by Jack Clancy
Belatedly, the southern border crisis is getting the attention it deserves.
There’s wall-to-wall coverage in the legacy and conservative press, independent documentaries proliferating on the subject, a Tucker Carlson interview with Bret Weinstein attracting over 15 million views on X, and President Joe Biden blaming Trump for a failed bill that involved the border crisis.
Under Biden’s watch, an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants have flooded the United States. It’s staggering to consider that if all these undocumented entrants formed their own state, it would be the 11th most populous in the union.
Speaking of eye-watering statistics, consider this tweet from Joel Berry, Managing Editor of The Babylon Bee:
In 3 years Biden brought in as many unaccompanied minors—most of whom are trafficked for child labor and sex—as the total number of African slaves shipped to N. America during the entirety of the slave trade.
In a follow-up tweet, Berry provided further clarity:
From 1619 to the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, N. America imported an average of 2,052 African slaves per year.
Last year alone, Biden facilitated the illegal importation of 130,000 trafficked children.
He then provided his sources, as summarized below.
A PBS article clarifies that, while an estimated 12.5 million African slaves were shipped to the New World, most of them ended up in South America and the Caribbean, just 388,000 were brought to the colonies that would ultimately form the United States.
What of the number of unaccompanied minors who have entered the United States under Biden?
A CBS News article from October last year, citing Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) statistics, reports, “In fiscal year 2022, HHS received a record 128,904 unaccompanied minors, up from 122,731 in the prior year”—or 251,635 unaccompanied minors during Biden’s first two years in the White House alone.
An additional ABC News 4 report puts the total number covering a four-year period to 340,000, plus a further 85,000 unaccompanied minors lost by the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Safe to say, the numbers of African slaves shipped to North America over a nearly two-century timespan and the number of unaccompanied minors who have entered the United States under Biden’s watch come close to parity.
Berry’s claim that most of these minors are “trafficked for child labor and sex” is difficult to verify, though he does provide a link to a New York Times investigation that tells the stories of many “alone and exploited” migrant children who “work brutal jobs across the U.S.”
“Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws,” the report’s abstract warns. The report continues:
The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined. The Times examination also drew on court and inspection records and interviews with hundreds of lawyers, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.
In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia.
In many parts of the country, middle and high school teachers in English-language learner programs say it is now common for nearly all their students to rush off to long shifts after their classes end.
A common misconception about slavery is that it ended in the antebellum era. In fact, as anti-trafficking organizations regularly point out, there are more slaves today than before slavery was abolished—nearly 50 million of them. Indeed, international human rights group Walk Free estimates that around 1.1 million people are living in slavery in the United States today.
In recent years, Americans have become increasingly focused on the injustices of a slavery that ended 160 years ago.
But the inconvenient truth is that the ongoing immigration and human trafficking crises are affecting both those trafficked and everyday Americans. Those hiring illegal immigrants can pay the illegal immigrants less than they would pay a worker living in America legally (not to mention unethical or dangerous working conditions). In “The Argument Against Illegal Immigration No One Wants to Make,” Annine Madok explains how wealthy elites use illegal immigrants for cheap labor. She says:
What’s immoral is enticing poor, hopeful people into a country with weak borders with a promise of opportunity simply so you and your hypocritical constituents can have a cheap source of domestic labor. It’s immoral, wrong, and no one wants to talk about it.
In turn, American jobs are disappearing to these underpaid workers. If an employer is willing to set ethics aside, why would he hire an American for a low-skilled job when he could pay someone else much less?
It’s a system where the only winners are the exploiters. Meanwhile, the conversation around human trafficking seems to only focus on one historical point. Certainly, an honest accounting of history is essential, but could such a laser focus on past abuses be obscuring the travesties that are being enabled today?
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Jack Clancy is a contributor to Intellectual Takeout.
