Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) methodically shamed President Joe Biden’s border chief for importing a growing workforce of indebted teenage workers for exploitation by labor traffickers around the nation.
“Why is it that you have enabled 345,000 children [and teenagers] to be smuggled across this border and then sent into the hands of modern-day slave traders?” Hawley asked Mayorkas during a Senate hearing.
“These are modern-day slave traders, and you’re just giving these children to them. What is going on? Why are you doing this?” Hawley said.
Mayorkas dodged the question — “There are a number of factual inaccuracies in your question” — and then argued that his agency would police more U.S. worksites to prevent the exploitation of his indebted migrants while they work to pay off their high-interest debts to the cartel-backed smugglers:
[That is] quite a number of false statements … So if I can state what I’ve been trying to state: One of the significant policy decisions we have made is to focus our worksite enforcement investigative efforts, our criminal investigative efforts, on unscrupulous employers that exploit individuals because of their vulnerabilities, and that includes underage workers.
Hawley’s public shaming of Mayorkas — and his Democrat allies — is a rare effort by the donor-dominated GOP to help win political support from the non-ideological swing voters who help decided elections.
Many swing voters have ambivalent views about President Joe Biden’s decision to spike the wealth-shifting inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and renters. But those voters’ views may shift if GOP politicians spotlight the human and economic costs of Biden’s pro-migration policy.
The administration has welcomed hundreds of thousands of child migrants, alongside more than four million illegal and legal migrants.
The teenage migrants — dubbed “unaccompanied alien children” — must pay their high-interest smuggling debts by working, even at tough jobs for low wages.
Their desperation makes them attractive hires for U.S. employers who do not want to hire the roughly six million Americans who have been sidelined by age, criminal records, drugs, laziness, obesity, disability — or a reluctance to take jobs for wages below what they have been paid before.
Hawley’s shaming of Mayorkas also helps to put Democrats on the defensive, just as Democrats extensively used the media-magnified “child separation” claim to put President Donald Trump on the defensive in 2017.
The teenage labor scandal was made undeniable by detailed articles in the New York Times, including an April 17 article that said:
Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals.
…
One [migrant], Marvin Che, said he came to the United States last year, when he was 16, and had been working 12-hour overnight shifts alongside other migrant children packing products at the manufacturer Pactiv Evergreen, including Hefty plastic party cups. “We came alone, so we have to work hard,” Marvin said.
…
[In Florida,] a boy working construction said he felt ashamed about not knowing how to read. He, too, was released in 2021 — at age 12 — and was immediately put to work by a man who had sponsored at least five children. At a day-labor pickup site, a 13-year-old released last year to a man he had never met said he wished he could enroll in middle school and start learning English. “People don’t know,” Antonio said, “but there are a lot of kids here living the same life.”
The Democratic Party’s progressive wing favors the child migrant inflow because it helps illegal migrants move their dependent families into the United States. This resulting population shift creates more clients for the Democratic Party as it gradually displaces outspoken and demanding American citizens.
Extraction Migration
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, reduces beneficial trade, 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 and contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to an elite opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. 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.