The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has written a letter to the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to urge that temporary protected status (TPS) be extended for nationals of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti when current their protections expire.
I encourage you to read it. The letter is a smooth-worded masterpiece of non sequiturs that urges continuation of the protected status that has been extended in each instance for far too long ("[t]hese designations have been in place since 2001, 1999, and 2010 respectively") and for all the wrong reasons. It not-so-subtly suggests that the aliens who have been the happy recipients of our government's abusive largesse of TPS in their behalf should be granted amnesty:
While the Chamber appreciates that the TPS program is intended to be temporary, the reality is these individuals have now lived and worked in communities across this nation for in some cases nearly two decades now. We urge you to extend the current TPS designations and to work with Congress on a more permanent resolution to the status of these TPS beneficiaries. (Emphasis added.)
That's the problem with amnesties. The minute one is mentioned — in this case, one for the so-called "Dreamers" who were also happy recipients of abusive governmental largesse in the form of a made-up program with no statutory basis (DACA) — it generates an immediate response of me-too-ism from anyone who has been treated "unfairly" by the immigration system. Unfortunately, treated unfairly tends to be generic code for "Wait a minute, just because I'm in your country illegally, you mean you really want to force me to leave?"
Even more unfortunately, it isn't just the aliens themselves who turn up the volume to demand even more governmental concessions after receiving years of benefits to which they weren't entitled. It almost inevitably also includes an unholy alliance of open borders and alien advocacy groups working in concert with businesses and corporate employers who insist that they need unfettered access to cheap, pliable, and plentiful alien labor to do their bidding, often under conditions that citizens and resident aliens would find objectionable.
Then, of course, there are the politicians who fling themselves with abandon into the mix, either to virtue signal their liberal-progressive credentials, or because they receive generous campaign contributions from the cheap-labor business lobby.
The president opened Pandora's box when he suggested that it was up to Congress to do something about "Dreamers" as he phased out the DACA program ever-so-slowwwwly over a two-year period.
It is his responsibility to ensure that all parties clearly understand, under threat of veto, that if/when an immigration amnesty is presented, it must be exceptionally limited and include no one but qualified DACA recipients; and that it must be accompanied by significant trade-offs in the form of enforcement measures that address both the immediate border and the interior of the United States.