The United States has a child labor problem.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone; the last few months of media coverage have spotlighted its troubling prevalence in nearly every industry nationwide. But the solution to child labor isn’t a simple matter of beefing up enforcement and raising fines on employers. Child labor is wrapped in a web of complexity requiring a deeper examination of oversight policies, systemic failures, and often-contrary regulations driving this crisis.
As violence and poverty are gripping many countries in Central and South America, migrants—including unaccompanied minors—are inundating the border in search of safety and opportunity. In fact, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, 130,000 unaccompanied children were processed by U.S. officials along the southern border in fiscal year 2022. Since 2008, U.S. border officials have transferred these unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), placing them into shelters instead of immediately deporting them.
Unfortunately, HHS’s lack of proper oversight and inability to handle the tracking and placement of these minor children contributes to the child labor problem.
This record influx of unaccompanied minors is also causing overcrowding in shelters. With no room to accommodate this unanticipated wave, kids are being moved from temporary shelters to sponsor homes in the blink of an eye, preventing the system from tracking them. They should be safe in a household where the federal government has vetted the sponsor, but during a similar surge less than two years ago, the HHS eliminated some of the steps in that process. This may have inadvertently caused children to be released into the custody of improperly vetted homes.
Unaccompanied and now off the government’s radar, these minors are easy prey for bad actors who are obtaining unlawful employment for them—revealing the conflicting labor laws and regulations put in place by the Department of Labor (DOL) to prevent such circumstances from taking place.
To understand how that creates a pathway for children to obtain illegal work, look no further than the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The law “prohibits employers from hiring any individual…for employment in the U.S. without verifying his or her identity and employment authorization on Form I-9.” Unsurprisingly, this law—designed to prevent illegal hiring—led to the "creation of a large-scale black market for legal documents in the United States,” according to the CATO Institute.
To address the resulting escalation of ID fraud, the U.S. government launched the E-Verify system as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. E-Verify, which is not run by the DOL but by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), compares documentation provided on a job applicant’s I-9 Form against government records to determine the employment eligibility of both U.S. and foreign citizens. While not mandated for all employers, it is considered the gold standard for determining identity and eligibility.
When an employee applies for a job and has been certified through the E-Verify system, companies trust that the U.S. government has vetted and confirmed these candidates' identities. Yet, even if employers are slightly suspicious, they’re also caught in the crosshairs of anti-discrimination laws which prohibit them from discriminating against any individual seeking employment based on their citizenship or immigration status, among other factors.
Employers must navigate this complex gauntlet hundreds of times over depending on the size of their business. It certainly isn’t foolproof as NBC News found out recently when it was forced to retract a story it ran about a migrant teenager working illegally on the overnight shift at a slaughterhouse. He wasn’t a minor after all, and if a major news operation cannot accurately verify one individual's age, you can imagine how difficult it must be for employers to do so for the large number of migrants applying for jobs with their company.
Too often we point the finger at companies that hire these children without realizing that in many cases the companies are not intentionally hiring minors. Moreover, these companies don’t have the resources of a news outlet like NBC to fly down to Guatemala to obtain the birth certificate of an adult who lied about being a minor to get into America.
Simply put, there are 16 or 17-year-old migrants finding ways to obtain fraudulent identification, and they’re using it to gain federal verification for work (E-Verify), which employers are responsibly relying on. Even if an employer does have doubts, they’re also bound by anti-discrimination laws to prevent these individuals from obtaining employment.
Complex laws and systemic failures of the agencies tasked to handle immigration and child labor irrefutably contribute to this growing crisis in our country. While there are steps that companies can take on their own, the buck certainly doesn’t stop with them. This situation requires a collaborative approach that spans every level of government and agency to keep children from ending up in unsafe jobs.
The minors crossing our borders desperately searching for a better life deserve that.
