In line with its immigration enforcement agenda, the Trump administration recently announced that it is ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Nicaraguan nationals. It has also signaled that it will consider ending TPS for Haitian, Honduran, and Salvadoran nationals.
TPS is a form of short-term protection granted to foreign nationals who are unable to return home due to a natural disaster, civil unrest, or violence affecting their native country. Enacted by Congress in 1990, the program is open to legal, as well as illegal, aliens. As the name implies, Congress represented the program as a way to provide provisional assistance to foreigners in dire straits, who would be sent home when the situation in their home country improved.
In reality, TPS has proven to be anything but temporary. At present, TPS has been granted to approximately 400,000 individuals from at least ten countries. Many of those individuals were given protection in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Yet they are still in the United States today with TPS – despite the fact that the circumstances which allegedly prevented them from going home are long over.
The open borders lobby has been predictably incensed at President Trump’s willingness to implement our immigration laws, as written. And they have advanced the same tired arguments in defense of foreign nationals in the United States on borrowed time: “These folks have been here for years, how can we send them home?” To hear the politically correct, multi-cultural elite talk, the only requirement for immigrating to the United States is to show up and grace us with your presence – whether we invited you or not.
Unsurprisingly, Congress’s response has not been to defend the interests of the American public – national security, public safety, and economic stability. Instead, Democrats and Republicans have jointly proposed a bill called the ASPIRE Act, that would allow every person holding TPS prior to January 1, 2017 to apply for a green card. In short, if passed, the bill would turn TPS into a giant amnesty program.
But the insanity wouldn’t end there: Because the bulk of immigration to the U.S. is based on family relationships, our immigration law suffers from a problem known as “chain migration.” That means that every TPS recipient who obtained a green card would then be able to sponsor multiple relatives to immigrate to America.
And with the promise of possible amnesty hanging in the air, every minor natural disaster will now bring crowds of foreign nationals rushing toward our borders, hoping to obtain TPS as the golden ticket that leads to a permanent stay in the U.S. So much for temporary….
Meanwhile, most average Americans are just wondering, when will figure out the simple principle that nearly every parent understands intuitively? When you reward bad behavior, you just get more bad behavior.