31 Kids Found Working Graveyard Shifts on Meat Plant 'Kill Floors,' Feds Say

[haele]

44. Especially if in the countries they were fleeing from, child labor is normal.

The military took me to a lot of countries where unless they were from a well off family (professional class or above) children were expected to quit school and work at the family business or employer when they turned 12 or 13.
Girls were expected to be getting groomed to find a husband by the time they were 15.
There was no such thing as "Teen-age" in those countries unless your family could afford to let you be a teenager. Just as it was prior to the 1940's in poorer or rural communities in the US.

I suspect that's why immigrant communities are often baffled when the government comes down hard on child labor. It's not that education isn't important; it's that culturally, education isn't as important as supporting the family that raised you.
Many immigrants are coming up for work to pull their families out of increasingly squalid poverty, and coming to the USA includes expecting not only work waiting for them, but work waiting for the older children they are bringing up with them, or have contacted older family minors to come up and live with them while they are pursuing or have been granted asylum.
That good old American "work ethic" is still in play, it's just that now all US citizens tend to expect their kids to at least finish high school before they have to find a job to support themselves, while those desperate immigrants still aren't expected to have that 'luxury' and need to prove themselves and their poor families worthy of being in the US.

IMO, the basis for many of the gangs in these poorer countries immigrants are fleeing comes from three components - Class structure in those countries, technology and nepotism reducing employment, and an high cost of attending secondary school to the poorer families requiring poor children to find jobs to support their own schooling (or drop out) once they get past basic letter and number recognition, let alone basic reading and math.
The poor are stuck with a hard decision; either they give themselves and their families up to a perpetual cycle of increasing poverty and slow death, or they flee to somewhere they can work their way out of desperate poverty into some form of self-sufficiency. And that means everyone in the family does their part, which leaves them and their children open to exploitation by "it's just business" folks making profits off cheap labor.

Haele