More than “Heartfelt Sympathy”: The Urgency of Immigration Reforms in Combating the New Child Labor Epidemic

Surging child labor violations incited the U.S. Department of Labor under President Joseph Biden’s administration to ramp up enforcement against corporations from poultry processors to fast food joints. Most minors working dangerous factory jobs, often overnight, are unaccompanied immigrant children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as the federal government has repeatedly acknowledged. This Note contends that prosecuting companies is toothless and insufficient to curb this practice, due to severe federal understaffing, paltry civil fines, and major manufacturers’ use of subcontractors to shield them from liability. Furthermore, merely imposing corporate fines ignores the immense and enduring financial pressures that unaccompanied immigrant children face. This Note argues that, given the inevitability of regional migration, the only ways to curb abusive child labor are to enable families to immigrate together and to afford immigrant children with a quicker path to legal stability. It proposes a litany of immigration reforms that would tackle this child labor epidemic at the root by fulfilling these objectives.