There’s nothing as permanent as temporary immigration status.
By Mark Krikorian
National Review Online pointed out last week that “It’s Worse Than You Think” with regard to the Senate’s preposterous amnesty bill. They were addressing specifically the fact that the Senate bill would immediately give probationary amnesty to virtually all illegal aliens, and that the much-touted enforcement “triggers” are therefore a sham, since legalization will already have taken place. What’s more, if the benchmarks (more miles of fencing, additional border-patrol agents, etc.) are not met, the probationary status would likely continue indefinitely, since there is no expiration date in the bill.
The editorial asks with regard to the possible failure to meet the triggers: “Does anyone really believe that the government will, at that point, make all of the illegal immigrants who have gotten ‘probationary’ legal status illegal again?” Common sense would suggest the answer is “no,” which is what the editors were getting at. But it’s actually worse than that. We don’t need to guess what will happen — we already know.This kind of provisional or temporary immigration status is routinely offered under the rubric of “Temporary Protected Status.” Known as TPS, this is a nominally time-limited status granted to groups of illegal aliens, or visitors here on visas about to expire, because of natural disaster or civil unrest back home. They don’t qualify as real refugees because they don’t face the prospect of persecution, but we’re also unwilling to deport them to an unstable situation.
Despite the government’s protestations of temporariness, no one is ever made to leave; most grants of TPS are renewed year after year until everyone gets a green card.
This is not some tiny asterisk in immigration policy; hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have benefited from TPS and its antecedents, most of them Central American, but with smaller groups of people from all over the world also getting in on the act. Although the formal mechanism for granting Temporary Protected Status was created by the 1990 Immigration Act, that was really just an example of Congress “bowing to reality,” in Michael Chertoff’s evocative phrase — the executive branch had been inventing ways of not enforcing immigration law for decades, using Orwellian formulations like “Extended Voluntary Departure” or “Deferred Enforced Departure.”
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