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Biden border crisis, child labor, Financial Times, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, labor productivity, Mainstream Media, meatpacking, productivity, Regime Media, UniParty, Washington Post, workers
The evidence keeps mounting that the Uniparty’s Regime Media will stop at almost nothing to cover up the costs of illegal immigration to the U.S. economy and American society. Just yesterday, as I tweeted, the Financial Times published a report claiming that a labor shortage fueled in large measure by flows of legal and illegal immigrants allegedly so inadequate that resulting worker shortages are imperiling President Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing revival plans.
Only one problem: The reporter and her editors completely failed to mention that the wages offered by U.S. construction firms have gone exactly nowhere at best lately – which is hard to square with the idea that they’re desperate to hire.
And this morning, I noticed a Washington Post report on the shameful reappearance of illegal child labor in the United States – including child employees exposed to dangerous working conditions – that buried unmistakable signs that continuing inflows of illegal aliens obviously enabled by President Biden’s lax border enforcement policies bear at least much of the blame.
In the fifth paragraph, the article states that
“Child labor violations have been on the rise in the United States since 2015. The number of minors found to be employed in violation of child labor laws shot up by 37 percent between 2021 and 2022. The number of children found to be illegally employed in hazardous occupations, such as meatpacking and construction, spiked by 93 percent over the past seven years.”
That’s certainly important to know. And in the following graph, readers learn that “Experts say a historically tight labor market could be fueling this rise in violations, with employers tapping into new labor pools to fill vacancies across a variety of industries.”
But it’s not until paragraph seventeen that the piece even obliquely mentions the illegal aliens angle:
“Many of the children [working at the meatpacking facilities focused on in the article] spoke only Spanish, and at least some Labor Department interviews with minors were conducted in Spanish, investigators [who were probing labor law violations for the federal government] said.”
Yet the article still never disclosed why these unilingual children are in the country to begin with – no doubt because their presence is surely unlawful, and a testament to the humanitarian impact of the Open Borders-friendly immigration policies pushed so avidly and for so long by major U.S. news organizations.
Also conspicuously overlooked in this Post report – the harmful economic impact of the long-time absence of sensible immigration policies. In this case, strong productivity growth is the casualty, which matters decisively because ever greater efficiency is a key – and probably the most important key – to America’s ability to generate high and rising living standards. And the evidence could not be clearer that the ready availability of illegal alien labor has enabled the nation’s meat-processing industry to remain profitable without automating or shaking up management or reconfiguring its production lines or taking any other major steps to modernize.
I last looked at that sector’s lagging performance in labor productivity (where the data is most up to date) in May, 2020, and here’s where the situation stands now: In the non-durable manufacturing sector, where meat processing is found, from the first quarter of 1987 through the fourth quarter of last year improved by 71.62 percent. But between 1987 and 2021, it rose in “animal slaughtering and processing” by just 13.98 percent.
And for those doubting the illegal immigrant connection, this 2021 Fact Sheet, issued by an organization bent on highlighting “the many different ways that undocumented immigrants contribute to the food supply chain in the United States,” puts the number of illegal alien workers in slaughtering and processing companies at 82,700 in 2019. If that’s accurate, then according to the official employment data for that sector, that came to nearly one in every five employees at year!
The bottom line: The resumed illegal immigration tide fostered by the Biden administration has helpd bring about resumed economic woes and exploitation. If I was shilling for the Cheap Labor Lobby, or ideologically wed to Open Borders, I guess I’d want to cover that up, too.