Pressure Grows to Grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, pressure is intensifying on the Obama administration to grant temporary protected status (TPS) to undocumented Haitians living in the U.S. TPS, which is aimed at illegal immigrants who cannot return home safely due to natural and man-made disasters, would allow an estimated 30,000 Haitians to remain in the country for a defined period of time—most likely 12 to 18 months—and obtain work permits. In Miami today, a variety of groups, including South Florida's congressional delegation, immigrant advocacy organizations, and the Catholic Church, held press conferences calling on the administration to act. "If they don't grant TPS in this situation, they have effectively repealed TPS," says Randy McGrorty of Catholic Charities Legal Services. "This is exactly what TPS was designed for." Yet so far, administration officials have said only that the policy is under consideration; in the meantime, all they've pledged to do is temporarily halt the deportation of Haitians residing here illegally.

TPS is a sour topic for the Haitian community. Advocates have long sought it, given the string of calamities that the island has suffered, including four hurricanes last year. But "Haitians have been let down time and again, by administration after administration," says Cheryl Little of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. What angers activists even more is that TPS has been granted to several other immigrant groups. Hondurans and Nicaraguans benefited from TPS after Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and Salvadorans earned the status after an earthquake in 2001. As destructive as both  those tragedies were, they don't match the apparent scale of devastation in Haiti. Yet, just as the island nation languishes in a unique category of squalor in the hemisphere, so, too, does the community here find itself relegated to a unique category of undesirable.

One of the arguments frequently used against granting TPS to Haitians is that it will encourage a massive influx of new immigrants. Yet Little and McGrorty point out that TPS benefits only those who are already in the U.S., not fresh arrivals. Moreover, they argue, allowing undocumented Haitians already here to work legally and send home remittances would serve a dual purpose: it would funnel dollars toward reconstruction and provide a measure of stability to families who might otherwise feel compelled to emigrate.

It's much too early to tell whether the earthquake will trigger a new wave of Haitian immigrants. Survivors on the island have far more pressing needs to attend to first, and transportation links will likely remain ruptured for some time. Last year's hurricanes didn't produce a notable uptick in Haitian arrivals, according to Little, but there's simply no comparing those disasters with the epic scale of the current one. The last time there was a massive influx of Haitians into Florida was in the aftermath of the 1991 coup that deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, says McGrorty. Some 60,000 immigrants streamed in from the island. If any event could set off something comparable, the earthquake would be it.