What To Do with All Those Separated Children

When… or if… the “zero tolerance” border enforcement situation is resolved, there will inevitably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of children unable to reconnect with their parents. What to do? If we look back to the previous century, we’ll see there is a simple solution: put the kids on trains and ship them off to the heartland to work on farms.

In the mid-1800s, slums in New York and other eastern cities were bursting with immigrants who had come to the U.S. seeking relief from poor harvests, famines, political unrest and revolutions in their homelands. Advertising by railroad and steamship companies extolled America as “Land of the second chance” and where “free land” was available. The reality for most was quite different. Packed into slums where lack of sanitation resulted in rampant disease and working at low-wage jobs where safety was not a consideration during an era of no worker protection, neither against injury or death, nor resultant financial loss. The streets of New York became infested with 30,000 permanently separated children.

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