Duvan Pérez immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala a few short years ago. He wound up working at a Mississippi slaughterhouse that supplies chickens to Chik-fil-A. Last year, while cleaning the deboning area, he got his hand caught in some equipment. Pérez found himself sucked into the rotating shaft of a machine and was dead within minutes. He was 16.
Most of the coverage of this story has focused on the question of labor violations. Federal law prohibits hiring anyone under 18 to work in slaughterhouses due to the dangerous nature of the work. NBC News reported that Pérez was illegally hired through a third-party staffing agency while posing as a 32-year-old man. An attorney for the company told the outlet “they were surprised and somewhat horrified” to learn the 16-year-old wasn’t a 32-year-old. I imagine they were as “surprised” and “somewhat horrified” as my wife is whenever I find a stack of packages addressed to her on our porch. Aromatherapy Humidifier
Missing from the news coverage, however, is any acknowledgment of the role immigration has played in it. The coverage, instead, reflects a surrender on the issue of U.S. reliance on cheap “immigrant” labor—that is to say, the labor of people who illegally enter the country and who should not be working here. But work they do and often for less money than Americans. America seems more and more to resemble an economic zone—a great big shopping mall powered by sweat shops—than a nation.
Sure, people still get exercised about sweatshops abroad, filled with sweaty kids toiling in sweltering and dangerous facilities. The problem, though, is that we’ve quietly imported those, too. Citing Labor Department data, NBC News reports that the number of children working illegally in the United States has skyrocketed across all industries; having nearly doubled since 2019. There are currently over 800 active child labor investigations in 47 states across various industries.
There is a connection between the rise in domestic child labor and illegal immigration, even if the media narratives permit them to merely hint at it and tuck the evidence for it between the lines.
Much of this, down to Pérez’s brutal death, is right out of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. That story, too, has an immigration angle. It centers on a Lithuanian man recently come with his family to Chicago and provides a fictionalized account of Packingtown, the hub of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Sinclair spent weeks studying the plants. There he had heard tales of gruesome deaths, of men being killed by their equipment. The most infamous story, which couldn’t be verified, was one in which a worker was turned into lard:
. . . and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!
With these vivid accounts of hideous working conditions, Sinclair had hoped his book would help spark the flame of a socialist revolution in America. He missed. But it did trigger demands for government regulation that culminated in the first set of federal food safety laws. Sinclair famously said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Today, however, stories about immigrant workers being chewed up by machinery are used to browbeat readers into embracing a world without borders. Indeed, on Jan. 17, the day the Occupational Safety and Health Administration blamed Pérez’s death on his employer’s disregard for safety policies, the Department of Homeland Security announced that “noncitizen” workers who complain about labor violations are eligible to receive two years of “deferred action.” That is bureaucratese for a two-year amnesty.
“Noncitizen workers should never be afraid to report exploitation in the workplace or fear retaliatory actions from an abusive employer,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a statement. “No employer is above the law. DHS will work with our law enforcement partners to hold those who prey on the vulnerability of migrants accountable and provide protection to those who come forward to report abuse. Combatting labor exploitation helps ensure fair wages and safe working conditions for all workers in our country.”
There is an easier way to accomplish all these goals: secure the border, crack down on employers who hire these laborers, implement deportations, and so on. But there is no will to fix the problem of illegal immigration because it is a perennial issue at the intersection of left-wing identity politics and right-wing laissez-faire capitalism.
The left gets their growing coalition of the ascendant; the right gets the cheap labor that lowers costs. The squat New York Democrat, Jerry Nadler, summarized how these interests intersect: “We need immigrants in this country. Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants, many illegal immigrants. The fact is that the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level.”
What Nadler is describing isn’t a country, however, it’s an economic zone, now become a gigantic meatgrinder situated in North America.
Pedro Gonzalez is a senior writer at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He publishes the Contra Substack.
What Nadler is describing is the Truth. This is always the Truth, and always will be. Farm work is dangerous. Factory work is dangerous. Construction work is dangerous. Mining work is dangerous. Transportation work is dangerous if you are piloting a ship through choke points like the Red Sea or the Straits of Hormuz. I worked in Construction, and everyone had their “war stories” of massive accidents, collapses of scaffolding. I’m an electrician and there were many stories of explosions and terrible burns. I had my share of explosions and electrocutions , but was fortunate that I suffered no significant injuries (also fell off a scaffold, put my hand in a brace for 6 months; I worked with it still). I worked in an electroplating factory and suffered a burn on the hand from a steam line. Others in that factory suffered mysterious illnesses and injuries. Peter Zeihan forecasts a MASSIVE expansion of our industrial base and a MASSIVE increase of a needed labor force, and native I born Americans haven’t been fruitful and multiplying for decades now. It is just the plain truth that injuries and death are part of our work life, since being thrown out of Paradise so so long ago. I am a Lilly white, straight male of Welsh Irish descent, supposedly of privilege (what a monstrous joke). I took my cuts & bruises, stitches, burns and broken bones and kept on working to my retirement. This I what life is like when we get our bread from the sweat of our brow. There will be rest and happiness when we go to our graves. So suck it up, form ranks, and press onward. There is so very much work to be done, and welcome the immigrants into our ranks. We need them, and they WANT to be with us.
Bravo on an excellent article! Gonzalez again gets right to the core truths of any matter he writes about. I so enjoy his refreshing, honest perspectives.
It was a CHILD who went through the meat grinder, not an adult man who at least (one assumes) has a body and brain that has developed fully! And once WE as a nation–the AMERICAN nation–can deport those who were trafficked here illegally, thanks to the collusion of widespread DNC globalist filth, we will implement Trump’s sensible vision of encouraging our *US citizens* to study and apprentice in vocational training to better meet the demands of our trade sectors and soon-to-be-revived-again domestic manufacturing base.
To Franky: yes it is great to encourage U.S. citizens to study and apprentice in vocational training to meet the demands of our trade sectors and soon-to-be-revived-again domestic manufacturing base. That is absolutely necessary, but it won’t be nearly enough. With Peter Zeihan forecasting a DOUBLING of our manufacturing base and a TRIPLING of our Labor force (what is that? 450 MILLION JOBS?!?), this collides with our demographic decline. We have a crisis of youngsters failing to marry and form families and having three children. They’re not marrying. They’re confused about gender. They’re stuck in “childhood” (my mother and father married when they were 18 years old, and stayed married until their deaths, and had 3 children). The problem is that much of the World manufacturing will be DISAPPEARING (primarily China and Germany) within the next ten years and North America MUST take up the slack, if anything is to be made, beyond Amish horse & buggies and pot-bellied stoves, and hand pumps for water from wells, and coal oil lamps. We will NOT SUPPLY enough workers from our own citizens’ efforts to reproduce, NOT to supply the enormous numbers of workers that’ll be needed in the not-too-distant future. Most of the immigrants coming in are NOT 16 year olds. I’ve seen the pictures. There are families, and young men who are typically sent out by their families back home to make money and send it back home. This is the traditional immigrant story of America. PZ forecasts the greatest expansion of our Nation’s industrial in the history of the World…very bullish. I can see clearly it will not happen without immigrants, ESPECIALLY immigrants who are family oriented and WANT to raise families.
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