Does America lack compassion and humanity for uninvited foreigners? Quite the contrary. While open-borders activists rail against injustice and demand new pathways to citizenship official U.S. policy rewards countless line-jumpers with permanent residency and taxpayer-subsidized benefits.
Case in point: the massive Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program run by the Department of Homeland Security.
In theory as the DHS website describes it the Secretary of Homeland Security may designate a foreign country for TPS due to conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the countrys nationals from returning safely or in certain circumstances where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately. Those conditions include hurricanes environmental catastrophes civil war epidemics and other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
The U.S. allows illegal aliens from TPS-designated countries to live here work here be protected from detention or deportation and travel freely. Its essentially a bad-weather pass into the U.S. Whenever a natural disaster strikes we allow legions of foreigners who entered illegally -- mostly from Latin America -- to stay here while their homelands recover.
In the meantime TPS winners can apply for a panoply of other immigration benefits and protections and file for adjustment of status to pave the way to permanent legalization. In fact the official draft application for Obamacare lists Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Applicant for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as an eligible immigration status.
Yep that means you dont even have to be a legit approved TPS designee to qualify for Obamacare. If you merely filed paperwork to be an applicant for TPS youre in like Flynn! DHS documents are now officially pimping Obamacare to foreigners. And GOP Senate Budget Committee staffers estimate that covering illegal aliens could raise the cost of Obamacare by $120 billion to $200 billion in its first decade.
In theory TPS beneficiaries are supposed to go home after their native countries improve. In practice there is nothing temporary about these temporary reprieves for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from around the world.
Last week DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that TPS had been extended for at least 70000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans for an additional 18 months beginning July 6 2013 and ending Jan. 5 2015. Thanks to American generosity these TPS winners have been here since 1998 -- when Hurricane Mitch hit their homeland.
That was 15 years ago.
Another 250000 illegal aliens from El Salvador first won TPS golden tickets after an earthquake struck the country ... in January 2001. In addition 60000 Haitians received TPS after the earthquakes in 2010. Last fall Napolitano extended their stay until at least 2014. Several hundred Somalis remain in the country with TPS first granted in 1991 along with some 700 Sudanese who first secured TPS benefits in 1997. Last March the Obama administration extended TPS to an estimated 3000 Syrian illegal aliens. Guatemala and Pakistan are lobbying for their own TPS designations.
As I explained when former President George W. Bush reflexively renewed work and residence permits for a quarter-million El Salvadoran illegal aliens in 2005 TPS designations are TINO: temporary in name only. Beneficiaries are supposed to register with the government. But DHS will do little to nothing to track them down once their status expires (if ever). Remember: After more than two decades the federal government still doesnt even have an entry-exit database in place to track legal short-term visa holders.
TPS beneficiaries are supposed to provide proof that they arrived here on an eligible date committed no more than two misdemeanors (!) and no felonies and maintained a continuous presence in the country. But the feds past experience with amnesties dating back to 1986 shows that the programs are dangerously rife with unchecked document fraud.
The prescient Federation for American Immigration Reform saw right through this transparent social and electoral engineering scheme. In congressional testimony from 1999 the organization warned:
For the past 20 years we have seen these programs transformed into backdoor immigration programs that are manipulated by the lobbying of foreign governments ethnic lobbies and our own political leadership alike. Each special program that provides short-term relief has been followed by persistent demands for similar treatment by other groups and nationalities not necessarily made up of persons in the same circumstances. It has now been politicized beyond recognition and certainly no longer deserves the support of the general public.
Temporary amnesties never die. They just keep rolling and rolling along producing new waves of cheap votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Big Business. American sovereignty RIP.
Michelle Malkin author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats Crooks & Cronies is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Does America lack compassion and humanity for uninvited foreigners? Quite the contrary. While open-borders activists rail against injustice and demand new pathways to citizenship official U.S. policy rewards countless line-jumpers with permanent residency and taxpayer-subsidized benefits.
Case in point: the massive Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program run by the Department of Homeland Security.
In theory as the DHS website describes it the Secretary of Homeland Security may designate a foreign country for TPS due to conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the countrys nationals from returning safely or in certain circumstances where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately. Those conditions include hurricanes environmental catastrophes civil war epidemics and other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
The U.S. allows illegal aliens from TPS-designated countries to live here work here be protected from detention or deportation and travel freely. Its essentially a bad-weather pass into the U.S. Whenever a natural disaster strikes we allow legions of foreigners who entered illegally -- mostly from Latin America -- to stay here while their homelands recover.
In the meantime TPS winners can apply for a panoply of other immigration benefits and protections and file for adjustment of status to pave the way to permanent legalization. In fact the official draft application for Obamacare lists Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Applicant for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as an eligible immigration status.
Yep that means you dont even have to be a legit approved TPS designee to qualify for Obamacare. If you merely filed paperwork to be an applicant for TPS youre in like Flynn! DHS documents are now officially pimping Obamacare to foreigners. And GOP Senate Budget Committee staffers estimate that covering illegal aliens could raise the cost of Obamacare by $120 billion to $200 billion in its first decade.
In theory TPS beneficiaries are supposed to go home after their native countries improve. In practice there is nothing temporary about these temporary reprieves for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from around the world.
Last week DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that TPS had been extended for at least 70000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans for an additional 18 months beginning July 6 2013 and ending Jan. 5 2015. Thanks to American generosity these TPS winners have been here since 1998 -- when Hurricane Mitch hit their homeland.
That was 15 years ago.
Another 250000 illegal aliens from El Salvador first won TPS golden tickets after an earthquake struck the country ... in January 2001. In addition 60000 Haitians received TPS after the earthquakes in 2010. Last fall Napolitano extended their stay until at least 2014. Several hundred Somalis remain in the country with TPS first granted in 1991 along with some 700 Sudanese who first secured TPS benefits in 1997. Last March the Obama administration extended TPS to an estimated 3000 Syrian illegal aliens. Guatemala and Pakistan are lobbying for their own TPS designations.
As I explained when former President George W. Bush reflexively renewed work and residence permits for a quarter-million El Salvadoran illegal aliens in 2005 TPS designations are TINO: temporary in name only. Beneficiaries are supposed to register with the government. But DHS will do little to nothing to track them down once their status expires (if ever). Remember: After more than two decades the federal government still doesnt even have an entry-exit database in place to track legal short-term visa holders.
TPS beneficiaries are supposed to provide proof that they arrived here on an eligible date committed no more than two misdemeanors (!) and no felonies and maintained a continuous presence in the country. But the feds past experience with amnesties dating back to 1986 shows that the programs are dangerously rife with unchecked document fraud.
The prescient Federation for American Immigration Reform saw right through this transparent social and electoral engineering scheme. In congressional testimony from 1999 the organization warned:
For the past 20 years we have seen these programs transformed into backdoor immigration programs that are manipulated by the lobbying of foreign governments ethnic lobbies and our own political leadership alike. Each special program that provides short-term relief has been followed by persistent demands for similar treatment by other groups and nationalities not necessarily made up of persons in the same circumstances. It has now been politicized beyond recognition and certainly no longer deserves the support of the general public.
Temporary amnesties never die. They just keep rolling and rolling along producing new waves of cheap votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Big Business. American sovereignty RIP.
Michelle Malkin author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats Crooks & Cronies is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
