Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories
Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/immigrant-child-labor-factories-bensenville-illinois/
During the day, they attend high school. At night, they work to pay debts to smugglers and send money to family.
After nine hours hosing down machinery at a food processing plant, Garcia is tired and hungry. But he has less than an hour to get ready for high school, where he is a junior. He quickly showers, gets dressed and reheats some leftover chicken soup for a meal he refers to as his dinner. Then he gulps down some coffee, brushes his teeth, and walks outside to catch the school bus waiting near the edge of the sprawling apartment complex.
Here in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, and in places like it throughout the country, Guatemalan teenagers like Garcia spend their days in class learning English and algebra and chemistry. At night, while their classmates sleep, they work to pay debts to smugglers and sponsors, to contribute to rent and bills, to buy groceries and sneakers, and to send money home to the parents and siblings they left behind.
They are among the tens of thousands of young people who have come to this country over the past few years, some as unaccompanied minors, others alongside a parent, amid a spike in the number of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.
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The teenagers use fake IDs to get the jobs through temporary staffing agencies that recruit immigrants and, knowingly or not, accept the papers they are handed. Working overnight allows the teens to attend school during the day. But it’s a brutal trade-off. They nod off in class; many ultimately drop out. And some, like Garcia, get hurt. Their bodies bear the scars from cuts and other on-the-job injuries.
Around Urbana-Champaign, the home of the University of Illinois, school district officials say children and adolescents lay shingles, wash dishes, and paint off-campus university apartments. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, an indigenous Guatemalan labor leader has heard complaints from adult workers in the fish-packing industry who say they’re losing their jobs to 14-year-olds. In Ohio, teenagers work in dangerous chicken plants.
