Why Child Labor Is Still Happening in the U.S.

Congresswoman Hillary Scholten remembers exactly where she was when she realized her new job on Capitol Hill was about to get a lot more complicated. “My heart just sank,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading.” Scholten was reading the New York Times, a big investigation into immigrant child labor. The very first anecdote in this 5,000-word opus is about a 15-year-old girl bagging cereal on the graveyard shift in the Hearthside Food Solutions plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Scholten is a third-generation Michigander. She’s from Grand Rapids. And it wasn’t just that companies in Scholten’s hometown were employing kids. It was that many of these kids seemed to be living without their parents. And a lot of them were falling asleep in school because they had full-time jobs. The machines they were working on? They had been known to slice off workers’ fingers. ADVERTISEMENT “Especially as an attorney who has worked on these issues her entire career, it felt like a personal attack,” Scholten said. On Wednesday’s episode of the show, I spoke with the former immigration attorney–turned–congresswoman about the broader powers she has now that’s she in D.C. and whether she will be able to use them. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Mary Harris: Rep. Hillary Scholten says the nuances of immigration have always been important to her. Before she was an attorney, she worked as a migrant advocate. But once she got her law degree, she took that experience one step forward, joining the DOJ. Hillary Scholten: I was working at the Justice Department on immigration issues largely related to enforcement, figuring out how to make our laws more just, more fair, more humane. You were working on immigration appeals, right? Yeah, exactly. But the Board of Immigration Appeals also has jurisdiction over dealing with regulations. It’s the highest administrative agency dealing with immigration issues—not only one-off cases, but we set national precedent for things like asylum, dealing with children who are detained in the United States. It’s a very powerful agency. Not a lot of people realize how much influence it has. And so that’s significant because when Trump was elected, we saw such a marked change in the direction of the work, where the focus of the policies seemed to be cruelty for the point of cruelty. And I couldn’t continue to work there and uphold my oath to protect and defend the Constitution, let alone maintain my own moral compass. And so I took a stand and I left. Scholten soon got a new job at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. But almost as soon as she arrived, her work—and the work of many other immigration attorneys across the country—was thrown into chaos. Things got especially bad as it became clear the Department of Homeland Security was separating migrant children from their parents at the border, leaving lawyers and advocates to figure out what to do next. That’s when Hillary Scholten started seriously considering a run for Congress. ADVERTISEMENT At the height of the family separation crisis, our agency was responsible for helping reunite and represent so many children. Imagine a legal services waiting room that turned into a virtual day care center overnight with kids who didn’t know where their parents were. And there were a lot of reasons I raised my hand to run, but no doubt I can pinpoint the moment when I was like, “Oh, hell no, I got to do more.” It’s the height of the summer. My dear husband came to visit me at work. It was going to be a late night, and he brought me an iced coffee. And we were chatting, and we walked through our waiting room. He’s normally a pretty stoic guy, and he fell silent. And I turned and looked at him, and his eyes had just filled with tears. And I realized that we had walked past a set of three siblings, all dressed in their Sunday best, between the ages of 5 and 7. That’s how old our children were at the time. And he just said, “Hill, you see this stuff on the news. It is an entirely different level to look these children in the eye.” One of our youngest clients was separated from his parents at 4 months old. You’re not just walking away from a parent. You’re being taken from their arms. Five years later, this investigation by the New York Times has Scholten thinking about different ways to help migrant children. Just this past weekend, she returned to her district to connect with constituents and think about how she can intervene, now that her community’s child labor problem is no longer a secret. She can already see the way the news has rippled outward. ADVERTISEMENT One of the saddest things about the fallout of all of this is that there has continued to be some real discontent within the immigrant communities here, where shining a light on the exploitation of children has also shined a light on the fact that there have been so many other individuals working without authorization in these factories. And as companies have started to look into who’s actually working here, their labor pool has vanished. Hearthside, after the Times ran the investigation, said they were going to be doing inspections on the manufacturing floor, and 75 percent of their workforce didn’t show up the next day. One of the most heartbreaking details in this New York Times reporting about migrant labor involves the way kids were going to school, which is required by law, and working full time. There was a ninth grade teacher in Grand Rapids who went on the record basically saying a kid passed out in class from fatigue, was hospitalized, eventually dropped out. The thing that was so shocking about this story is this wasn’t a secret. People knew. They just didn’t seem to know who to tell. That’s exactly right. And these teachers are doing everything that they can to keep these kids learning, to keep them protected, but clearly, if the individuals in their lives don’t even know where to go or who to turn to, the children themselves certainly don’t. We as a society—every single individual bears a modicum of responsibility for letting us get to this point. But any energy that we spend in turning the blame away from these companies is the wrong direction for our energy right now. We have had these labor laws on the books for over a hundred years. There are plenty of companies that don’t exploit children. And yet, there are some bad actors here who have, in the case of this company in Grand Rapids, according to the New York Times, appeared to have knowingly violated these laws. You have 14-year-old children walking around on the floor and people saying, “Hey, I think that’s a kid,” and you don’t do anything about it? The blame needs to fall squarely at the feet of these companies and they need to be held accountable. Exploiting children cannot just be a cost of doing business. ADVERTISEMENT What about looking beyond the companies? The whole reason the New York Times went to Grand Rapids to investigate was that they found this data point that only 7 percent of migrant children in Grand Rapids were being released to their parents. And it was an immediate red flag because it meant sponsors—people who are saying, “Come live with me”—aren’t their family necessarily. They might be people who are basically trafficking