The GOP governor of Ohio and many pro-migration media outlets insist the federal government’s huge Haitian migration into the city of Springfield is legal.
“They are there legally,” Gov. Mike DeWine wrote in a September 20, op-ed for the New York Times. “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield.”
Springfield GOP Mayor “[Rob] Rue reminded me — and as Trump and Vance refuse to acknowledge — the Haitians who have come to Springfield are here legally,” Washington Post op-ed writer Eugene Robinson wrote on September 19. “I should repeat that: Federal ‘temporary protected status’ allows them to live and work here,” he added.
The same fight is happening in nearby Charleroi, Pa., where roughly 1,000 migrants have been imported to work at several factories and to rent apartments.
“There was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed,” said a September 17 tweet by Camera Bartolotta, a GOP state Senator in Pennsylvania. “Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and LEGAL to work in his facility,” she wrote.
The insistence that Springfield’s roughly 15,000 Haitian migrants are legal is intended to squash public objections to the federal government’s economic policy of inviting a taxpayer-subsidized migration into Americans’ towns and cities. The claim of legality also helps Democrats to reframe the normal economic and civic debate as a personalized racial insult by deplorable and irredeemable Trump supporters.
But is the widespread claim of legality true?
Or is the administration using legal means to legalize illegal migration?
TPS Migrants
The flow of roughly 16,000 Haitians into Springfield is just part of the massive flood of approximately 10 million legal, illegal, temporary, and quasi-legal migrants welcomed by Alejandro Mayorkas, who is President Joe Biden’s pro-migration border chief.
His inflow includes roughly 300,000 Haitian migrants who he provided with Temporary Protected Status ( TPS). His award of this renewable status means they are illegal migrants whom he is allowing to legally remain and work in the United States for a few years.
That two-level status also means they are illegal migrants who can work legally and can legally get anti-poverty aid.
“Recipients of TPS are generally people who are in the country unlawfully or soon will be because their visas are going to expire,” said Jon Feere, a former top advisor at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from January 2017 to January 2021. He told Breitbart News:
They’re not immigrants. They’re not permanent residents. They’re not anything other than illegal aliens who have been given a temporary reprieve from deportation. Under the law, they will be deported because of their illegal status. It’s just a matter of when ….. An immigrant is a person with permanent residency [a green card]. Anyone with TPS is by definition not an immigrant.
Mayorkas’s agency, the Department of Homeland Security, says migrants with TPS approvals are temporarily protected from deportation:
Once granted TPS, an individual also cannot be detained by DHS on the basis of his or her immigration status in the United States. TPS is a temporary benefit that does not lead to lawful permanent resident status or give any other immigration status.
“In other words, DHS fully recognizes that TPS beneficiaries have an unlawful immigration status that would otherwise result in them being detained and deported,” said Feere. “That’s not up for debate.”
Ohio Gov. DeWine recognized the distinction when he described the Haitians as “legal migrants,” not as “immigrants,” Feere noted. “An immigrant is a person who’s in the United States with permanent residency — anyone with TPS is by definition is not an immigrant, they’re here temporarily and will be going home because of their illegal status,” Feere said.
Democrats and their media allies try to bury the illegal migrant status by touting the TPS status. For example, ABCNews.com reported on September 19 that JD Vance has “continued to attack the Haitian population there as ‘illegal’ despite their legal protected status.”
However, there is no contradiction: Illegal migrants get legal status with TPS. In fact, Mayorkas has doubled the total population of TPS illegals to roughly 1 million migrants from many countries as part of the Democratic Party’s deliberate plan to expand the U.S. economy with a low-skill, low-wage, government-dependant workforce extracted from poor countries.
In contrast, many Republicans, including JD Vance, spotlight the migrants’ status as illegal migrants who have wrongly and improperly been given TPS status by Biden’s deputies:
The Democratic-aligned media is reluctant to admit that TPS Haitians are illegal migrants. For example, the New York Times reported on September 19:
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said on Wednesday that he would continue to describe Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, as “illegal aliens” even though most of them are in the country legally.
