The leftists on Twitter are in an uproar over a 15 year old roofer who fell to his death in Alabama in 2020. They are firing off post after post, claiming that Republicans don’t want to protect children. They are, however, leaving out an important part of the story.
The missing fact? The child laborers who are being injured are illegal immigrants (referred to in this link as “migrants”). The employers in this case are already hiring them illegally and paying them less than minimum wage, so labor laws protecting children really won’t do anything in these cases.
In fact, the $100,000 fine levied against the roofing company for hiring the child labor is peanuts compared to what these companies save by hiring illegals for less than minimum wage. Go to any construction site in the US, and you are likely to find illegal immigrants- what the left euphemistically calls “migrants”- being the majority of the workforce. A roofing company that employs 10 people at $8 an hour is saving a quarter of a million dollars every year that they continue the practice in Florida.
According to salary.com, a roofer in Alabama makes around $30k a year. Now imagine that you are employing illegals for half that. A ten man crew would save you $150,000 a year in salary alone. Then there is unemployment, the Social Security match, benefits, and other costs that you don’t have to pay, even though you are breaking a dozen laws in the process.
But a child labor law will matter.



