I have nothing to say in this really, as I am away from all of the illegal alien thing...
But without that angle, the premise in this article that a 14yo caused to work is child slavery is questionable at best.
I was driving grain trucks, implement trucks, and every sort of farm machinery by the time I was 14... I made extra money at that age doing all sorts of things... a paper route, trapping, custom trapping, varmint hunting, haying, and yes, even roundup. I swept floors and stocked shelves, and somewhere around there I worked doing R&R for a transmission shop, though that might have been later. I was a licensed driver at 14 and 1/2 years.
Later in life, I dang near lost my business over the fines and charges I almost incurred for hiring a young kid to sweep up the shop and paying him out of my pocket. He was a good lad, trying to make some extra money for his single mother, and lived right down the street. On the way home from the school, he would stop in and sweep the floors for 10 bucks and all the beer and soda cans he crushed and bagged, with the full and vocal approval of his mother, who was very happy to have her son exposed to good men (a vacancy in his life), and the working ethic she knew he would need. And she received from him four of those days labor (forty dollars, which was a lot for them) from the lad, insisting she not get it all, allowing reward for him in walk-around money.
Had he been allowed to remain, he surely would have gone on to apprentice as soon as he could be legit, having learned in-house by osmosis... and would have secured a serious wage advancing to journeyman, probably before he left high school.
But some liberal do-gooder wrecked all that by turning me in to the sheriff, who saw what was going on and did nothing, and later to the state, who did plenty. The boy lost his job, his mother lost a third of their weekly grocery allowance, I lost a great shot at an apprentice, and a lawyer got a fist full of hundreds to keep me out of trouble.
There is no justice in that.
