President Joe Biden’s pro-immigration border chief has extended temporary amnesty for 850,000 illegal and quasi-legal economic immigrants through 2026, further depressing American wages and driving up their rents.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) waiver was extended by 18 months. announced By outgoing border chief Alejandro Mayorkas.
Beneficiaries include 234,000 illegal immigrants from El Salvador who first received TPS status after the 2001 earthquake that devastated their home country’s economy. The small country’s economy is now booming amid a successful suppression of gang crime by the country’s popular President Nayib Bukele.
Mayorkas’ press statement therefore blamed bad weather for the refusal to send economic migrants back home:
El Salvador’s extension of the TPS is based on geological and weather events, including significant hurricanes and heavy rainfall in 2023 and 2024, which continue to impact areas heavily affected by the 2001 earthquake.
The agency is “automatically expanding [work permits] By March 9, 2026,” Mayorkas said.
The mass amnesty announcement also includes 600,000 economic migrants from Venezuela.
Mayorkas said:
After reviewing the conditions of the country Venezuela And in consultation with interagency partners, it determined that an 18-month TPS extension is warranted based on the serious humanitarian emergency the country faces due to the political and economic crises under the brutal Maduro regime. These conditions have contributed to high levels of crime and violence, affecting access to food, medicine, health care, water, electricity, and fuel.
The amnesty award is a political windfall for Venezuela’s Cuban-backed dictator, as it helps 600,000 protesters work in US jobs instead of protesting on the streets of Venezuela.
The US government also allows expatriates to send money to their families at home. But that money helped the crumbling dictatorship hire the police it needed to suppress pro-democracy protests.
In previous decades, US governments had sought to promote democracy in South America, rather than expel immigrants who had been expelled from American communities by cutting wages and raising rents for use by American employers.
Under Mayorkas, the number of immigrants eligible for TPS waivers has tripled to nearly one million. That population includes many Haitian immigrants who were invited to take up jobs and homes in Springfield, Ohio.
The new announcement also extends TPS for immigrants from Ukraine and Sudan.
In his final weeks in office, Mayorkas is also expanding opportunities for foreign graduates to get white-collar jobs in the United States. He is also helping foreign graduates get in line from jobs to green cards and citizenship.
The new TPS amnesty was applauded by business and ethnic lobbies, which stand to benefit from any influx of renters, customers, workers and political dependents.
“Hundreds of thousands of individuals can continue to be protected so they can live safely in the United States, contribute to their communities, support their families, and strengthen [U.S.] Economy,” said FWD.us, the main business-funded lobby group for illegal and legal migration.
Representative Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, claimed, “This decision provides relief and stability to millions of people who cannot safely return to their countries due to the current environmental and political crises.” ,
But Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the El Salvador amnesty may be quietly welcomed by President Donald Trump’s representatives, who face a mountain of tasks in the first few months of his administration.
Trump officials would have faced a March deadline to approve or end amnesty for El Salvador migrants, Krikorian said.
That way, they will deal with it later in the administration, when they have time to prepare a full explanation as to why they are not renewing TPS. [for El Salvador]So in a way, this is a kind of gift for Trump.
But, he said, Mayorkas’s claimed concerns about extreme weather in El Salvador are “pathetic.” He continued:
When they renewed the Honduran TPS [in a prior year]One of the reasons was that the coffee plants were infected with blight, “coffee rust” on the leaves, and that was the reason people could not go back to Honduras.
The El Salvador TPS waiver will expire in September 2026.
The Venezuela extension also gives Trump time to decide how he should treat the vast population of Venezuelan migrants welcomed by Mayorkas and Biden.
Trump has a spotty record on the issue, partly because he provided some legal cover — but not work permits — to Venezuelan migrants in January 2021, which came before Biden’s inauguration.
