Malign Neglect of the Border Led to America’s Child Helots

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, March 03, 2023

How many times do we have to say it? There is no such thing as benign neglect of the U.S. border.

America tolerates this chaos because it brings disproportionate benefits to the upwardly mobile class of Americans who employ illegal labor directly as gardeners, landscapers, housekeepers, and nannies. Or indirectly, in cash-driven businesses such as same-day delivery, car washes, and restaurants. Illegal immigration makes the life of double-income families feel more affluent.

Liberals tend to feel that the legal gray zone and free-for-all is beneficial. The migrants get the liberty and financial benefit of moving into the richest country in the world. Liberals see it as a step forward toward a future in which borders matter less — as goods, services, and people traverse them more and more. Conservatives tend to see something like a step backward, toward the cultivation of a helot class. Helots were state slaves in Sparta, assigned to work for and till the holdings of prominent Spartans.

Our neglect is not without huge cost to the migrants themselves, namely in that they are suddenly out of reach of the law. A 2012 poll found that 28 percent of U.S.-born Latinos agree with the statement, “I am less likely to contact police officers if I have been a victim of a crime for fear they will ask me or other people I know about our immigration status.” What that reflects is that the population of Latinos without legal status is so high, because of the likelihood of future amnesties. But until that day, each illegal migrant walks underneath a legal gray zone that envelops almost a third of Latino-American citizens with whom their lives are tied up.

A chaotic, barely enforced, ever-changing set of regulations is precisely the environment in which human traffickers and drug traffickers proliferate and take advantage of illegal migrants on both sides of the border. When the Biden administration announced it would end certain forms of legal detention, there was a child-migrant surge. And now that child-migrant surge is weakening our child-labor laws.

The New York Times in a blockbuster piece reports:

Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.

Some of the reporting points to firms taking advantage of the Biden administration’s determination never to have “kids in cages” by offering to put them in factories or workshops instead. The Times reports that the pressure to quickly find adult sponsors for these child migrants created a system “that rewards individuals for making quick releases, and not one that rewards individuals for preventing unsafe releases.”

Workplace enforcement of labor laws has been soft for years for the reasons stated above — it creates the illusion of even more prosperity for the most politically influential class in America. But that means we barely know how to use the tools that would save children from exploitation. “In the past decade, federal prosecutors have brought only about 30 cases involving forced labor of unaccompanied minors,” the Times reports.

The companies that employ illegal child-migrant labor include some of the most loudly “progressive” in the country, including Target and dairy suppliers for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. “In Worthington, Minn., it had long been an open secret that migrant children released by H.H.S. were cleaning a slaughterhouse run by JBS, the world’s largest meat processor. The town has received more unaccompanied migrant children per capita than almost anywhere in the country” the Times reports.

In effect, by promiscuously letting children in illegally, the Biden administration is making them something like stateless people — children who are deprived of the protection of our laws and their own nation’s laws. Republics are not fit places for a helot class. The Biden administration’s misguided idea of humanitarianism and public relations has expanded the American helot class to include children.