OPINION:
If ever a federal program were egregiously misnamed, at least as it has operated until now, it’s the 35-year-old system granting temporary protected status to foreign refugees fleeing countries considered too dangerous for them to return to because of war, violence and/or natural disasters.
In recent years, the program has been abused, most notably under President Biden, who gratuitously expanded it, more than tripling the number of protectees from 400,000 to 1.3 million. Temporary protected status, in effect, became another manifestation of the Biden administration’s reckless and enormously costly open borders policy.
At issue now, however, is that these refugees have been allowed to remain in this country far longer than the program ever intended.
Put another way: What part of “temporary” do those who have run the program thus far and those resisting enforcing its time limits not understand?
Take an editorial in The Washington Post on Sunday, headlined: “350,000 Haitians are being sent home. That’s cruel.”
The Post’s editorial lamented that hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been notified by President Trump’s administration that they must return to their crime- and poverty-ravaged Third World Caribbean island homeland by early next month.
When Congress enacted temporary protected status in 1990, the law envisioned “temporary” as being six to 18 months. Yet some Haitians have been here since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit their country 16 years ago this week, on Jan. 12, 2010. The quake, with an epicenter 15 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, reportedly killed 200,000 and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless.
As regrettable as that was, under no definition of the word does 16 years even remotely qualify as “temporary,” even for Haitians who are self-supporting and not living here on the taxpayers’ dime.
Other Haitians came here much more recently on the grounds that their country was, and remains, a dangerous, failed state and the poorest nation in the hemisphere, despite sharing the island of Hispaniola with the much more prosperous Dominican Republic.
It was eight years ago this week, on Jan. 11, 2018, that Mr. Trump, then in his first term, correctly if undiplomatically included Haiti among what he reportedly called “s—-hole countries.”
“Certain conditions in Haiti remain concerning,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged in announcing that the Haitians would have to leave by Feb. 3, despite noting that armed gangs “operate with impunity, enabled by a weak or effectively absent central government.”
Still, it’s long past time for the Haitians under temporary protected status to go home, because there is no indication that conditions in Haiti will improve anytime soon in their absence. The country is certainly not going to fix itself.
The Haitians who have been told they must leave in the next three weeks reportedly have been offered a free, one-way plane ticket and $1,000. For context, the per capita income in 2024 in Haiti, according to the World Bank, was $3,188.
For the record, Haitians are not alone in having their heretofore seemingly permanent temporary protected status ended. So, too, are beneficiaries from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, The Post editorial said. The Venezuelans might be granted an extension, however, given the fluid situation in their South American nation after the forcible Jan. 3 ouster of dictator Nicolas Maduro.
If Haiti is ever to become something other than a foreign aid money pit, it’s incumbent on the soon-to-be-repatriated Haitians themselves to go back and help pull their country up by the proverbial bootstraps.
Interestingly, when Mr. Trump announced Jan. 7 that he was pulling the United States out of 31 United Nations entities and 35 non-U.N. international organizations, the Organization of American States was not one of them. The OAS needs to be pressed to help the returnees make Haiti habitable again.
So while The Washington Post and others might decry the ending of the Haitians’ “temporary” protected status as “cruel,” singer Nick Lowe reminded us (albeit in an unrelated context in a 1979 Top 40 hit song): “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, in the right measure.” Ending their temporary protected status is the right measure.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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