yes. Kids in cages — all of them, until adjudication — is the only way to remove the financial incentive for unaccompanied child migration. When Honduran and Guatemalan parents realize their children won’t earn a single dollar to send back home, they will stop sending them here. Relatively minor changes to working hours for teenagers in certain states are largely irrelevant in the face of an immigration system that has undermined 100 years of federal child labor law. Human smugglers don’t care what the law says, and 15-year-old Guatemalan immigrants don’t know what it says. Unaccompanied minor children broke the law in coming to this country, and they will break the law to work in it at the behest of their parents, sponsors, and smugglers, if not of their own volition. Until that reality is confronted and something is done about it, egregious forms of child labor will become evermore commonplace, regardless of what the Iowa legislature does.

-River Page