Biden Likely to Extend, Expand Amnesty for Half a Million Venezuelans

At issue is whether to extend Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan immigrants already in the U.S. The administration has until Monday to make its decision. It also is considering whether to expand the protections to an estimated 250,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the U.S. after TPS was granted last year in March and therefore not eligible for the temporary legal status.

Officials are wary of redesignating TPS to apply to more Venezuelans, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations. The concern inside the White House, the people said, is that doing so will incentivize more migration at a time the administration is struggling to manage the logistical challenges and optics of record numbers of migrants arriving at the border, especially ahead of the midterm elections.

“The administration must publish a Federal Register notice by Monday — 60 days before the current designation expires Sept. 9 — to indicate if it will extend TPS for current holders,” Politico added.

Presidents have much authority to award the TPS status to favored migrants whose home countries suffer from a disaster, such as war, flood, or famine.

But the Venezuelan case is complicated by the huge number of Venezuelans who can migrate to the U.S border. Moreover, life in Venezuala is bad but likely not a humanitarian disaster. In fact, Biden’s deputies are deporting some Venezuelans back to their home countries.

“The quarter-million Venezuelans who’ve come in the past ~16 months came because of Biden’s lax policies,” said a tweet from Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

Like the Haitians [who were] settled in Chile & Brazil, the [TPS] Venezuelans were living in Colombia & elsewhere and took advantage of Biden’s “La Invitación” to trade up.

“TPS is only for instances where deportable aliens cannot safely be returned …. but we deport hundreds of people a year to Venezuela,” he said. 

“If we keep TPS (we shouldn’t), then it should automatically end once we deport anyone to a covered country,” he added. 

Many Venezuelan migrants walked and rode vehicles from Venezuela to the United States via Panama and Mexico.

Biden’s 2021 welcome at the border motivated many more to undertake the trek, which required them to hike across the dangerous Darien Gap, where many migrants are drowned or murdered by robbers.

Business-backed migration groups are calling for the expansion of TPS to more migrant Venezuelans who aid investors by serving as consumers, renters, and workers:

Democratic politicians also want to welcome the Venezuelans, partly in hopes of eventually converting them into Democratic voters:

Today on Venezuela’s Day of Independence I’ve sent a letter with 44 of my Democratic legislative colleagues who joined me in calling on the White House to renew and redesignate TPS for Venezuelans across our nation who have fled Maduro’s regime. pic.twitter.com/JqX2Xuvunq

— Senator Annette Taddeo (She/Her/Ella) (@SenatorTaddeo) July 5, 2022

Biden’s deputies are changing government rules to help TPS beneficiaries get green cards and citizenship.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.

This economic strategy of Extraction Migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.

Extraction migration also distorts the economy and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and radicalizes Americans’ democratic, equality-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The extraction migration economic policy is hidden behind a wide variety of noble-sounding excuses and explanations. For example, progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.

But this colonialism-like economic strategy also kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it extracts human-resource wealth from its poor home countries. This migration policy also minimizes shareholder pressure on companies to build up complementary trade with poor countries.

The polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.