Tucker Carlson: the Temporary Protected Status Program Is a Lie to Fool Americans

    TUCKER CARLSON: This week the Trump administration announced it will be suspending the Temporary Protected Status label for immigrants from El Salvador. Basically no journalist in America had ever heard of this till this week, but all of a sudden nothing this bad has ever happened. You’ve read that again and again, so here’s what it’s really about. The move affects about 200,000 Salvadorans who’ve been allowed to live and work here since 2001. That was the year an earthquake hit their country. The name of the program Temporary Protected Status alludes to what its purpose was supposed to be: it was supposed to provide short-term refuge for visitors from other countries that were in short term disorder.

 

    That’s not what happened; that’s never what happens. In fact it has simply become an illegal immigrant amnesty program just like DACA, except it targets specific countries rather than people of a specific age. Under TPS, people are protected from deportation and given work permits even if they came to the US illegally. The excuse for this is, not surprisingly, paper-thin: the El Salvador earthquake was bad, very bad, but the notion they can’t return home 17 years later — absurd. The same goes for the 57,000 Hondurans who are still here because of 1998 Hurricane Mitch, that was 20 years ago, or the 51,000 Haitians who are allowed to stay here because of the 2010 earthquake in that country.

 

    This isn’t about providing short-term refuge; it’s elites in Washington using a legal loophole to let hundreds of thousands of people come here permanently without going through any of the ordinary immigration channels. Now you can tell that nobody ever expected for them to return home because the suggestion that they do return home is being treated as a massive crisis for some reason. On Monday the New York Times commented on quote “the sense of dread gripping employers in California, Texas and Virginia.” It’s obvious why they feel dread. TPS effectively legalized hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers in those places and employers would rather not have to pay high wages to actual Americans. Politicians meanwhile are upset at the prospect of losing hundreds and thousands of future safe votes. That’s what it’s all about. Anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is lying to you or themselves.