Sandie is joined by Matthew Soerens from World Relief to discuss a recent New York Times investigation that revealed unaccompanied children arriving at U.S. borders are being exploited for labor. They discuss the findings of the report, the U.S. process to place children, and the Department of Labor’s response.

Matthew Soerens

Matthew Soerens is the US Director of Church Mobilization for World Relief, where he helps evangelical churches to understand the realities of refugees and immigration and to respond in ways guided by biblical values. He also serves as the National Coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition that advocates for immigration reforms consistent with biblical values. Matthew previously served as a Department of Justice-accredited legal counselor at World Relief’s local office in Wheaton, Illinois and, before that, with World Relief’s partner organization in Managua, Nicaragua. He’s also the co-author of Seeking Refuge: On the Shores of the Global Refugee Crisis.

Key Points

• Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are vulnerable to human trafficking, especially labor trafficking, because they are in a foreign country and often come with vulnerabilities.


• The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act provides basic protections for unaccompanied minors at the U.S. border who are identified is especially vulnerable to human trafficking.


• Children are being exploited for labor in the U.S. through online enticement of vulnerable youth from other countries.


• As consumers, we all have a responsibility to hold companies accountable and demand enforcement from the federal government.

Resources

• World Relief


• Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. | The New York Times


• More than 100 children illegally employed in hazardous jobs, federal investigation finds; food sanitation contractor pays $1.5M in penalties | U.S. Department of Labor (dol.gov)


• Evangelical Immigration Table


• Press Release: World Relief Urges Congress to Reject H.R. 29, Warns It Will Hinder Fight Against Human Trafficking and Harm Vulnerable Children

Transcript

Sandra Morgan  00:00

This is episode 294, Combating Exploitative Child Labor in the U.S., with Matthew Soerens.

Production Credits  00:10

Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Sandra Morgan  00:30

Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. This is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. And today, I’m really happy that my friend Matthew Soerens is with us. He is the US Director of Church Mobilization and Advocacy at World Relief. He’s also part of the evangelical immigration table, and so many other things. He adjunct teaches at Wheaton, and he completed an MS in international public service at DePaul University. He is also co-author of Welcoming the Stranger, and more recently, Inalienable. And one of the things that was really important to me as I put this bio together, keeping it brief, of course, is my students here at Vanguard and when I’m at other universities, often ask me, ‘How did you become an advocate?’ And I love mentioning our guest’s paths as great examples of many options. Some people start in law enforcement, other people in psychology, sociology, but you studied international public service. And that is, I want to go back and get that degree. It sounds fascinating. What do you study?

Matthew Soerens  02:14

Yeah, I mean, I kind of joke sometimes. It was so interdisciplinary that I have a master’s degree in it and I’m not quite sure what it was. But it was a mix of nonprofit management. So I actually was already working at World Relief when I did that master’s program, along with international affairs, international relations, and some of the governmental side of public policy dynamics, and then a dynamic of cross cultural communication, as well. So bringing all those things together. And I use less of those things in my work at World Relief because we primarily serve refugees and other immigrants in our U.S. programs. And there’s lots of cross cultural dynamics there.

Sandra Morgan  02:48

Okay. So that’s where we’re gonna go now is what you’re doing here in the U.S. And there was a big report recently about children in exploitative labor. So let’s kind of back up a little bit and talk about the intersection of that exploitation and immigration generally.

Matthew Soerens  03:11

Yeah, I think sometimes people hear the term human trafficking and they think that’s sort of synonymous with human smuggling. And they sometimes think of all human trafficking victims as foreigners to the United States, which of course, is not the case. There’s many U.S. citizens who become victims of human trafficking, which legally is defined as, as when people are made to work under force, fraud, or coercion or into sex work as well. That is under force, fraud, or coercion or as minors. So smuggling and trafficking are not exactly the same thing. But you don’t have to be transported into the United States to be trafficked. And yet, they’re not unrelated either, because the people who are vulnerable enough to, first of all, to flee their countries in the first place, whether they’re fleeing threats of persecution that might qualify them for asylum under U.S. law, or just extreme poverty, which also, of course, is a huge vulnerability, they’re going to be vulnerable along that journey, they’re going to be vulnerable, even once they get into the United States. And that is why we do see that immigrants are disproportionately likely to be victims of human trafficking in the United States relative to citizens. And that’s especially true in this area of labor trafficking. So when people are made to work under situations of force, fraud, or coercion, sometimes that includes people who have to work to pay off a debt to some sort of a smuggler who was able to get them unlawfully into the United States.

Sandra Morgan  04:31

I really want to jump in here because that aspect where it feels like smuggling, because they were lured with an offer of a job, but they had to pay to be transported. So they feel complicit. They don’t say, Oh, I’m a victim. And so they don’t self identify, and the moment that it becomes human trafficking is kind of a sliding scale, it’s a little bit gray. But when they no longer have control over their own space, their decisions, they’re under control of the trafficker. It’s no longer smuggling and that debt, that was really a false fraudulent exercise to gain control over them, is why we no longer call it smuggling, we call it human trafficking. So okay, let’s jump into that report. More than 100 children illegally employed in hazardous jobs. Tell me what happened, and what’s going to happen, and what we should be watching for?

Matthew Soerens  05:51

Yeah, so this New York Times report, which is worth reading, for those who haven’t read, is basically looking at unaccompanied children. Meaning kids who were identified at the U.S. border, in this case, unde