President Joe Biden’s deputies are building a bureaucratic bridge to help many Ukrainians from Eastern Europe move into U.S. jobs and housing, Robert Law, chief of regulatory affairs at the Center for Immigration Studies, said.
The bridge includes a new on-ramp in Poland, easy flights to the United States, and the likely award of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) work permits to migrants who make the journey, he said.
On March 3, Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s pro-migration Homeland Security chief, announced the award of TPS to roughly 70,000 Ukrainians who were in the United States on March 1. The population includes many recent illegal migrants and many fighting-age young men who might help their nation survive the invasion — which is supposedly a top priority for the U.S. government.
But the welcome spotlights the eagerness of Cuban-born Mayorkas and his political allies to bring in more people from poor countries.
Mayorkas has already helped import more than 70,000 people from Afghanistan and more than 1 million southern migrants in 2021. He has expanded the flow of foreign contract-workers into Americans’ white-collar jobs and is trying to expand the number of blue-collar asylum-seekers who get citizenship:
The temporary grant of TPS status to Ukrainians supposedly lasts 18 months, with a cutoff date of March 1. But history shows that the federal government prefers to extend and expand each giveaway, even when the specific disaster that hit the home country has subsided, Law said.
“They have constantly violated the law with this bogus re-designation behavior — they just did that earlier this week [for Sudan’s migrants], although on a smaller scale. … They did this with Haiti, they’ve done it with pretty much every single country,” Law, who served as a senior adviser in Mayorkas’ agency for President Donald Trump, said.
“There’s no confidence that this administration will not move up that cutoff date” to cover Ukrainians who arrived after March 1, even if the war has ended, Law said.
The Ukrainians in the United States could have been protected from being sent home by alternative options, he said.
On August 5, Biden awarded Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) and employment authorization for 18 months for eligible Hong Kong residents. The DED grant provides fewer benefits than TPS, but it includes temporary legal residency and work permits.
The TPS program now includes roughly 700,000 migrants from 13 countries, with starting dates in 1991, 1999, 2001, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016, and later.
Still, small numbers of people from 12 countries have seen their TPS status expire. Those countries include Kosovo in Europe, as well as Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in Africa, in addition to Lebanon and Kuwait in Arab regions.
The new on-ramp for Ukrainians is the State Department’s March 1 announcement that Ukrainians were classified as stateless people, who can request visas for the United States in many other countries. “Nonimmigrant visa (NIV) applications may be processed wherever a Ukrainian applicant is physically located and can schedule an appointment,” the March 1 statement said.
Once granted tourist or temporary work permits, Ukrainians can easily fly into the United States, where they can oversee their visa in expectation of the expanded and extended TPS status, Law said. “I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything wrong with a temporary basis allowing a Ukrainian who is otherwise eligible for a visa to be able to obtain it in another country,” he said.
The key issue is if embassy officials will be allowed by their political appointees to reject a visa application if they expect the Ukrainian person plans to illegally stay in the United States, he said:
The underlying test of that will be if consular officers do their job to ensure that any Ukrainian who was applying for an American temporary visa from a different country truly intends to depart the United States when their time is up? That’s where I think you run into the problem.
On March 4, Mayorkas’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency also invited Ukrainians to ask for visas:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reminds the public that we offer immigration services that may help people affected by extreme situations, including the invasion of Ukraine.
The following measures may be available on a case-by-case basis upon request:
…
Note: When you request help, please explain how the impact of the extreme situations or unforeseen circumstances, such as the invasion of Ukraine, created a need for the requested relief.
Migrants from Ukraine are already using the State Department’s welcome to get into the United States.
BuzzFeed News reported on one Indian and his Ukrainian-citizenship family who were allowed to fly from Europe into Seattle, Washington, instead of flying to his home to India:
“I’m still a bit overwhelmed and haven’t had much time to think about our next steps,” Alex told BuzzFeed News, “but [TPS] provides some sense of stability, and I’m happy to know it’s an option.”
Because Alex is not a naturalized Ukrainian citizen, it’s unclear if he will benefit from TPS, but he’s glad it will at least offer the rest of his family some protection for 18 months. More than 75,000 Ukrainians in the US are expected to be eligible.
Ukrainians and Russians have also developed a new illegal migration route into the United States via Mexico, Reuters reported March 3:
A growing number of Russians and Ukrainians are traveling to Mexico, buying throwaway cars and driving across the border into the United States to seek asylum, a trend that could accelerate as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced more than a million people to flee their homes.
U.S. border officials encountered about 6,400 Russians in the four months between October 2021 and January of this year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data show. That’s more than the roughly 4,100 apprehended during the entire 2021 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The jump is similar for Ukrainians, with a little more than 1,000 apprehended since October 2021 through January, compared to about 680 for all of the last fiscal year.
Instead of being flown home, “almost all the Russians and Ukrainians have been allowed to remain while they pursue asylum claims,” Reuters reported.
The Ukrainians who sneaked across the border before March 1 are eligible for TPS status. They are already getting free legal services from the ACLU-backed San Diego Rapid Response Network.
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has used a wide variety of excuses and explanations to justify its policy of extracting tens of millions of immigrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as workers, consumers, and renters for U.S investors and CEOs.
The economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while also raising their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states. The economic strategy also kills many migrants, separates families, and damages the economies of the home countries.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society. Migration is also backed by university progressives who desire to manage the chaos of a diverse society rather than being forever sidelined by cooperating citizens in a stable Republic.
Unsurprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls. 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.