El Salvador Official: Trump Sending 200K El Salvadorans Home Will Have ‘Beneficial Effects’ on Economy

The roughly 200,000 El Salvadoran nationals who will have to return to their native country will have “beneficial effects” on the country’s economy, an official with the El Salvador central bank says.

President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that the “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) — a program that is intended to be temporary but is regularly extended instead — will end for El Salvadorans who were originally given the protected status following an earthquake in the country in 2001.

The decision to end TPS for El Salvador will see roughly 200,000 El Salvadoran nationals returning to the country with skills and knowledge that will give them a leg-up in the small country’s economy.

Óscar Cabrera, an official with the El Salvadoran central bank, admitted in an interview this week that Trump’s ending of TPS for El Salvador and the return of U.S.-educated El Salvadorans will greatly benefit the country.

Cabrera said, “In the case of returns from the United States, the beneficial effects that impact the US economy would be transferred in the long term to the economy (of El Salvador) with these Salvadorans with a high degree of qualification.”

TPS has often been used by illegal aliens of a particular country to remain in the U.S. under a federally protected status, thus escaping deportation.

For example, as Breitbart News reported, the Washington Post highlighted three cases in which illegal aliens from El Salvador used TPS to remain in the U.S., despite not even being in El Salvador when the 2001 earthquake hit.

The Washington Post  reported:

Losing TPS “would be catastrophic for my family,” said Edwin Murillo, a 41-year-old father of two reached by phone at his home in Texas …

Murillo had studied business administration in El Salvador but left in 1999 because, he said, jobs were scarce. He entered the United States on a visa, which he overstayed, and in 2001, following the earthquakes back home, he and his wife jumped at the chance to apply for TPS.

Another  Washington Post piece noted more abuse of the TPS by illegal aliens:

[Oscar] Cortez, a father of two, said he came to the United States in 2000, after he dropped out of college in El Salvador because he couldn’t afford the tuition and was downsized out of a job at a textile factory. Undocumented at first, he worked low-wage, sporadic jobs laying carpet or cutting lawns …

His co-worker Jaime Contreras, a welder on the project that will extend Metrorail to Dulles International Airport, said his job has transformed his family’s lives, both in Maryland and in El Salvador. As a child in El Salvador, Contreras went to school in the mornings and to work in the afternoons, painting houses at age 7 and welding at 11.

At 20, he moved to the United States seeking higher wages.

Despite the TPS originally design to be a temporary program, President George W. Bush and President Obama extended the program for the 200,000 El Salvadorans a total of 11 times.