During the last year, the Trump administration announced that it would terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for around 300,000 foreign nationals from Central America and the Caribbean. TPS gives migrants already in America legal permission to remain in the United States if their countries are suffering from natural disaster or social unrest. The Department of Homeland Security can designate countries for 6 to 18 months and extend the period as many times as it sees fit, but recipients must periodically reregister to maintain their status.
DHS decided that conditions in El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti—the three most high-use countries of the 10 currently designated for the program—have improved enough to send TPS recipients back to their countries of origin. By 2020, nearly 200,000 Salvadorans and around 100,000 combined Hondurans and Haitians expected to reregister for TPS will have been stripped of their status, and will thus face deportation.
Immigration hardliners favor this decision. They worry, first, that TPS beneficiaries will be allowed to live and work in America forever, because no presidential administration will ever have the wherewithal to revoke their TPS and deport them. Second, they point out that TPS recipients are not especially in need of U.S. largesse. The conditions of Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador may be dire, but so are those of Venezuela, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea—three countries not designated by the government for TPS. Should their nationals also be eligible? Where are we to draw the limit? Finally, they worry that the TPS debate puts at stake the credibility of the U.S. immigration regime. Ending TPS, they argue, would move us closer to the ideal of seriously protecting American sovereignty.
While these concerns raise some legitimate questions, they are ultimately misplaced. To the first point, for example: Although there is something incoherent about allowing “Temporary” Protected Status to be renewed for all eternity, this incoherence is not an argument for ending TPS; it merely suggests that the law should be updated to reflect new realities. More than half of the TPS recipients from El Salvador and Honduras have lived in America for more than 20 years, per research from the Center for Migration Studies. The same study determined that TPS beneficiaries from those two countries plus Haiti have had around 273,000 children who are, naturally, American citizens by virtue of their birthplace. They all stand to see their families ripped asunder. A simple “Revoke TPS, deport those who remain” proposal fails to grapple with the fact that these are people who have settled down, birthed American children, and raised families.
Which brings us to the second concern: Is it the United States’ obligation to accept all poor immigrants across its borders? Obviously not. Even wealthy countries do not have the resources to bring in all the globe’s indigent people in some utopian attempt to improve the condition of the unfortunate. Nor should wealthy countries be expected to accomplish what is clearly an impossible task. The trouble is that TPS recipients are already in America. Their place of residence necessarily changes the nature of moral deliberations to be made about deporting them, given that TPS beneficiaries live in the United States and would face dreadful living conditions if expelled.
Consider that San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital whose metro population accounts for more than a third of the country’s people, is the world’s most violent city, measured by homicide rate. Robert Muggah writes that El Salvador has a higher rate of conflict deaths today than it did from 1981-1989, when it underwent a civil war that killed 75,000 people. Consider also that six out of ten Honduran households live in poverty, per the World Bank. And Haiti, in turn, is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Its literacy rate hovers around 50 percent. In fact, Haiti is so poor that an untold number of its children— in 2012 UNICEF gave an estimate of 250,000—live as “restaveks,” or as slaves who exchange their labor for housing. Is “preserving our credibility” worth deporting hundreds of thousands of people to such appalling circumstances?
Related to these moral considerations are the economic ripple effects mass deportations could have on the countries in question. The economies of Haiti, El Salvador, and Honduras are all highly dependent on remittances from expatriates (many of whom are TPS recipients) in the United States. For perspective, World Bank data show that remittances to Haiti in 2017 were equal to 29.2 percent of the country’s GDP. In El Salvador, that number was 20.4 percent, and in Honduras, it was 18.8 percent. There are few countries where remittances have more economic significance than in these three.
Not only is this money difficult to replace by the people already living in the other nations: The Economist reports that the economy of El Salvador creates only 11,000 jobs per year for every 60,000 who enter the workforce. Add, as the TPS revocation would, a few more tens of thousands of returning migrants, and you could impose an unmanageable burden on the labor market.
To the hardliners’ third point, many relevant experts and civil servants agree that TPS revocations would undermine U.S. interests and foster conditions for disaster. Jonathan Blitzer of the New Yorker writes that “Diplomats, foreign-policy experts, former ambassadors, and government officials had all warned the [DHS] that cancelling TPS for the Hondurans would undercut U.S. interests in the region.” Objections to Trump’s policy were so severe that they contributed to the resignations of several high-ranking officials at the Departments of State and Homeland Security, as the Washington Post reported.
Nor will revoking TPS will do anything to solve the issue of illegal immigration in the long term. It will not contribute to fixing the problem of visa overstays. It will not advance the goal of securing the border with Mexico. And, given that deportations could destabilize Central America, cancelling TPS could backfire, ultimately placing more strain on the border, not less. Nobody benefits.
Republican lawmakers, including Florida representative Carlos Curbelo, have proposed alternatives more humane than the Trump administration’s. Curbelo’s would create a path to legal residence for TPS recipients from Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, subject to considerations on past criminal convictions and certain time cutoffs. Given that TPS itself has become politically controversial, it could be phased out even as the people who benefitted from it are allowed to legally remain in the United States. This idea is similar to a proposal from Rep. Mike Coffman, which would end the program but grant permanent status to past TPS holders within a certain time frame. Such measures must pass through Congress, so in the end it is up to legislators to craft a morally defensible strategy to let TPS recipients stay if the program is reformed or scrapped. But Trump’s proposals cannot proceed as planned.
When the Trump White House and some of its hardline restrictionist allies speak about immigration, it occasionally becomes clear—to borrow from George Orwell—that for some people “deportation” is at most a word. The president’s TPS decision is likely to have unintended consequences for American foreign policy, and will also decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of human beings—human beings who have come to call America home, to the benefit of themselves and the society around them. The government’s actions on TPS must reflect these realities.