The Parole Migrants
Since 1990, U.S. immigration law protects Americans’ wages by barring foreigners from entering or working in the United States.
That law also ensures that every foreigner — including Haitians — is inadmissible if they do not have a green card, a tourist visa, a business traveler visa, or a temporary work visa.
But there is also “parole” which once was a little-known, side door in the nation’s border law.
The DHS website says “Parole allows an individual, who may be inadmissible or otherwise ineligible for admission into the United States, to be paroled into the United States for a temporary period.”
Before Mayorkas, the side door was rarely opened to foreigners, mostly because federal law narrowly limits parole entry to a few people in emergency emergencies, a ship crewman with a heart attack, or a tourist facing a sudden war in their home country. Federal law says:
[The Secretary of Homeland Security] may … in his discretion parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit any alien applying for admission to the United States, but such parole of such alien shall not be regarded as an [formal legal] admission of the alien and when the purposes of such parole shall, in the opinion of the [Secretary], have been served the alien shall forthwith return or be returned to the custody from which he was paroled and thereafter his case shall continue to be dealt with in the same manner as that of any other applicant for admission to the United States.
But Mayorkas is a progressive lawyer who beleives inadmissible foreigners have an “equity” right to enter the United States.
Haitians do face much deadly risk as they volunteer to travel illegally to the United States. So in April 2023, Mayorkas converted the risk into an escalator by declaring saving Haitians from their voluntary risk counts as an “urgent humanitarian reason” for easy travel into the United States.
In July, 023, he declared the Haitian parole process worked because it reduced criminal activity at the U.S. border.
In August 2023, Mayorkas announced he would grant parole to Haitians who have relatives in the United States, as “the latest example of the U.S. effort to expand lawful pathways and offer alternatives to dangerous and irregular migration.”
The website for the DHS agency that grants visas now declares: “Individuals who are outside of the United States may be able to request parole into the United States based on urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.”
Mayorkas’ use of parole contradicts the purpose of the nation’s immigration law and the interests of ordinary Americans, says Feere. But “the [lawsuit] question is whether there is a humanitarian interest in bringing these [Haitian] individuals here in the first place,” responded Feere, adding:
Is there an urgent humanitarian reason or significant public benefit to the American people? I don’t think that this administration has adequately made that case.
A lawsuit in Texas against the parole program was temporarily blocked over a technicality that requires state government to show they have “standing” before they can file the lawsuit. “The standing test can be met if the states have lost funds because of the alleged wrong. However, the parole program allows Mayorkas to claim that states do not have to expend more money when migrants arrive via parole instead of illegally.
Under the law, “TPS should be used in extraordinary circumstances and with the intent that the people are going to be going home as soon as the condition that makes deportation difficult subsides, ” said Feere. “It is not a means to create permanent residency in the United States.”
Moreover, humanitarian benefits to the Haitian migrants are offset by humanitarian losses among Americans — such as lower wages, higher rents, civic breakdown, more homelessness, plus fraud and taxpayer costs.
Any humanitarian benefit for the migrants is s also offset by the extra damage to the left-behind Haitians who are facing a brain-drain loss of police, skilled workers, and professionals. The additional chaos in Haiti caused by the parole policy sharply contradicts the “significant public benefit” requirement in the parole law.
Mayrkas has created two parole side doors for Haitians and other migrants.
One doorway is the “CHNV” program — Cubana Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — which allows inadmissible foreigners from those countries to ask for travel into the United States.
The other parole side door is the “CBP One” cellphone app that allows inadmissible migrants in Mexico to ask for legal entry at one of the “ports of entry” along the southern border.
Mayorkas is using the two programs to admit roughly 70,000 additional migrants each month, or roughly 840,000 people a year. The huge inflow is almost equal to the legal immigrant inflow set by Congress in 1990.
