Biden’s Child Migrants Used at Hyundai Auto Parts Factory

Migrant children from Central America were used in low-wage manufacturing jobs for the Hyundai Motor auto factory in Alabama, according to a report by Reuters.

“Reuters learned of underage workers at the Hyundai-owned supplier following the brief disappearance in February of a Guatemalan migrant child from her family’s home in Alabama,” says the July 22 report headlined “Hyundai Subsidiary Has Used Child Labor at Alabama Factory.” The report continues:

The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the [the SMART Alabama LLC] plant earlier this year and weren’t going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people’s account in an interview with Reuters.

The article also included statements from other workers about additional children who were holding jobs at the Alabama-based parts supplier in Luverne that would otherwise have been held by Americans:

One former worker at SMART, an adult migrant who left for another auto industry job last year, said there were around 50 underage workers between the different plant shifts, adding that he knew some of them personally. Another former adult worker at SMART, a U.S. citizen who also left the plant last year, said she worked alongside about a dozen minors on her shift.

“We’re building a child laborforce under the Biden administration because every [poor migrant] has to work with prices the way they are,” responded Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA. She continued:

It’s not surprising because [Biden’s deputies] are allowing a lot of poor people, including children, to come through our open border. Of course, they want to work. How else are they going to support themselves?

“We have a moral obligation to prevent things like this, to prevent the [migrant] deaths in the desert, to prevent the rapes of women and children coming across by the cartels, to prevent the child-labor trafficking, to prevent sex trafficking,” said Jenks. “All of that is entirely preventable by securing the border.”

The flood of child labor allows companies to avoid paying good wages to Americans and to avoid investing in the labor-saving machinery that allows Americans to earn more wages each day.

The imported workers and consumers also allow the investors to avoid creating risky but profitable businesses in distant countries.

The savings from the reported use of Democrat-sponsored child labor flows to company owners, investors, and their political allies in Washington, DC.

Since February 2021, Biden’s deputies have allowed more than 200,000 young migrants — children, teenagers, and young-look adults — to cross the border via the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” legal loophole. Overall, Biden has allowed entry by roughly two million migrants, including roughly 700,000 migrants who sneaked past the reception centers at the border.

Since 2020, a few media outlets have posted reports about the flood of child labor into U.S. jobs.

In February, Reuters reported:

After borrowing $10,000 for smugglers to get her through Mexico, -16-year-old] 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.

…

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.”

“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.

…

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.

Some children are getting killed on their way to Biden’s welcome. The Associated Press reported from Guatemala on July 16:

The body of 13-year-old Pascual Melvin Guachiac Sipac arrived around midday in Guatemala’s capital. Twenty-one Guatemalans were among the migrants who died after being abandoned in a tractor-trailer June 27 in sweltering heat.

…

Guachiac Sipac was an Indigenous Quiche who spoke little Spanish, but he set out nonetheless with his cousin for the United States, both hoping to work and help their families. His cousin, Wilmer Tulul, died too and his body was expected to return to Guatemala Saturday. They were from Tzucubal, a community of about 1,500 people in the mountains nearly 100 miles northwest of the capital, where most live by subsistence farming.

The migrants, including the younger migrants who use the “Unaccompanied Alien Child” pathway, are delivered to Biden’s border chief by the coyote labor-smuggling groups.

In turn, the border chief, Alejandro Mayorkjas, provides the migrants and children with temporary legal status. He has also helped create a network of non-profit groups that are funded by government grants and business-backed charities. The non-profits often transport the migrants to U.S. job sites, often for free.

Many additional migrants sneak past the border processing overseen by Mayorkas. These illegal migrants are often transported illegally by for-profit criminals. Federal officials do little to suppress this network, even though it can be hazardous to migrants.

Once at the worksite, the migrants work off their smuggling debts under abusive conditions imposed by the U.S. labor brokers who paid the coyotes to deliver the migrants to Mayorkas. The law-breaking worksites are rarely inspected by federal, state, or local officials, largely because business groups are so influential at all levels of government.

“There’s no question that Mayorkas is part of the supply chain,” said Jenks, adding:

The progressives in Congress are complicit. He is far worse than that. This is his doing. He might as well be driving trucks to take them where they’re going. It’s not the fault of the government officials who are actually driving them or busing them or flying them or whatever, because they’re being forced to by Mayorkas.

But Democrats and the establishment media are eager to hide the trafficking of child labor into U.S. workplaces, Jenks said:

It doesn’t fit their narrative and they don’t want to talk about the unintended consequences of open borders. They’re able and willing to ignore the death of migrants who die of dehydration in the desert — that’s a horrifying way to die — [so] they’re perfectly willing to ignore [the child labor] that. Kids working in a factory? They can ignore that easily.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants — plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This federal economic policy of Extraction Migration has skewed the free market in the United States by inflating the labor supply for the benefit of employers.

The inflationary policy makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.

Extraction migration has also slowed innovation and shrunk Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.