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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

Well, the main answers in the article seem to be:

- migrant children show up and work and just lie about their age or supply forged documentation, which is impossible to verify for the company or any US agency.

- not enough government inspectors, and not enough latitude during inspections for private inspectors; e.g., having to request permission to show up on second shift.

(2) is easy to solve with money, but I have no idea what anyone could be expected to do about (1), unless you decide to aggressively prosecute companies relying on migrant workers, which is politically untenable for both parties.

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>migrant children show up and work and just lie about their age or supply forged documentation, which is impossible to verify for the company or any US agency.

Except it is possible, obviously, as the Department of Labor ultimately discovered the child labor. Auditing isn't simply looking over some spreadsheets, I've had to audit inventory before back in the day and we had to go to the warehouse and verify actual inventory. These auditors aren't doing their due diligence because these auditors aren't hired to find any issues, they're hired to provide a passed audit. The solution is that these audits shouldn't be privatized, or significantly heftier fines need to be levied to align incentives.

I agree that the audits should not be privatized and we should probably increase the number of Department of Labor employees by an order of magnitude or two, but how do you propose a DoL employee verify the age of a Guatemalan national who says he's 18 but is really 15 and has paperwork to "prove" it?

This is actually a very hard problem to solve. Even some American citizens don't have any government paperwork documenting their age, but fortunately the number is very low and they typically belong to groups that would not be applying to work in factories anyway.

> Except it is possible, obviously, as the Department of Labor ultimately discovered the child labor.

The article sadly did not go into detail about how they did it - presumably they discovered some blatant or documented discrepancies. It says only that they were "severe."

No it’s not have you heard of e verify? https://www.e-verify.gov/ If you make employers use it or dole out real meaningful fines the problem would mostly go away

Yes, that would mostly fall under “aggressively prosecute companies relying on migrant workers” as I said, except for the loophole of legal migrants who lied to the US government about their age in order to get jobs like this. It does ideally disrupt employers hiring undocumented minors, but it doesn’t solve the problem of a 15 year old showing up without paperwork and obtaining employment authorization as an “18” year old and therefore passing e-verify.

I suppose if they could somehow get documents saying they are 18 when they are actually 15 nobody would know all the paperwork is clean. It’s not great but there would be no scandal because there would be no way to prove the kid was 15 when all the legal papers said otherwise. Seems like a real edge case tho

But that's largely the case the article is about: migrant children coming to the US and claiming they're old enough to work these jobs and these hours. You don't have to "somehow" get documents - if a refugee shows up without papers and tells the US government they're 18, how is the US government going to know they're lying? They're issued documents reflecting whatever they said. When the article mentions "dubious" and "fraudulent" documents, this is a major part of what they're talking about. (The other part involves contradictory documentation, and just plain fake IDs.)

"People" will know because they often don't keep it a secret (examples cited in article), and obviously the families know, but auditors and government agencies don't have a way to actually prove it in many cases, unless it's egregious or there's contradictory documentation.

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