President-elect Donald Trump’s signature policy plank may end up angering a lot of American employers who depend on legal migrant labor, according to a new report.
In a Saturday article, the Wall Street Journal quoted several business leaders and experts who predicted a standoff between Trump and companies that routinely hire legal immigrants. If the incoming president follows through on his promise to reverse President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, it would result in many migrants with legal status being removed from the United States.
The Journal reported that undoing the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) — a designation for roughly 1.1 million refugees from countries going through war or political upheaval like Afghanistan, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and others — could deplete many businesses of large portions of their workforce. Some advocates are urging Biden to use his lame duck period to take action to extend the work permits of TPS beneficiaries before Trump’s inauguration.
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Mike Arntson — the plant manager for Fargo, North Dakota-based Cardinal Glass — employs five TPS beneficiaries. He told the Journal that he’s hoping Trump’s administration will stop short of policy changes that would destabilize his workforce.
“My hope is that once we have secured the border that we revitalize our legal immigration process,” Arntson said. “To take a subsection of the workforce here in North Dakota and make them go back to the country where they were born, it just doesn’t make sense.”
If Trump repeals TPS, it could mean companies that are already struggling to fill open positions will have even more difficulty hiring workers. And it could financially destabilize the households of immigrant workers — many of whom have been in the workforce for years — as litigation over TPS repeal plays out in the federal judiciary.
“It will have an enormous impact across the U.S. in a wide range of industries, regardless of whether those people get deported or wind up leaving the U.S.,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told the Journal.
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Many foreign-born workers in the United States are also known as “Dreamers,” which is the term used for beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Dreamers — who number roughly 535,000 — were brought to the United States as the children of undocumented immigrants, and many have been in the U.S. for the better part of their lives.
One DACA recipient is Alejandro Flores-Muñoz, who came to the U.S. at age seven. He’s now 35 years old, and runs a catering business that recently won a $500,000 contract from the City of Denver to provide food for people in homeless shelters. His company, Combi Taco, is also regularly hired by corporate clients and hosts of private events.
“I know no other country but the U.S.A.,” he said.
Additionally, the Biden administration’s “humanitarian parole” could also end once Trump is sworn in as president. That program benefits approximately 1.7 million immigrants who have been granted temporary residence and work permits in the U.S. for two years. Humanitarian parole recipients come from countries “deemed dangerous because of wars or natural disasters,” according to the Journal.
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Click here to read the Journal’s report in full (subscription required).
