DHS Extends Temporary Protected Status to Cover Nearly 500k Aliens

Milton Friedman once wrote "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." While evidence of this truism abounds, one of the greatest examples is Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Biden Administration just announced a massive expansion of TPS for Venezuela that the government estimates extends protection from removal and employment authorization documents (EADs) to 472,000 additional aliens present in the country. That would bring the total of Venezuela nationals with TPS to approximately 700,000. This will obviously encourage more migration from Venezuela, but also this points to the future of the Biden Administration's immigration policies. Look for more TPS for more countries and escalating migration as aliens seek the benefit.

TPS has an advantage most other efforts by the Biden Administration lack, as it was created by Congress. The law allows the government to designate countries or parts of countries for TPS in instances where it would be unsafe to remove aliens to that country for reasons of war, natural disaster, or other extreme and temporary circumstances in the country. There is nothing wrong with this law, in theory, because it is temporary in nature. Both the circumstances warranting the protection and the protection itself are, by law, temporary in nature.

However, we know that what counts as "temporary" is in the eye of the beholder. Especially in immigration law, the government's idea of temporary is permanence. For example, El Salvador has had TPS status for 22 years. Honduras and Nicaragua are coming up on their 25th anniversary of TPS status. Haiti has been in TPS for over a decade. This is as temporary as inflation has been transitory or the border crisis was seasonal.

Border Crisis Threatens Cities' Resilience

Rejecting the Bipartisan Agreements of Columnists

Last week, one of The New York Times' conservative columnists, Bret Stephens, and one of their liberal columnists, Gail Collins, published a back-and-forth on their view of some of the currently hot political issues. Not surprisingly, they started with the migrant crisis.