Virgin
Islands, and we count them as some of our hardest workers, and we
recognize the impact that sending so many of these people back would
have not only on the loss of jobs here and the work that those
individuals are doing in the United States, but on the economy of Haiti
itself. There is no infrastructure that will support the 50,000 people going
back to Haiti at this time, and that economy will probably completely
collapse without the remittances that the Haitians who are living in
the United States would be able to bring to that country. Therefore, the negative consequences of terminating Haiti's TPS
designation would be twofold: such actions would be catastrophic to
Haiti's recovery efforts and run counter to congressional efforts to
improve American relations in the region through the recently passed
United States-Caribbean Strategic Engagement Act, Public Law 114-291. So the 300,000 Honduran, Nicaraguan, Haitian, and Salvadoran
immigrants await a mass deportation decision on temporary protective
status, and we are requesting--we are urging, Mr. Speaker--that this
Congress would continue to urge the Department of Homeland Security,
and use our own powers, to ensure the safety of those individuals,
ensure the safety of the stability of the economies of our near
neighbors, of Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and El Salvador, and urge the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security for their protections not to
expire and not to put these people into difficult choices of returning
to countries that still face many of the same extraordinary conditions
that led to the initial grant of TPS or remaining in the United States
without lawful immigrant status. We believe that this is the right thing to do, that this Congress
wants to do the right thing, that the Trump administration's 2018
proposed budget cut, budget request to Congress, for example, proposes
to reduce foreign aid to Latin America and the Caribbean to levels not
seen since 2001. Because of that, the remittances of these individuals
is even more important.
Keywords matched
deportation immigrant immigrants TPS