Mayorkas’ parole inflow is in addition to the annual flows of roughly one million legal immigrants, at least 500,000 temporary blue-collar workers, at least 550,000 temporary white-collar contract workers, hundreds of thousands of asylum-seeking grants, and at least 500,000 “gotaways” who sneak through Mayorkas’ poor guarded border. Mayoorkas’ vast inflow adds up to roughly one migrant for every American birth, despite opposition from President Joe Biden.
Mayorkas also claims he has the legal authority to admit even more parole migrants. The Senate immigraiton bill that was defeated by a bipartisan coalition in February 2024 did not include any language to block Mayorkas’s parole pipeline. Since 2023, Mayorkas has used those two pipelines to import more than one million migrants, including 400,000 inadmissible Haitians.
Feere said:
Mass immigration advocates are going to use any immigration program they can to dramatically increase immigration in the United States, even programs that are meant for narrow humanitarian purposes. This is a perfect example of where the American people are generous and reasonable, and understand we’re not going to deport people back in the middle of a natural disaster. But when humanitarian programs are exploited by administrations, I think Americans begin to wonder whether or not their generosity is being taken advantage of.
Mayorkas’ Goals
Mayorkas is a progressive and wants more migrants because he favors migrants over ordinary Americans.
He also wants to build a Canadian-style migration system that ensures U.S. companies need not offer higher wages to attract new workers during a “tight labor market” when unemployment rates are low.
On. September 13, the New York Times posted an interview with Mayorkas, where he was asked: “How do you think about what the immigration system should do?”
He responded by describing immigration as a benefit for U.S. employers and investors, and also for migrants. He did not describe any benefit for ordinary Americans:
I think its goals are, actually, well defined … The three goals are basically economic prosperity, family unification and humanitarian relief.
Let’s take a look at economic prosperity. There is bipartisan agreement that our economy benefits from migrant labor. Take the nonagricultural unskilled visa, the H-2B. Republican and Democratic governors, senators, House members implore me to deploy the maximum number of visas available. And they all decry the fact that that maximum number is woefully inadequate to meet their respective jurisdictions’ needs. And that’s because the numeric limits were set in 1996. We’re in 2024 now.
Canada needed 700,000 jobs to be filled by migrant labor because those jobs could not be filled by the domestic work force. And so Canada decided to invite as many as a million migrant laborers to Canada for the benefit of its economic prosperity.
Employers, investors, and city officials groups welcome the endless human resources that he extracts from poor countries. “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit,” Charleroi borough manager Jim Manning told KDKA news.
Mayorkas also suggests that employers have a right to any foreign workers they “need and …want,” regardless of the pocketbook impact on American employees, or the rival strategy of maximizing Americans’ productivity. He told the New York Times:
We’re stuck in 1996. Talent from all over the world comes to be educated in the United States at some of our best colleges and universities. They develop skills that our companies need and desperately want. The individuals themselves, the students now skilled, want to stay, and our immigration system does not provide them with an avenue to do so. And we lose them to other countries that end up competing with us. What a broken system, and it’s broken in terms of all three goals that underlie it.
Business groups welcome migrant workers — few of whom have the legal independence or economic ability to protest poor wages, dangerous conditions, or exploitative managers.
“I don’t think [Vance] really understands from a boots-on-the-ground perspective what employers are dealing with in trying to have a consistent and reliable workforce,” factory owner Ross McGregor told theDispatch.com. “If he were to apply a business mindset to this situation, he would see the benefit that we get from simply being able to rely on [a migrant] coming to work every day,” McGregor said as he ignored employers’ vital civic role in helping get young, alienated, disabled or drugged Americans into reliable, well-paid work.
Mayorkas did not directly claim that his radical and high-risk policies would benefit the ordinary Americans who now lose jobs and homes to his migration policy.
But the ruthless Cuban-born border chief for the second time portrayed critics of migration as akin to traitors: “There are voices that don’t believe in immigration to the United States … [who] would render our country far, far weaker and far less valued in the world.”
