Our Dickensian Border Policy

By Rich Lowry

Monday, March 06, 2023

 

‘I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”

 

Thus relates David Copperfield in the Charles Dickens novel of the same name.

 

Of course, Dickens, who spent time in a workhouse himself when he was young, was a crusader against the exploitation of children. The edge is taken off the depictions of the heartless treatment of children in his fiction, though, by the funny and memorable portrayals of the malefactors; the upward trajectory of the lives of the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist; and the knowledge that the practices that Dickens inveighed against are a thing of the past in the advanced world.

 

It takes a heart of stone not to smile at the name of David’s cruel stepfather, Edward Murdstone (Mr. Murdstone, to you), or the wine-bottling factory where David unhappily works, Murdstone and Grinby.

 

The orphan Oliver Twist had a bad time of it in a workhouse in the town of Mudfug. Yet, as his story develops, at least Oliver avoids the dangerous fate of getting apprenticed to the chimney sweep, Mr. Gamfield. And, after his miseries with Fagin and his band of thieves, an unexpected inheritance and a happy adoption await him.

 

This is all relevant today, because, as a big New York Times report highlighted, we have a Dickensian border policy.

 

The Times details how so-called unaccompanied minors end up “in some of the most punishing jobs in the country.” Despite long-standing child-labor laws, the Times found “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.”

 

Needless to say, J.Crew and Walmart aren’t as charming as Murdstone and Grinby, and favorable plot twists are unlikely to be written into the stories of many of the kids caught up in this child-labor maw. Most important, this isn’t happening more than 150 years ago in another country, but right here and right now.

 

The upshot of the Times piece is that the United States has chosen to import a social problem — as if we didn’t have enough already.

 

The Times reports that the child-labor force has “exploded” since 2021, which, of course, coincides with the advent of Biden’s lax border policies. A quarter of a million children have entered the United States over the past two years.

 

For no good reason, we’ve made it difficult for ourselves to quickly send home minors coming on their own from non-contiguous countries, and thus we’ve enabled a market in child smuggling and child labor.

 

On top of this, upon taking office, Biden immediately suspended the application of Title 42 to unaccompanied minors. The way it works now is that kids show up at the border with a name and phone number of a sponsor, and the U.S. government automatically sends them to that person.

 

As the Times puts it: “These are not children who have stolen into the country undetected.”

 

Caseworkers interviewed by the Times estimate that two-thirds of all unaccompanied minors end up working full-time.

 

This is bad for the kids, corrupting to the companies that exploit them, dispiriting to the people who know this is happening but are powerless to stop it, and unhealthy for our society generally — there’s a reason that we don’t want young kids to work grinding jobs that blight their education and prospects.

 

The Department of Health and Human Services is in charge of sheltering the minors when they arrive, then placing them with sponsors, and then monitoring them afterward.

 

HHS is not doing a good job at this, and its secretary, Xavier Becerra, doesn’t come across well in the Times piece. You don’t have to be a Becerra fan, though, to realize he’s in an impossible situation. It looks horrible, and it isn’t permitted by the rules regardless, to hold kids in institution-like facilities for long, but there are also major downsides to moving them quickly.

 

The king’s cure would be to not have such an irrational system that leads to a de facto open border for a certain segment of illegal immigrants. That way, children wouldn’t be sent across the border in the first place, without their families, on an arduous journey with perhaps a dangerous factory job in the offing at their ultimate destination. But no one in charge ever seems to think of that.

 

There a few other things to be said about all this.

 

One, it’s worth remembering that migrants are supposed to be asylum-seekers, fleeing persecution in their home countries; but almost every time the press reports in any detail on the stories of individual migrants, they prove to be economic migrants.

 

Two, it’s hard to believe that the availability of cheap, easily exploited illegal child labor doesn’t exert downward pressure on low-skilled wages.

 

Three, not to sound like a child-welfare nativist, but there are plenty of children already in the United States who desperately need the attention of caseworkers.

 

Perhaps the Times story will move the needle in how child migrants are treated, but it is unlikely to lead to the reevaluation at the border that is necessary.

 

So the beat will go on, and we can be assured that it’s not going to produce any great literature.