By Terry Manning
I get messages from readers asking me to take on “the other party” — meaning the Democrats — because I so often go after “their party,” the Republicans.
One wrote, “Your argument is weakened when you only cite flaws of Republican politicians. There are plenty of examples to go around on the other side as well.” He included examples of Democrats with questionable family connections, concluding, “the stench of these people is enough to make one want to recuse himself from caring” about politics entirely.
Well, dear readers, this week I look at a situation where there is plenty of blame to go around, but I hope by the time you finish reading you will care less about that than the crisis they are ignoring — when they’re not exploiting it.
I found a Fox News article on Health and Human Services whistle blower Tara Lee Rodas. She appeared before Congress and directly criticized the government for delivering unaccompanied alien children over to human traffickers.
These traffickers take advantage of lax federal oversight to subject young people to slavish conditions in dangerous jobs. Often minors, they regularly work illegally long hours, face loss of life and limb, and struggle to repay debts incurred by “sponsors” who pretend they are trying to to help them while their citizenship cases are processed.
In the Fox News report, Rodas is quoted, “Realizing that we were not offering children the American dream, but instead putting them in modern-day slavery with wicked overlords, was a terrible revelation.”
Of course, Fox News would run a story where a whistle blower was pointing fingers at the Biden administration. The House hearing was even titled, “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children.” Democrats pointed to the fact the issue existed before the Joe Biden presidency, but even this jaded liberal can’t forgive the implications of what Rodas testified. So I looked for other reporting.
I quickly found an investigative piece from The New York Times making the same claims, that the United States is inadvertently handing over young immigrants to people who exploit them as cheap labor. The February story’s protagonist is Carolina, a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl who works in a cereal factory where workers have lost fingers in accidents. One woman had part of her scalp torn off after a fast-moving machine caught her hairnet.
The article featured other minors who are suffering from overwork, malnutrition and lack of schooling. Caretakers talked at length about the horrible circumstances these young people face. The consensus seemed to be, yes, this is a terrible thing, but what can be done about it? Where was the oversight that was supposed to prevent all this?
In response to the article, the Bush White House announced a crackdown on migrant child labor. The Times reported, “As part of the new effort, the Department of Labor, which enforces these laws, said it would target not just the factories and suppliers that illegally employ children, but also the larger companies that have child labor in their supply chains.”
A follow-up article in the Times detailed various instances where members of the government were notified of violations and ignored them or put them at the end of long queues of investigations to be handled by understaffed agencies.
But things would be different now, right? Biden accepted responsibility for the situation and was ready to help fix it, right? This is what people like Rodas wanted, right? As the old football coach says, “Not so fast, my friend.”
Just a couple days after the Fox News report, The Washington Post published a story about how a conservative group has been pushing state-level rollbacks of child labor protections.
The Post credited the Foundation for Government Accountability for using an “IKEA”-style approach to writing legislation for Republican-led state legislatures to help them make it harder for the government to track child workers and easier for corrupt business interests to abuse them.
In March, Arkansas passed a law removing requirements for work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Nearly a dozen states, most GOP-controlled, are pursuing similar legislation.
And that’s how this often works. One side points fingers at the other for not solving a problem the first side helped create. And while the other side tries to find solutions, the first side makes the situation even worse.
Is there blame on both sides? Yes? But sometimes, “both sides” is just “b.s.” to distract from a situation where who to blame isn’t the point.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
