Lax Border Policies Facilitate Drug Trafficking, Labor Exploitation—Affecting Voters

Illegal immigrants station themselves at an encampment after crossing the United States border in Jacumba, Calif., on Feb. 3, 2024. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Commentary

The southern U.S. border has unfortunately been exploited for some of the largest illicit businesses in the world—human sex trafficking, drug trafficking, and labor exploitation, along with illegal fishing and farming.

According to a former law enforcement agent who requested anonymity, labor exploitation in particular is a very widespread business, especially in California. Illegal immigrants who are exploited may find a job by word of mouth, such as janitorial, house cleaning, or factory work, and agree to an under-the-table payment. Over time, these people will be underpaid by more than 60 percent, if they even get paid at all. The person who is supposed to pay these illegal immigrants will often elongate the time it takes to pay them by weeks and even months.

These illegal immigrants may stay with these jobs for some time, because they think they’re going to get paid, but inevitably many will leave and find other under-the-table work. The challenge is finding a place to work where documentation isn’t going to be verified. Some begin working in the exploitation industry as young as 13 years old. Additionally, the illegal immigrants may be working 16 to 20 hours a day and won’t get paid overtime at all. This is happening today as we speak, in Los Angeles County.

So how are these illegal immigrants able to manage the cost of living or maintain housing? These immigrants that are cleaning houses and working at residential facilities often live there as maids, so they’re happy to have shelter and access to food. Sometimes these illegal immigrants don’t even get monetary payment, but rather are paid with housing and meals. There very well could be a young teenager who is being exploited today, working over 40 hours with little to no pay, in the midst of a crisis where the border is being supervised by the current administration.

With the crisis of fentanyl, the base chemicals of this drug are manufactured in China, where people are working with cartels in Mexico and other traffickers to produce the fentanyl and send it into the United States. All the money that’s collected from fentanyl and other opiates, amphetamines, illegal fishing, illegal farming, and human trafficking amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

However, these illicit businesses alone aren’t the only concerns with the border crisis.

According to Devin Nunes, former Republican Congressman and Trump Media CEO: “You have every type of person that comes to us with supposed conspiracy theories, or facts, you never know. You always have to kind of vet people because they come to you and they’ve got something that sounds like it’s real but you never know. So, I was out of Congress, was not on the Intelligence Committee ... and a guy that I knew from the past says, ‘Hey you got to know what’s coming across this border’ (this is about two years ago), he says, ‘There’s a bunch of Chinese nationals coming across the border.’

“I said ‘Oh, come on it can’t be that bad.’ He’s like ‘No no, there’s hundreds of them.’ ... I said OK well I’m gonna have you on my podcast so you can tell me all about it. He says, ‘Okay but when I come on your podcast I’m going to do it from Panama.’ ... So he comes on ... and I say, ‘So how do you know these people are coming out?’ So he says ‘I got pictures!’ He had pictures that he had taken from the day before in video that he was playing on my ... podcast.

“So if I knew this two years ago, you can imagine, now I think they estimate there’s 20 to 35 thousand of military age men from China that are coming across the border, and that doesn’t even include the terrorists that have had to have come across with all the bad actors.”

Interview With Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.)

Q. Speaker Johnson ... has been talking about a bill that will require U.S. citizenship in order to vote. What are the chances of getting that through?

Mr. Calvert: Well, we got to get the majority in the House, hopefully with a three-vote majority we can still get the votes to do that, but then it has to get through the Senate, and of course Schumer will never allow it to come to the floor. But you get it out of the House, you send that message to the Senate, that if we’re controlling the House and we’re controlling the Senate, we got the White House, we can pass such a bill and sign it into law.

Q. We have to humanize the immigration problem. ... that our kids are dying from fentanyl or they are being affected by sex trafficking. ... So with California being so Hispanic, we have to have a plan, and I hope ... you can send a message to that population.

Mr. Calvert: “Absolutely and we’re going to be focused on the Hispanic population here in this whole congressional district [41]. Beyond that, Mike Garcia [D-Calif.] has done a great job of doing that in the L.A. media market. Mike is the perfect guy to do that, obviously being a Hispanic graduate, being fifth in his class at the Naval Academy, a smart guy and a conservative guy, and he’s willing to take brave votes ... and articulate that back to the community. ... We’ve become a party of not just what people think of as country club Republicans, but of the working class people in America, and I saw that firsthand when I went to talk to a bunch of truck drivers down in Fontana ... I went down to talk to these guys, and I went out and saw these Trump bumper stickers on the pick-up trucks ... walk in there, there’s about 150 drivers there ... I said ‘Hey, how many of you guys are Democrats?’ and all of them raised their hands. Then I asked the second question, ‘How many of you guys vote for Trump?’ and all of them started cheering.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.