https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/12/18/savetps-a-working-class-struggle/
Jessica's TPS work permit cards
By the time the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was announced in 2014, I had already benefited from another immigration relief program: Temporary Protected Status (TPS). In January and February 2001, my birth country of El Salvador experienced two earthquakes – a month apart from each other – that utterly devastated every aspect of life in Salvadoran Society. In order to help El Salvador reconstruct and get back on its feet, the United States extended TPS status to undocumented Salvadorans immigrants already in the U.S. I was one of them. Created by Congress in the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS was meant for people from countries going through environmental disaster and other extraordinary and temporary conditions or confronting armed conflict. Currently, the program is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In the past two months, TPS has come under attack from the Trump Administration. In November 2017, DHS terminated the program for Haiti, and four months later it extended that terrible decision to TPS-protected immigrants from Nicaragua and Honduras. Starting January 2019, an estimated 50,000 Haitians, 57,000 Hondurans, and 2,550 Nicaraguans with TPS status will become undocumented. They will be expected to leave the U.S. Furthermore, TPS was allowed to expire for three black-majority countries: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone earlier this year. None of them were granted a renewal period as the DHS had done in previous years.
From a working-class perspective, terminating TPS would be catastrophic for workers and families. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) has estimated that 81 to 88 percent of TPS-protected immigrants just from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti participate in the labor market – well above the rate for the total US population at 63 percent. Indeed, many TPS workers have been in the US for so long that they're now homeowners and entrepreneurs, and so they are very invested in their local economies. For example, Salvadorans with TPS must have continuously resided in the U.S. since the designation date of March 9, 2001 – that's more than a decade of working legally and paying taxes in the U.S. Furthermore, the Center for American Progress (CAP) calculates that the loss of TPS workers would cost employers $967 million in turnover and reduce America's GDP by $164 billion over a decade. Of course, working people represent more than just economic contributions, but you'd think that reports like these would influence rational policymakers. But this administration operates with little regard to facts, policy briefs by experts, or peer-reviewed research. Instead, it responds to the worst instincts in our politics, even excusing and allying with white supremacy. This is not rational. It is shamelessly racist.
Rally to Defend Dream Act and TPS on December 6, 2017 in Washington, D.C.. Image from DMV Sanctuary Network
TPS is a racial and environmental justice issue. The program's primary beneficiaries are Black, LatinX, Asian, and Middle Eastern. We come from Haiti, Syria, Nepal, Honduras, Yemen, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Somalia, Guinea, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Liberia, and Sudan. All of these nations have historically been at the mercy of imperialist policies – by the U.S. and other countries — that pillage natural resources and do little to promote the well-being of residents, most of whom are people of color. For these countries, TPS was granted on account of either civil strife (usually the reason for Middle Eastern and African countries) and natural disasters (usually the reason for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean) thereby helping these countries rebuild what US Imperialism has destroyed. Thus, TPS is a form of humanitarian relief for civil war refugees and natural disaster victims that is also a form of reparations to formerly colonized working people of the world.
Similar to DACA, TPS beneficiaries like me receive provisional protection against deportation and permission to work in the United States for a limited period of time –no less than 6 months and no more than 18. In order to be eligible, immigrants from TPS-designated countries must be physically present in the U.S. on the date on which the program is designated for their nationality and must continue to reside in the U.S. In addition, the program does not grant permanent legal status in the United States, nor are TPS beneficiaries eligible to apply for permanent residence or for U.S. citizenship. In other words, working-class immigrants can be workers, but not residents let alone citizens.
My TPS work permit has provided me with many opportunities to pursue the American Dream by making it possible for me to join the workforce. It also allowed for me to file taxes – something that I've been doing since I was 17 years old. Since attaining full-time employment, I have been saving to purchase a home in Virginia for my mother. This is my greatest dream – the chance to honor my mother's sacrifice by providing her with a home that she can call her own. Throughout my time living in the United States, I had never thought I'd be faced with the possibility of giving up this dream. Yet all of this changed on November 9, 2016. The morning after, I felt a fear unlike any I had felt before. The right side of my chest hurt, my stomach felt strange. I was hungry, but couldn't bring myself to eat. I could just think of one thing: if Donald Trump's DHS Secretary does not approve our renewals, then we'd potentially be forced to return El Salvador. As of today, I have 81 days left on my TPS work permit if the designation isn't renewed by DHS.
Since the beginning of December, a number of actions have taken place in Capitol Hill to urge members of Congress to save TPS and pass a Clean Dream Act. The deadline for Congress to act is December 22 – the date Congress adjourns for the holidays. The urgency has escalated even more after Congress failed to include protections for immigrant youth in their spending bill fix. If Congress doesn't act soon, then a number of Dreamers and TPS beneficiaries await deportation and an inhumane removal experience from US society.
As we have seen in recent years, more and more of our working-class brothers and sisters from the global south have had to flee civil war, genocide, economic exploitation, and the environmental effects of climate change – and that will almost certainly continue. Efforts have already begun to eliminate other venues for legal immigration, and the gradual termination of TPS is unlikely to be the end of the assault on immigrants under this Administration. If naturalized and documented allies do not step up to demand a comprehensive immigration reform that makes it easier for all workers, political asylees, climate change refugees, and persecuted people to pursue new beginnings in the United States, then we will forsake our responsibility to whose labor provided the capital to build the economies of developed nations.
