By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com
A few days ago, the New York Times published a major investigative report about how Joe Biden's open borders have created a boom time for illegal alien child labor exploiters.
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: 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.
Well, now Joe Biden says he's "shocked, shocked," at Hannah Dreier's extensive report highlighting the surge in child labor exploitation not seen since the days of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and he says he simply has to take action:
The Biden administration on Monday announced a wide crackdown on the labor exploitation of migrant children around the United States, including more aggressive investigations of companies benefiting from their work.
The development came days after The New York Times published an investigation into the explosive growth of migrant child labor throughout the United States. Children, who have been crossing the southern border without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in punishing jobs that flout child labor laws, The Times found.
The White House laid out a host of new initiatives to investigate child labor violations among employers and improve the basic support that migrant children receive when they are released to sponsors in the United States. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, called the revelations in The Times "heartbreaking" and "completely unacceptable."
Turns out unaccompanied migrant children need support — lots of support. They're expensive. The Bidenites have not been paying for that support after they've let them all in as come-one, come-all asylum cases. They've been handing them off to creepy human-traffickers who've gone unvetted, some taking huge numbers of kids in groups of 20 and packing them off to work at the egg farms or a host of other industries.
The Times described how that goes:
But as more and more minors have crossed the border, the Biden administration has ramped up demand on H.H.S. staff members to release the children from shelters as quickly as possible. Mr. Becerra has urged staff members to move with the speed of an assembly line, The Times found. The department rolled back protections that had been in place for years, including some background checks and reviews of children's files.
A spokeswoman for the department said last week that it was in the best interest of children to be quickly moved out of detention and that the department had not compromised safety.
Once children are released, they have few options for additional help. Most leave shelters with little but the phone number for a national hotline run by H.H.S. The Times found that children were calling the hotline to report labor exploitation and hearing nothing back. Operators were generally referring calls to local law enforcement and other agencies, who may not have followed up.
On Monday, senior administration officials said Health and Human Services would now direct operators to return calls to children and require them to explain what local law enforcement agency would be in touch.
Maybe these kids shouldn't be here in the first place, but that isn't anything the Times, or the Biden administration, has ever considered. Just shovel out more of the taxpayer money, and "punish" companies who exploit the kids, including those up the supply chain, and they've got 'er fixed, right?
Not exactly. The interesting part of this is who the exploiters-to-be-punished are. Who are these brazen violators of child labor laws reminiscent of what goes on in some place like China and Bangladesh?
None other than Biden's own wokesterly company allies:
The Times found products made with child labor in the American supply chains of major brands and retailers, including Ben & Jerry's, Fruit of the Loom, Ford, General Motors, J. Crew, Walmart, Whole Foods and Target. In Grand Rapids, Mich., children worked late nights at plants operated by Hearthside Food Solutions, which makes and packages food for other companies, including General Mills, Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats.
Ben & Jerry's? Bailed-out General Motors? Wokester kings Target and Walmart? Greenie-sustainable Whole Foods?
Be interesting to see the response when Joe Biden goes after them — and there is plenty of reason to think that Biden is too cowardly and cynical to do it.
The Times reports that Hearthside Foods, which contracts with General Mills, is currently under investigation. That company is not famous for its greenie virtue-signaling or donations to Democrats. The others, though, have been loudly virtue-signaling for years, and turns out they are the biggest exploiters as well as big donors to Democrats.
So will Biden really do it, or is his claim to be investigating exploitative corporations just a public relations measure, targeting only a few token non-woke corporate violators to have something to tell the papers?
We all know which answer is more likely, which may well mean that this child migrant labor exploitation, along with Joe's open border, continues. Biden, after all, is loyal to his allies, and both he and they have a job to do to maintain that migrant pipeline into the states.
As for Biden himself, the impact of his open-borders policies as the problem at the root of the problem, somehow never gets brought up. It raises the question of whether the crackdown on corporations is little more than a bid to cover up his own role in the horrible exploitation of migrant children.
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