Thanks to Susan for sending this opinion piece by former US Representative Tom Tancredo regarding Temporary Protected Status for, most recently, Haitians. We told you about the Obama Administration decision here.
From World Net Daily:
Like most “emergency” programs set up by government, the benefits of gaining “Temporary Protected Status,” or TPS, as a refugee do not expire when the emergency has passed. In government jargon, “temporary” can be 20 years – or forever.
The federal government has no system for tracking people previously awarded TPS since its inception in 1990. Thus, there is no way of knowing the total number of individuals now residing in the United States who first arrived under the TPS program, nor is there any reliable data on what percentage of TPS refugees eventually return home. But the nation’s experience with the first decade of the program led the Center for Immigration Studies to conclude, “In the real world, there is nothing as permanent as a temporary refugee.”
Within hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, President Obama announced the awarding of Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the United States – people here illegally before the earthquake, a number variously estimated at 100,000 to 200,000. Indeed, over the past 20 years, most TPS recipients were people already in the county, not people fleeing a disaster.
Thus, while the program is largely defended on the humanitarian grounds of offering temporary safety to genuine refugees, it is undeniable that historically, the main function of the TPS program has been to to protect illegal aliens – people already here and thus not directly affected by any natural disaster – from the threat of deportation.
[…..]
Americans are coming to realize that our nation’s immigration policies and refugee programs are based on lies, fantasies and politically expedient half-truths – and not on the best interests of the United States. TPS is one of those lies. “Temporary refugees” never go home, because the “emergency” never passes, and the lobby for new amnesties never rests.
Read it all!