Rich Lowry
Opinion
March 6, 2023 | 8:29 p.m
“By the age of ten I became a diligent little hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.”
This is what David Copperfield tells in Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name.
Of course, Dickens was a crusader against child exploitation. However, his fiction’s depictions of the heartless treatment of children are defused by the funny and memorable depictions of the wrongdoers; the upward trend in the lives of the likes of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist; and the knowledge that Dickens railed against is a thing of the past in the advanced world.
It takes a heart of stone not to smile at the name of David’s cruel stepfather Edward Murdstone (Mr. Murdstone to you) or the wine bottling factory where David is unfortunate to work, Murdstone and Grinby.
Orphan Oliver Twist had a tough time in a workhouse in the town of Mudfog. But at least Oliver avoids the dangerous fate of being apprenticed to the chimney sweep Mr. Gamfield, and eventually an unexpected inheritance and happy adoption awaits him.
All of this is relevant today because, as a major New York Times report pointed out, we have Dickensian border politics.
The Times describes how so-called unaccompanied minors end up “in some of the toughest jobs in the country.” The Times found “12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Kids sawing planks of wood on night shifts in South Dakota.”
The Times reported that unaccompanied migrant children were found at forced labour.REUTERS/Adrees Latif
Needless to say, J.Crew and Walmart aren’t as charming as Murdstone and Grinby, and favorable twists are unlikely to be written in the stories of many children trapped in this maw of child labor. Most importantly, this has not happened in any other country more than 150 years ago.
The upshot of the Times article is that we’ve chosen to import a social issue—as if we didn’t have enough already.
The Times reports that child labor has “exploded” since 2021, which of course coincides with the advent of President Joe Biden’s lax border policies. A quarter million children have entered the United States in the past two years.
For no good reason, we have made it difficult for ourselves to quickly send home unaccompanied minors from non-contiguous countries, and so we have enabled a market for child smuggling and child labour.
As the Times puts it, “These are not children who snuck into the country undetected.” Officials interviewed by the newspaper estimate that two-thirds of all unaccompanied minors end up working full-time.
It’s bad for children, corrupt for the corporations that exploit them, and unhealthy for our society in general.
The Department of Health and Welfare is responsible for housing the minors upon arrival and for supervising them upon their release. It’s not doing a good job, but the king’s remedy would be better enforcement on the border and inland. In this way, children would not be sent across the border alone in the first place, on an arduous journey with perhaps a dangerous factory job at the destination. But nobody in charge ever seems to think about it.
There is still a lot to say about all of this.
NYT also reported that child labor has exploded since 2021.Go to Nakamura for NY Post
First, it should be remembered that migrants are meant to be asylum seekers fleeing persecution in their home countries; but almost every time the press reports extensively on the stories of individual migrants, they turn out to be economic migrants.
Second, it is hard to believe that the availability of cheap, easily exploited, illegal child labor would not put downward pressure on the wages of the low-skilled.
Third, not to sound like a child welfare nativist, but there are already many children in the United States who desperately need the attention of social workers.
Despite the Times story, the frontier madness will continue, and we can be sure it will not produce great literature.
Twitter: @RichLowry
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