Jessica F. Chilin-Hernández
Jessica F. Chilin-Hernández serves as Assistant Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. She is originally from San Salvador, El Salvador.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
NEW YORK – A year ago, I predicted that the most distinctive aspect of 2017 would be uncertainty, fueled by, among other things, Donald Trump's election as president in the United States and the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union. The only certainty, it seemed, was uncertainty – and that the future could become a very messy place.
Throughout 2017, Trump proved every bit as bombastic and erratic as expected. Anyone who paid attention only to his incessant tweets might think the US was teetering between a trade war and a nuclear war. Trump would insult Sweden one day, Australia the next, and then the EU – and then support neo-Nazis at home. And the members of his plutocratic cabinet rival one another in terms of conflicts of interest, incompetence, and sheer nastiness.
There have been some worrisome regulatory rollbacks, especially concerning environmental protection, not to mention the many hate-driven acts that Trump's bigotry may have encouraged. But, so far, the combination of America's institutions and the Trump administration's incompetence has meant that there is (fortunately) a yawning gap between the president's ugly campaign rhetoric and what he has actually accomplished.
Most important for the global economy, there has been no trade war. Using the exchange rate between Mexico and the US as a barometer, fears for the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement have largely subsided, even as trade negotiations have stalled. Yet the Trump roller-coaster never ends: 2018 may be the year that the hand grenade Trump has thrown into the global economic order finally explodes.
Some point to the US stock market's record highs as evidence of some Trumpian economic miracle. I take it partly as evidence that the decade-long recovery from the Great Recession is finally taking hold. Every downturn – even the deepest – eventually comes to an end; and Trump was lucky to be in the White House to benefit from the work of his predecessor in setting the scene.
But I also take it as evidence of market participants' short-sightedness, owing to their exuberance at potential tax cuts and the money that might once again flow to Wall Street, if only the world of 2007 could be restored. They ignore what followed in 2008 – the worst downturn in three quarters of a century – and the deficits and growing inequality that previous tax cuts for the super rich have brought.
They give short shrift to the deglobalization risks posed by Trump's protectionism. And they don't see that if Trump's debt-financed tax cuts are enacted, the Fed will raise interest rates, possibly setting off a market correction.
In other words, the market is once again showing its proclivity for short-term thinking and pure greed. None of this bodes well for America's long-term economic performance; and it suggests that while 2018 is likely to be a better year than 2017, there are large risks on the horizon.
It's a similar picture in Europe. The UK's decision to leave the EU didn't have the jolting economic effect that those who opposed it anticipated, largely because of the pound's depreciation. But it has become increasingly clear that Prime Minister Theresa May's government has no clear view about how to manage the UK's withdrawal, or about the country's post-Brexit relationship with the EU.
There are two further potential hazards for Europe. One risk is that heavily indebted countries, such as Italy, will find it difficult to avoid crisis once interest rates return to more normal levels, as they likely will. After all, is it really possible for the eurozone to maintain record-low rates for the foreseeable future, even as US rates increase?
Hungary and Poland represent a more existential threat to Europe. The EU is more than just an economic arrangement of convenience. It represents a union of countries with a commitment to basic democratic values – the very values that the Hungarian and Polish governments now disparage.
The EU is being tested, and there are well-founded fears that it will be found wanting. The effects of these political tests on next year's economic performance may be small, but the long-term risks are clear and daunting.
On the other side of the world, Chinese President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative is changing Eurasia's economic geography, putting China at the center, and providing an important stimulus for region-wide growth. But China must confront many challenges as it undergoes a complicated transition from export-led growth to growth driven by domestic demand, from a manufacturing economy to a service-based economy, and from a rural to an urban society. The population is aging rapidly. Economic growth has slowed markedly. Inequality is by some accounts almost as severe as in the US. And environmental degradation poses a growing threat to human health and welfare.
China's unprecedented economic success over the past four decades has been partly based on a system whereby broad consultation and consensus-building within the Communist Party and the Chinese state underpinned each set of reforms. Will Xi's concentration of power work well in an economy that has grown in size and complexity? A system of centralized command and control is incompatible with a financial market as large and complex as China's; at the same time, we know where insufficiently regulated financial markets can lead an economy.
But these are all essentially long-term risks. For 2018, the safe bet is that China will manage its way, albeit with slightly slower growth.
In short, as the advanced economies' post-2008 recession fades into the distant past, global prospects for 2018 look a little better than in 2017. The shift from fiscal austerity to a more stimulative stance in both Europe and the US will reduce the need for extreme monetary policies, which almost surely have had distortionary effects not just on financial markets but also on the real economy.
But the concentration of power in China, the eurozone's failure (thus far) to reform its flawed structure, and, most important, Trump's contempt for the international rule of law, his rejection of US global leadership, and the damage he has caused to democracy's standing all pose deeper risks. Indeed, they threaten not just to hurt the global economy, but also to slow what, until recently, had seemed to be an inevitable march toward greater democracy worldwide. We should not let short-run success lull us into complacency.