From an economic perspective, so long as we have low unemployment and migrants are primarily working in areas with acute labor shortages, they're good for the economy. Folks who aren't working or are engaging in criminal activity are an economic drain on the country.
Actually, would it be wrong to send all our felons to stay with Maduro in Venezuela? For an extended vacation. Sorry...that was very wrong.
A New Risk for Employers: Losing Millions of Migrants With Temporary Work Permits
Trump promised to eliminate programs that provide temporary work permits, including to Dreamers
By Ruth Simon and Michelle Hackman, WSJ
Dec. 14, 2024 5:00 am ET
Nate Koetje, chief executive of an electrical contractor based in Grand Rapids, Mich., would like to hire as many as 200 workers next year. Despite a somewhat cooling labor market, he said he would be lucky to find 150.
So if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to eliminate programs that provide temporary work permits to immigrants with no permanent legal status, Koetje’s growing company would face even more staffing challenges. The company, Feyen Zylstra, now employs two people whose ability to continue working is at risk.
“Though the numbers are small, these individuals play a key role in the success of a company like ours,” Koetje said, adding that increasing opportunities for legal immigration is important for the continued growth of companies like his, and he sees it as a bipartisan issue.
Mass deportations are the most prominent of Trump’s immigration pledges, but a more urgent threat looms for millions of immigrants and their employers: losing access to legal work.
Trump has promised to eliminate several programs that offer deportation protections and work authorization to immigrants in the country illegally or whose visas have expired. As many as 3.3 million immigrants covered by the programs could lose their ability to work, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
People opposed to President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass-deportation policy demonstrated in November in New York City. Photo: Ron Adar/Zuma Press
Those at risk include people from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Ukraine as well as people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, often called Dreamers. Many immigrants with temporary status, known as TPS, enjoy deportation protections—and work authorization—because the government has determined their home countries are too dangerous. Many more entered the country through a program set up by the Biden administration that rewarded them with work permits for coming legally rather than attempting to cross the southern border.
Immigration advocates, and some Democrats in Congress, are urging the Biden administration to take executive action to extend immigrants’ work permits for as long as possible ahead of Trump’s return to Washington. That would include classifying new countries with large immigrant populations for TPS and renewing existing TPS populations whose status is about to run out.
Some officials inside the Biden administration have hesitated, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking. Officials fear the party would face blowback given Trump won the election in part by casting Democrats as too weak on immigration, the people said.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Trump transition didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Immigrants whose legal work status is at risk work in sectors that range from healthcare and hospitality to manufacturing and education, for small businesses and for large employers such as Eli Lilly, Amazon and Microsoft. Some are recent arrivals; others have been in the workforce for a decade.
Their removal from the workforce—which, because of the intricacies of federal immigration law, would take months or more to play out—would create fresh challenges for employers already struggling to fill open positions. It would also plunge millions of families into instability, opening them up to possible deportation with few legal options to challenge the decision.
“It will have an enormous impact across the U.S. in a wide range of industries, regardless of whether those people get deported or wind up leaving the U.S.,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a nonpartisan advocacy group.
Chris Thomas, an immigration attorney in Denver, is working with one social-media company that has more than 1,000 employees whose legal work status could vanish, in roles that range from marketing to computer analyst. “A lot of other companies are expressing the same concern,” Thomas said.
Trump has argued the Biden administration’s use of certain programs that grant work permits to migrants was illegal, such as Biden’s broad use of an obscure immigration power known as humanitarian parole to allow in more than a million people without visas.
“Do you know that we flew in a million people, airplanes over the top of the border, beautiful airplanes, they’re flying them in,” Trump said at an August campaign rally in Asheboro, N.C. “If you want to stop people, you’re not flying them in on airplanes and many other things.”
Roughly 1.7 million immigrants entered the country during the Biden administration through humanitarian parole, which most often grants them two years of permission to live in the U.S. and a work permit, according to the MPI estimate. Another 1.1 million immigrants, from countries including El Salvador, Haiti and Venezuela, are covered by Temporary Protected Status. Presidents have the authority to grant TPS to people from countries deemed dangerous because of wars or natural disasters.
A third category, totaling roughly 535,000 people, are Dreamers. They were brought to the country as children and have enjoyed temporary protection since 2012 under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Many of these immigrants have established roots in their community, and their status makes it easier to rent homes, obtain health insurance and apply for driver’s licenses. Some have started their own businesses.
Alejandro Flores-Muñoz, a DACA recipient, came to the U.S. from Mexico at age 7. Now 35, he owns a food truck and a catering company that provides meals for corporate clients and private events.
Last year, his catering business, Combi Taco, won a $500,000 contract from the city of Denver to provide meals to immigrants living in the city’s shelters. In December, it catered the lieutenant governor’s holiday party, held at the governor’s mansion. Flores-Muñoz and his partner have six part-time employees. Of the eight, five are eligible to work under TPS or DACA.
“I know no other country but the U.S.A.,” said Flores-Muñoz.
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Trump has said he plans to end several of the programs that grant work permits so that immigrants aren’t able to renew their work eligibility. The first of those cliffs will come in March when TPS for roughly 175,000 Salvadoran immigrants—all of whom have been living and working in the U.S. since at least 2001—is set to expire.
He has at times spoken sympathetically about the Dreamers, although his first administration attempted to end the DACA program twice, failing on technical legal issues.
This time, legal experts believe, Trump is on better footing to end immigration programs because he won several legal victories regarding his immigration powers shortly before leaving office.
Growth in the U.S.-born labor force has slowed since Trump was last in office, increasing the appeal to employers of hiring immigrant labor—especially those who come with ready work permits and Social Security cards.
Cardinal Glass Industries employs five workers with TPS at its Fargo, N.D., plant.
Plant manager Mike Arntson said he figures he would have to hire away workers from another local employer if anyone on his team loses their legal work authorization. Seventy percent of the plant’s 343 employees were born outside the U.S., he said. The unemployment rate in North Dakota currently hovers below 2.5%.
“My hope is that once we have secured the border that we revitalize our legal immigration process,” Arntson said. “To take a subsection of the workforce here in North Dakota and make them go back to the country where they were born, it just doesn’t make sense.”
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