PUSH TO ADDRESS CHILD LABOR BOGS DOWN
Legislation to crack down on exploitation of migrants becomes mired in immigration standoff in Congress
Weeks after revelations that migrant children are being regularly exploited for cheap labor in the United States prompted bipartisan outrage and calls to action on Capitol Hill, Congress has moved no closer to addressing the issue, which has become mired in a long-running partisan war over immigration policy.
Legislation to crack down on companies’ use of child labor has gone nowhere and has little Republican backing, while Democrats’ efforts to increase funding for federal agencies to provide more support services to migrant children who cross the border by themselves face long odds in the House, where the GOP has pledged to slash agency budgets.
At the time, Republican proposals to institute tougher vetting of adults in households sponsoring migrant children and expedite the removal of unaccompanied minors stand little chance of gaining ground in the Democratic Senate.
Instead, as Congress prepares to wade into a bitter debate over immigration policy in the coming days, Republicans and Democrats have retreated to their opposite corners, abandoning whatever initial hope there may have been for tackling the issue of child labor in a bipartisan way.
Republicans have pointed to exploitative conditions at companies employing migrant children, documented in an investigation by The New York Times, to justify a hard-line immigration package. The Times reported in February that as the number of children crossing the southern border alone has soared to record levels, many have taken on dangerous jobs that violate labor laws, including in factories, slaughterhouses and at construction sites.
The GOP’s legislation, headed for a House vote this week, would restore a series of stringent policies championed under the Trump administration, including measures to hold migrant children in detention centers and expedite their deportation.
Democrats, desperate to avoid any appearance of aiding Republicans in their fight against President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, have quieted their criticism of the government’s handling of the situation, instead directing their anger at the companies that employ migrant children.
The result is that the political space is vanishing for consensus in Congress on a solution to help protect children from exploitation.
“I know it’s complicated, but this really needs to be about protecting kids, and not about the bigger politics of the border,” Janet Murguía, president of the Latino civil rights advocacy organization UnidosUS, said in an interview, accusing Republicans of “playing politics” and Democrats of being “skittish” in confronting the problem. “It’s a no-brainer. It should be easy to find bipartisan support on this.”
The Biden administration has taken steps to change some of its policies since the Times revealed the explosion in child migrant labor. The Health and Human Services Department, which is responsible for placing unaccompanied migrant children in the care of trustworthy adults, has designated a team to support children
after they leave government shelters, and is providing more children with case management and legal services. The department’s inspector general is also conducting an evaluation of the vetting system used to place migrant children in homes.
The Labor Department has begun initiatives to enhance its enforcement of child labor laws, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last month that his department was adding a new mission to address crimes of exploitation, including a focus on migrant child labor victims.
Still, there is little sign of momentum to enact legislation that could stop the exploitation of child migrants as workers. In the opening throes of lawmakers’ outrage, Republicans and Democrats spoke out angrily about the issue, taking the Biden administration to task. Leading members of both parties sent rounds of letters to Cabinet secretaries demanding to know
how unaccompanied minors ended up filling dangerous jobs on factory shifts. Lawmakers drafted bipartisan legislation to raise fines against companies violating child labor laws.
But by the time Congress held its first oversight hearings on the issue last month, the subject had been subsumed into a looming fight in the House over a border security bill, and a rampedup Republican campaign to impeach Mayorkas over the state of the southern border.
Even in a series of hearings organized to address the trend of migrant child labor, Republicans have used the topic to condemn the Biden administration’s overall immigration policies.
“This is a crisis made worse by President Biden’s open-border agenda,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, RWash., and the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said last month during an oversight hearing with the inspector general of the Health and Human Services
Department.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley, RMo., pressed Mayorkas on the issue, suggesting it should cost him his job.
“You have at every stage facilitated this modern-day indentured servitude of children,” he said. “Why should you not be impeached for this?”
At the same time, Democrats have tempered their criticism of the Biden administration for the crisis, even as some of them have continued to declare the government’s handling of the matter unacceptable. They have reserved their toughest words for Republicans, whose proposed policies they argue would worsen a humanitarian crisis.
“It is hard to take seriously the party that boasts of its concerns for exploited children while simultaneously stripping vital protections from unaccompanied children,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said during the recent hearing.
In the Senate, Richard Durbin, D-Ill. and the chair of the Judiciary Committee, said last week that he was working to bring in senior officials to testify about migrant child exploitation. Durbin was one of the first Democrats to send letters to the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, demanding to know what steps were being taken to protect children from the conditions laid out in the Times’ reporting.