“I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”
Thus relates David Copperfield within the Charles Dickens novel of the identical identify.
Of course, Dickens was a crusader towards the exploitation of youngsters. The edge is taken off the depictions of the heartless remedy of youngsters in his fiction, although, by the humorous and memorable portrayals of the malefactors, the upward trajectory of the lives of the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and the data that the practices that Dickens inveighed towards are a factor of the previous within the superior world.
This is all related at the moment, as a result of, as a giant New York Times report highlighted, we now have a Dickensian border coverage.
The Times particulars how so-called unaccompanied minors find yourself “in some of the most punishing jobs in the country.” The Times discovered: “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.”
The upshot of The Times piece is that we now have chosen to import a social drawback — as if we didn’t have sufficient already.
The Times experiences that the child-labor drive has “exploded” since 2021, which, after all, coincides with the appearance of Biden’s lax border insurance policies. 1 / 4 of one million kids have entered the United States over the previous two years.
For no good motive, we’ve made it troublesome for ourselves to rapidly ship dwelling minors approaching their very own from noncontiguous international locations, and thus we’ve enabled a market in youngster smuggling and youngster labor.
As The Times places 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 find yourself working full-time.
This is unhealthy for the children, corrupting to the businesses that exploit them, and unhealthy for our society typically.
The Department of Health and Human Services is accountable for sheltering the minors after they arrive, after which monitoring them upon launch. It just isn’t doing job, however the king’s treatment could be to have higher enforcement on the border and within the inside. That manner, kids wouldn’t be despatched alone throughout the border within the first place. But nobody in cost ever appears to think about that.
There are just a few different issues to be mentioned about all this.
One, it’s price remembering that migrants are presupposed to be asylum seekers; however nearly each time the press experiences in any element on the tales of particular person migrants, they show to be financial migrants.
Two, it’s laborious to consider that the supply of low cost, simply exploited unlawful youngster labor doesn’t exert downward stress on low-skilled wages.
Three, to not sound like a child-welfare nativist, however there are many kids already within the United States who desperately want the eye of caseworkers.
Despite The Times story, the madness on the border will proceed, and we could be assured that it’s not going to supply any nice literature.
Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief of National Review
Source: www.bostonherald.com”