Congress established Temporary Protected Status (TPS) more than 30 years ago to address exactly the sort of situation that is playing out in Ukraine today. An estimated 30,000 Ukrainian citizens are believed to be in the United States on some sort of temporary visa, or here illegally. A percentage of those Ukrainians may want to get home right now to join the resistance to Russia’s military invasion and subjugation of their homeland, or to be with their families in a time of crisis.
Congress established Temporary Protected Status (TPS) more than 30 years ago to address exactly the sort of situation that is playing out in Ukraine today. An estimated 30,000 Ukrainian citizens are believed to be in the United States on some sort of temporary visa, or here illegally. A percentage of those Ukrainians may want to get home right now to join the resistance to Russia’s military invasion and subjugation of their homeland, or to be with their families in a time of crisis.
Ever since the U.S. economy has embarked on a post-COVID-19 recovery, Americans have been told by lobbyists for various mass-immigration vested interests that increasing immigration is the solution for growing inflation and difficulties that employers may be experiencing in finding workers. In a recent study, the Federation for American Immigration Reform challenges the lobby’s misleading, self-serving narrative, demonstrating that cheap-foreign-labor policies that put American workers last are not the answer.
Former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has already been declared unlawful by a federal judge in Texas — a decision that is likely to be upheld later this year by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In fact, Mr. Obama admitted, on 22 occasions, that he lacked the authority to grant across-the-board protections to illegal aliens before he succumbed to pressure from his political base and created DACA in 2012.
The chattering class and the ruling elites of deep blue cities and states are aghast that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is resorting to political publicity stunts to bring national attention to the migration crisis the Biden administration is inflicting on his state. In doing so, Abbott is giving these self-declared sanctuary jurisdictions a taste of the hardships imposed by Biden’s open borders policy and exposing their self-righteous hypocrisy. Abbott’s political theater has been so successful that Governors Doug Ducey of Arizona, Ron DeSantis of Florida, and even the Democratic mayor of El Paso have gotten into the act.
In July, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens offered a notable mea culpa, acknowledging his failure to read or empathize with the mood of about half of the country. “I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’ My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges,” he wrote.
Proponents of unchecked immigration have a long history of labeling anyone and everyone who advocates for limits on immigration and for the rule of law. In the early 2000s, it began with the Southern Poverty Law Center labeling just about every organization calling for reducing immigration or enforcing immigration laws as “hate groups.”
President Biden, who came to office two years ago with some of the lowest levels of illegal immigration in modern history, largely ignored the historic border crisis he created by devoting only a few lines to it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Rewarding illegal immigration by granting mass amnesty has traditionally been a tough sell with the American public. So, the marketing strategy for amnesty advocates is to sell the American people on the idea that millions of illegal aliens are actually doing us a favor by being here, and that granting them legal permanent residence is the least we can do to thank them.
Summer is over. Kids are heading back to school and members of Congress are heading back to Washington to try to hammer out a federal budget for the new fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. In the best of times, this is never an easy undertaking – and these are most certainly not the best of times.