Biden’s last-minute amnesty aims to hamstring Trump administration
By William Davis www.americanthinker.com
Before hitting the exits, Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas had one last gift left for America’s large migrant population.
The Biden administration announced an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 850,000 foreign nationals from El Salvador and Venezuela. For the more than 230,000 migrants from El Salvador who first obtained “temporary” relief following an earthquake in their country in 2001, Mayorkas cited bad weather as a reason to prolong the program.
“El Salvador’s extension of TPS is based on geological and weather events, including significant storms and heavy rainfall in 2023 and 2024, that continue to affect areas heavily impacted by the earthquakes in 2001,” the secretary wrote.
As if the people of Los Angeles, western North Carolina, and Florida have not also struggled with weather-related disasters. To hear Mayorkas tell it, El Salvador has uniquely bad weather, and that’s why we must gives hundreds of thousands of their citizens amnesty in perpetuity. Never mind the millions of El Salvadorans who seem to be able to persist in their home country despite the apparently insurmountable weather-related challenges.
The case for allowing these Salvadorans to remain in the U.S. is also weakened by the fact that El Salvador is now one of the continent’s safest countries, with crime rates collapsing in recent years to a level far below those in the U.S.
Put simply, the conditions in El Salvador are mostly fine, and the rationale for expanding TPS protections for these migrants is flimsy at best.
Nevertheless, these migrants, along with the more than 600,000 from Venezuela, will now have their work permits extended until 2026, allowing them to compete with American workers for critical job opportunities.
Mayorkas’ rationale for extending TPS for the Venezuelan migrants will likely garner more sympathy given the unrest fueled by the nation’s communist government. The ongoing political crisis in Venezuela has led to an outpouring of international condemnation of President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime and will almost certainly be used as a pretext to import more Venezuelan migrants to the U.S.
There has been unrest, poverty, and chaos in Venezuela for decades, and this will likely continue for the foreseeable future. By Mayorkas’ logic, this means the “temporary” amnesty granted to foreign nationals from that country would be extended in perpetuity, and perhaps that’s exactly his intention. Just because a country is struggling politically and economically does not mean the U.S. has an obligation to open the floodgates to its people.
Many of the Venezuelans who are benefitting from the TPS program could use their experience in the U.S. to improve the conditions and raise the expectations in their home country, so it does not serve American interests to allow them to remain here indefinitely.
There is also the issue of crime which has been rampant among foreign nationals from Venezuela.
Major American cities have been terrorized by the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which has been busted hundreds of times in New York City alone and hijacked apartment complexes in Colorado, among other crimes. This is not to suggest all Venezuelan TPS recipients are violent or bad people, but is this really an appropriate time for the U.S. to be expanding migration from that country?
TPS has always been abused by bad actors to grant de facto amnesty to foreign nationals without having to go through Congress.
This is just another example of the program’s abuse, and the timing was no accident. Extending TPS protections at this time was done primarily as a last act by the Biden administration to frustrate the Trump administration’s attempts to restore law and order to our immigration system.
Donald Trump’s team will almost certainly revoke this latest TPS giveaway, but the hope of the Biden administration is that through this last act they will be able to get the new administration’s agenda bogged down in the bureaucracy and the courts.
Trump won a decisive victory in the 2024 election campaigning on border security and a return to the rule of law, but much like his first term, the plan of anti-borders activists is to rely on internal resistance and activist judges to thwart the new administration’s plans to restore American sovereignty.
The Biden administration’s dubious decision to extend TPS protections for these foreign nationals is primarily about setting the stage for such subversion. Our organization, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, stands ready to defend the new administration’s policies, just as we did last time.
The Biden administration is leaving its successor a mess, one that it has actively worked to make worse on its way out the door. Their latest executive amnesty is the cherry on top of a shameful legacy of lawlessness and decay.
No comments:
Post a Comment