Child labor today

A Times expose found young teens working long hours, sometimes for well-known brands in the national scale. What can be done?

Shortly after Hannah Dreier joined The Times as an investigative reporter last year, she mentioned something which shocked its editor, Kirsten Danis. As Hannah reported on a 2019 series about Long Island immigrant teenagers falsely accused of being gang members – stories that won a Pulitzer Prize – she noticed that some of the young teenagers were working night shifts at a cookies.

Kirsten's surprised reaction made Hannah wonder if there was another story to be told. "It's kind of an open secret among people in the immigration world that a lot of these kids end up in jobs that violate child labor laws," Hannah told me. "I realized that I was so focused on border and detention policies that I had neglected to report on the children's experiences once they were actually living in the United States."

Hannah has spent the past 10 months reporting the story, and she has spoken with over 100 child laborers in 20 states about it. This weekend, the Times published its expose.

"Migrant children, who have arrived in the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some some of the toughest jobs in the country," Hannah writes. Many of the kids have worked on products for big companies, including Whole Foods, Walmart, J. Crew, and Frito-Lay. "It's not that we want to occupy those jobs," said Kevin Tomas, 15, who was stacking cereal boxes in a factory recently. "It's that we have to help our families."

Parts of the solution seem simple: If federal, state, and local authorities enforce existing laws, they could reduce child labor. Part of the answer may involve better monitoring of so-called sponsoring families. – related to foster families – with whom the children often live. Companies could also play a role by cracking down on contractors and more rigorously verifying worker identification. As Hannah said, the illegal use of child labor is an open secret.

But solving the underlying problem: the recent wave of child migration children and adults and the chaos created by it - is more vexing.

In recent years, the number of migrant children entering the United States has soared in arrow for a combination of reasons. Parts of Latin America, including Honduras and Venezuela, have fallen into disarray, prompting more people to leave these countries. The Covid pandemic has exacerbated desperation.

The United States has responded with policies that aim to help, and sometimes do, but can also create additional incentive to migration. Beginning in 2008, for example, the United States made it easier for Central American children who arrived at the US-Mexico border to stay here and live with sponsor families. The policy prevented children from being stranded in Mexico, but also gave desperate parents yet another reason to send their children north in search of a better life.

Donald Trump, of course, tried to suppress migration, including through tough policies that separated children from their parents. President Biden ended some of these policies, but struggled to find an ideal solution.

Migration increased almost as soon as he took his duties, in part because migrants believed Biden's election meant the United States would admit people even if they didn't have legal permission to come. Last year, the number of unaccompanied minors entering the United States rose to 130,000, three times what it was five years earlier, Hannah says. The number of adults entering the country has also increased in 2021 and 2022.

The Biden administration initially did little to discourage this increase. After heavy criticism from Republicans and complaints...