Salvador solution
Hope still remains for a bipartisan policy answer to immigration debates.
For a brief, shining moment it seemed as if Washington was on the verge of untangling the political Gordian Knot of immigration reform. In an extraordinary televised White House meeting between the president and legislators last week, Donald Trump said he would simply sign whatever immigration deal was worked out and promised to “take all the heat for both Democrats and Republicans.”
All that changed when a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators called his bluff and proposed a compromise that involved a path to citizenship for Dreamers, legal residency for their families and trading spots in the visa lottery in exchange for maintaining Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from countries such as El Salvador. The deal was far more restrictionist than most Democrats and plenty of Republicans would have wanted, but seemed crafted to appease Trump’s antiimmigration agenda. For anyone who paid attention to the vulgarity laced news that ended the week, you know how Trump responded to the proposal.
That moment of hope has been dashed, leaving plenty of U.S. residents still wondering about their own fate — including some 200,000 El Salvadoran immigrants who learned last Tuesday that the TPS program under which they have lived here since 2001 was ending.
Many are long-time residents who have families, homes and jobs, don’t want to return to troubled El Salvador and assumed that acting like good citizens for a long time would eventually lead to legal citizenship.
They came here to live with U.S. permission while their country recovered from major natural disasters. Now they are being told recovery is complete; it’s time to go back.
About 50,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans here under TPS have recently gotten the same news. Some 57,000 Hondurans are awaiting it.
Most want to stay and why not? The United States has its problems, but it’s better than the rampant gang violence, poverty and corruption they face at home.
Many of those problems have roots in the decade-plus-long Salvadoran civil war, in which the United States backed a brutal and violent right-wing government, and decades-long Nicaraguan revolution, in which the United States backed right-wing Contra rebels.
Their own governments have asked the U.S. government not to return them because their impoverished countries have little to offer, and the money they send to relatives and friends is much needed.
After years in the United States, this is home and forcing them to leave accomplishes nothing. It only shines a light on the mean-spiritedness that has become too much a part of our public discussion and policy on immigration.
Fortunately, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen has given the Salvadadorans until September 2019 to leave because she said that would provide time for a legislative solution to this issue.
A lot of these issues are the result of a patchwork of immigration legislation or executive orders that were required because major reform bills have twice failed to get through Congress since the last big immigration reform in 1986 under Ronald Reagan.
What is needed now is a comprehensive bill that gives a reasonable path to permanent residency not to just the Dreamers and those under Temporary Protected Status but to all 11 million undocumented immigrants living here.
It’s well past time for Congress to stop the madness of excessive partisanship and political extremism and come up with an immigration policy that is reasonable, humane and forwardlooking.
What is needed now is a comprehensive bill that gives a reasonable path to permanent residency not to just the Dreamers and those under Temporary Protected Status but to all 11 million undocumented immigrants living here.