the kids or using them to earn money. And that’s the kind of thing where it seems like that data was pretty freely available. And that’s about more than the companies. That’s about how well we’re looking after minors who are coming in to our country. That’s exactly right. That is exactly why I advocated for this interagency task force, because both the Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services have a role to play in enforcing these laws and protecting these children. One of the large initiatives out of this task force will be increased sponsor vetting. Over the next four weeks, HHS is going to conduct an audit of the vetting process for potential sponsors who have previously sponsored an unaccompanied child and will provide staff training on appropriate assessments of this process. We are very engaged with both agencies on making sure that this task force is doing everything that it possibly can to protect these kids and prevent this from happening again. Last week, Rep. Hillary Scholten took to the floor of Congress to present her plan for dealing with migrant child labor in the U.S. She started with that interagency task force she mentioned. It will encourage the Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services to work together to prevent kids from ending up on assembly lines. It is HHS that is supposed to be tracking migrant kids once they get into the country, and it’s the Department of Labor that should be enforcing child labor laws. ADVERTISEMENT But Scholten is already thinking bigger. She says that as a Democratic congressperson who flipped a red seat blue, she’s uniquely positioned to take on this bigger fight, overhauling the immigration system completely. I am not a typical Democrat in a lot of ways. As someone who has worked on enforcement issues, I understand the importance of enforcing our laws not only as a penalty for individual migrants who want to break the law, but as a key mechanism for keeping kids safe. If you can’t get children across the border, they can’t be exploited. So we need to get over this notion that border security is somehow anti-humanitarian. It is a key component of making sure that we have a just and humane immigration system. Do you find that’s a sticking point sometimes when you talk to your fellow Democrats? Absolutely. We as a party have just not figured out how to talk about comprehensive immigration issues. And now I’m in a position to do something about it. Yeah, but a lot of politicians have died on this hill. You know what I mean? Comprehensive immigration reform, what you’re talking about—thinking big—are you confident you can do it? When I first raised my hand to run for office, everyone said there is no way in hell West Michigan is going to elect a Democrat, a woman, a mother to represent this seat. Then here I am. A white woman with round glasses and a white jacket on speaks. Rep. Hillary Scholten in Washington on Jan. 25. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images ADVERTISEMENT Are you the first congresswoman from your district? I am. And I know that there are so many others who have worked tirelessly and tried to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. But I think that we have a brand new moment here in this time and in this Congress. There are so many new, fresh voices in my freshman class. I’ve already been working with them and talking with them—Republicans and Democrats, who want to see comprehensive immigration reform come to light. It’s a humanitarian issue. Yes, absolutely. But this issue perfectly exemplifies how this is not only a humanitarian issue, it’s an economic and a workforce issue. We have a critical worker shortage in this country, and so we have all kinds of new parties coming to the table demanding a solution who never have before. I don’t have a single meeting—and this is not an exaggeration—where the need to fix our immigration system is not brought up as a part of the work that is done. By constituents? By constituents. A meeting at the airport about how extensive delays to get the certain type of permit to do the work that we need is a worker shortage issue, which is directly related to immigration. I had a meeting with the bankers, in my office, and they were talking about how one of the biggest barriers to reaching new communities is the fact that people are so afraid of traditional institutions because they’re afraid they’re going to get reported, and it creates unsafe situations in communities when people are not putting their money into banks but keeping it at their homes. Then talking with local law enforcement about how they feel a huge barrier to connecting with communities is a lack of immigration status. People don’t report. They don’t reach out. That makes all of us less safe. And we’re putting the burden of enforcing our immigration laws on local law enforcement when in fact their job is to catch burglars, car thieves, murderers, and assailants. This is not the job of bankers and other local administrators. This is the job of Congress. ADVERTISEMENT As an immigration attorney, can you talk to me a bit about how you crack down on child labor without hurting the actual children involved? RECOMMENDED FOR YOU Can Georgia Republicans Really Fire a Prosecutor for Indicting Trump? When It Comes to Abortion, Only One Religion’s Beliefs Count in America My Father Said He Wishes Our Relationship Was More Like His With His Dog That’s going to be key to this response, because I can tell you already these children are experiencing backlash in the community. What does that backlash look like? The children who were reported on in this article are not the only ones working. This is a widespread problem. And it looks like the migrant community saying, “Nobody speaks to the press anymore. Nobody speak to law enforcement anymore.” There’s a silencing that happens. Is that because the fear is that jobs will go away for everyone? That’s exactly right. And that’s why it is so incumbent on us in this moment to step in and understand that a key component of protection is making sure that we fix the laws that allowed this exploitation to begin in the first place. There’s only so much that the Department of Labor can do or that the Department of Health and Human Services can do when they’re working within a fundamentally flawed and broken program. And I will put that squarely at the feet of the United States Congress, of which I am now a member. So this is my problem to solve, and I’m here to solve it. Subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts Get more news from Mary Harris every weekday. VIEW TRANSCRIPT You say that you’re a member of Congress, you want to hold yourself accountable. Are you giving yourself a deadline? If you could see the bags under my eyes, you would understand that the deadline has already passed and we are working on a 40-year deficit to deliver on comprehensive immigration reform that has led to this system where these kids can be exploited. It’s hard to completely convey how personal I take this as someone who has made it my life’s goal to make our country more just and fair for the most vulnerable among us—and as a mom who sees her kids on that factory floor. For more information, visit us at http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/index.html.