Please be advised the Office of Inspector General is initiating a review to determine the Wage and Hour Division’s efforts to curtail child labor law violations, as well as the cause for rising child labor law violations. We will contact your audit liaison to schedule an entrance conference to discuss the audit’s objective, scope, and methodology.
We plan to begin work immediately after our meeting and would appreciate your notifying appropriate agency officials of our plans. If you have questions, please contact Tracy Katz, Audit Director, at (xxx) xxx-xxxx or [email protected].
In the article, author Rebecca Rainey notes that the Department of Labor concluded 765 cases involving child labor over the last ten months. Those cases involved 4,474 children, including those in the country illegally. According to the piece, child labor violations have seen a 69% increase from 2018 to 2022. The issue involving the DOL and child labor violations has come under increasing media scrutiny. The Biden administration blames understaffing at the division and underfunding. Conversely, Republicans point toward Biden’s handling of the border situation and a lack of effort on the part of the Department of Labor.
Were this issue confined solely to the DOL, one could possibly attribute the situation to a case backlog and a lack of staff. But in light of the behavior of people at HHS, a trend seems to be emerging. To be clear, I am not implying or alleging that the people in these agencies are profiting or otherwise benefiting from these problems. There has been no evidence for that. Rather, it would appear that this administration is dedicated to keeping the borders wide open, either to create more left-leaning voters, to put the nation permanently out of balance, or simply because it is considered the “progressive” and therefore, the “right” thing to do.
The administration has been focused on letting illegal immigrants in and not on what will happen when they get here. Ask New York, Chicago, or any border town about that. Combine that with a bloated, sluggish federal bureaucracy, and you have the perfect situation in which kids become numbers and disappear between the cracks. One of the evils of unfettered immigration is that people are essentially stockpiled and turned into data. Their safety and their humanity are no longer a concern. They are bodies, even products, but not people, which, sadly enough, is part of the mindset of human traffickers.
