Congress Spends $1.6 Billion to Subsidize Cartels' Labor Smuggling in U.S.

Neil MunroDecember 3, 2021

Congress has voted to spend $1.6 billion to help cartels deliver children and job-seeking youths to cities and towns around the United States.

The giveaway is buried within the continuing resolution, which was rushed through Congress late Thursday to keep government agencies operating until February.

“This money is available through September 30, 2024, and its intended purpose is disguised in legislative language that says ‘for the account specified and for the activities specified, in section 141 of this Act,’” said a December 2 report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

From February to October 2021, President Joe Biden’s deputies admitted roughly 125,000 younger migrants from Central America as “Unaccompanied Alien Children.” That inflow was six times larger than the 20,000 younger migrants who were admitted during the prior four months by President Donald Trump.

Pro-migration groups — including lobbies for Fortune 500 investors — portray the cartel smuggling as a rescue effort for “children” trapped in crime-ridden countries.

But the cartels are using a 2008 law that requires federal agencies to relay migrants to U.S. destinations if they claim to be younger than 18.

The agencies then deliver the migrants to “sponsors” throughout the United States, saving the cartels and clients from paying the extra cost of smuggling people from the border to distant U.S. destinations.

The vast majority of the sponsors are either illegal migrants who earlier paid the cartels to sneak them and their children into the United States, or else the labor traffickers who steadily work with the cartels to smuggle indebted workers into the United States.

This government-funded migrant-delivery system helps to persuade illegal migrants to stay in the United States instead of returning home to their left-behind families. It also provides U.S. employers with cheap labor that reduces the need to hire Americans or invest in American-made labor-saving machinery.

Migrant workers harvest strawberries at a farm near Oxnard, Calif. Ventura County is one of two counties where labor organizers hope to get a Bill of Rights passed to protect farm workers from abuse and wage theft.

“This [spending] is the next step in the government’s partnership with the cartels to funnel people from south of the border into the United States,” said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the CIS. He continued:

The original Step One [in the partnership] was just complicity and opening the border. Step Two was flying or putting the [delivered migrants] on planes and buses to reconnect with their families already here. And now, Step Three through this [funding] in the C.R. is to fund the reckless border policies of the Biden ministration.

The federal spending is the mirror image of the cartels’ lucrative payment system for delivering migrants from South and Central America to U.S. border agents, he said. “It’s the [government’s nationwide] distribution [of the delivered migrants] and the enrichment of the groups that advocate and support these policies,” he said.

“The friends of the Biden administration are basically going to be paid off for their role in the whole scene,” he added.

The federal spending is being used to help extract more poor workers and consumers from Central America for use as workers, renters, and consumers in the U.S. economy.

This economic policy of extraction migration is strongly backed by business groups and by groups representing education and welfare workers. Few reporters want to notice the resulting economic damage done to Americans and to the migrants’ home countries.

The covert labor-smuggling policy is widely recognized in Washington — but is not named by establishment media outlets.

“We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a March 26 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP Senators. “There’s a trail on our side of the border with markers placed by the federal government to show illegal immigrants where to go… We’re transporting people — who pay [coyotes] to get here — the last mile with your taxpayer dollar.”

“Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the [migrant] teens are coming to work and send money back home,” Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told a ProPublica reporter. “They want to help their parents,” she said in a November 2020 article.

A recent murder in Florida exposed one corner of the government’s tacit cooperation with labor traffickers:

On November 18, a grand jury indicted 24-year-old Yery Noel Medina Ulloa, an illegal alien from Honduras, on first-degree murder charges for the killing of 46-year-old Francisco Javier Cuellar, a father of four children.

In addition, Ulloa is facing tampering with evidence charges.

As Breitbart News initially reported, Ulloa initially came to the United States-Mexico border months ago, posing as an Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC) named “Reynel Alexander Hernandez” in the hopes of being released into the U.S. interior.

Agents apprehend a large group of migrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico into Texas. (Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/Del Rio Sector)

Bloomberg reported in November about evidence that many trafficked youths were part of a farm-labor trafficking operation in Alabama:

At least three agencies looked into reports of potential trafficking or exploitation of unaccompanied migrant children in Enterprise, Ala., and couldn’t substantiate those claims, according to two people familiar with the investigation.

…

The Health and Human Services [HHS], Homeland Security [DHS], and Labor departments investigated the Enterprise situation but couldn’t track down most of the minors who were placed with sponsors there, according to the people familiar with the investigation. It’s not uncommon for federal officials to lose contact with unaccompanied children after their release from government custody.

The dead-end in the Enterprise case highlights apparent gaps in the federal system designed to care for children who cross the border without a parent.

Much labor trafficking is often hidden behind legal visa-worker programs, such as the H-2A farm worker program and the H-1B white-collar visa program.

Labor migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents.

Migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.