University Professor and Students Detail Problems with Trump’s Termination of TPS for Hundreds of Thousands of Immigrants
In an opinion piece for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, Dr. David Leblang and students explain various issues with Trump’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of hard working, vetted, legal immigrants. They show how ending TPS for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan will actually increase undocumented immigration.
The article is excerpted below and available here:
Most recently, the administration announced in January its decision to end TPS for roughly 200,000 Salvadorans — removing both their protection from deportation and their ability to work legally in the United States. Many of the immigrants affected by Trump’s terminations have lived in the United States for more than a decade.
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The Trump administration has broken sharply with past practice and ended TPS for foreign nationals from Nicaragua, Haiti, Sudan, Nepal and Honduras, even though those countries have not yet recovered from conflict or natural disasters. Migrants in the United States from South Sudan, Syria and Somalia are still covered, as the initial term of protection has yet to expire. The only country for which the Trump administration has renewed TPS status is Yemen, which is embroiled in a war so deadly that the European Union has declared it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
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Our findings suggest that TPS — or other policies that increase remittances to migrants’ homelands — may help stem migration into the United States. Many argue that a better way to stem immigration would be helping Latin American countries to develop economically and to reduce violence. Interestingly, recently released documents from the Department of Homeland Security suggest that the White House received several reports from its own analysts suggesting that ending TPS might increase illegal immigration to the United States.
