A migrant boat sailing from Turkey crashed in Italy on Sunday, killing at least 59 people, including 12 children, a team at Reuters reports. The boat was carrying people from Afghanistan, Iran and many other countries.  

Flavio Di Giacomo, an International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman, called for the opening of "more regular migration channels." Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressed deep sorrow for the deaths and blamed human traffickers who offer "the false prospect of a safe journey." 

Here in the States, many unaccompanied migrant children, primarily from Central America, are ending up in "a new economy of exploitation," as Hannah Dreier reports in a New York Times investigative piece. "This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century," Dreier writes.  

The investigation comprised interviews with more than 100 migrant child workers across 20 states "who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined." Don't miss this one, including the photographs by Kirsten Luce. 

Welcome to Monday’s edition of The Forum Daily. I’m Dan Gordon, the Forum’s strategic communications VP, and the great Forum Daily team also includes Dynahlee Padilla-Vasquez, Clara Villatoro and Katie Lutz. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected]. 

SEPARATING — Some families trying to use the CBP One app at the border to schedule asylum interviews are not able to include their children, leading them to send their children separately as unaccompanied minors, per Sandra Sanchez of Border Report. "[T]he family members do not understand the intricacies of U.S. immigration law. ... And so there’s a lot of confusion and a lot of difficult decisions being made," said Priscilla Orta, a supervising attorney with Lawyers for Good Government. 

MEXICO ASYLUM DENIALS — Mexico’s refugee assistance agency, COMAR, launched a pilot program in southern Mexico last week to "explore expediting asylum denials to those it deems likely to travel onward to the U.S," reports Rosa Flores of CNN. Its goal was to deter migrants from accessing temporary documents amid their pending cases, but the Biden administration’s pending asylum rule "changes the whole thing," said COMAR’s head, Andrés Ramírez. "We need to rethink it." 

BLOCKING OWNERSHIP — Two GOP-led proposed bills in Texas could prohibit certain legal immigrant populations from purchasing property in the state, reports Sasha von Oldershausen of Texas Monthly. Senate Bill 147 would impact Chinese nationals, Iranians, North Koreans and Russians awaiting U.S. citizenship, while Senate Bill 552 would prohibit individuals, companies and government entities from those four countries from buying agricultural land in the state.  

TARGETS FOR ABUSE — Advocates in Wisconsin are raising awareness about transnational marriage abandonment, one form of domestic violence to which immigrants are vulnerable, reports Sophie Carson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Any abuser is going to use the tactics with his means to control the woman," said Basema Yasin, coordinator of the domestic violence support program in Milwaukee called Our Peaceful Home. "Immigration status is one of the most powerful tools they have." 

Thanks for reading, 

Dan 

P.S. Lots of heavy stuff today, so let’s end with something lighter: Fellow word nerds, enjoy Ilan Stavans’ recent New York Times essay on how immigrants’ native lexicons have enriched American English.