Campaign Action
How fucked up, cruel, and just plain awful is Donald Trump’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Sudan? Among the TPS recipients who may be targeted for deportation once their protections expire are workers who clean the offices of the very agency that will be charged with rounding them up if Congress takes no action to legalize their status:
Mr. [Victor] Moran, [Total Quality] janitorial services executive, had been worried about the impending cancellation of the program. His staff cleans buildings throughout the Washington area, including the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that would be responsible for deporting his workers, and the offices of the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III.
First and foremost, the human costs of ending TPS are immeasurable. Families with U.S. citizen kids stand to get torn apart, torn from their communities, and deported to nations that are no longer home and are not prepared to take them back. Secondly, the actions of this shit businessman stand to kneecap small and large businesses alike, with construction companies to Disney standing to lose valued employees:
For Stan Marek, the chief executive of Marek, a Houston-based construction company, the decisions to end temporary protections have come at the worst possible time. Houston is waiting to be rebuilt after its run-in with Hurricane Harvey, yet, he said, there will be fewer people than ever to overhaul the city’s office buildings, schools, hotels and hospitals.
About 30 employees from Honduras, Haiti and El Salvador with temporary protected status have worked for him for over a decade. Some are skilled craftsmen; some are supervisors.
This sweep comes as businesses are facing a labor shortage. “Business leaders often insist they cannot find enough workers at all, let alone Americans.” According to the New York Times, Marek “has pushed on his workers’ behalf, even paying for a public relations campaign to call for immigration reform. ‘If they lose their status—boom, we’ll have to terminate them, and that’s not much fun, telling a guy who’s got three kids in high school, all American-born, that he’s going to be terminated,’ Mr. Marek said. ‘They’re good people, damn good people.’”
According to a report from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, revoking “protections from Salvadorans, Hondurans and Haitians would deprive Social Security and Medicare of about $6.9 billion in contributions over a decade, and would shrink the gross domestic product by $45.2 billion”:
Concentrated in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia and Maryland, those with protected status work mainly in construction, restaurants and grocery stores, and as landscapers and day care workers, according to data on recipients from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti assembled by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonprofit that has argued for extending the program.
More than 45,000 Haitians will have to leave by July 2019; about 57,000 Hondurans are hoping, against all indications to the contrary, that they will be spared the next time the Trump administration must decide whether to extend their protections.
Defenders of terminating TPS will say that this opens up jobs for native-born Americans, except there’s one minor issue in this thinking:
“There are no Americans out there to take the jobs,” said Mark Drury, a vice president at Shapiro & Duncan, a Washington-area plumbing, heating and cooling firm. The company and its competitors have resorted to poaching each other’s project managers, engineers, welders and plumbers.
The company even retrained and hired a former coal miner who decided to switch careers, Mr. Drury said, but had not found other miners willing to move to the area.
Not only will the company have to lay off its 14 Salvadoran workers, Mr. Drury said, but it was also worrying about the roughly 30 employees who are protected from deportation by virtue of a government program for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children. The Trump administration has announced the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, will expire in March. Congress is considering creating a new program for those immigrants, perhaps in exchange for new border security spending, but no deal has been reached.
Mr. Drury said he had about 40 openings. The company — which is helping to build a cancer center, the new headquarters of the mortgage giant Fannie Mae and a project at the National Security Agency’s headquarters — was already turning away work because it could not hire fast enough, he said.
“Losing people just puts us further behind,” Drury said.