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WASHINGTON, DC – As the U.S. Senate gears up to deal with immigration reform, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua are facing a deadline that could lead to a sharp deterioration of their condition here. About 300,000 Central Americans, most of them Salvadorans, are allowed to stay in this country legally under a special ‘Temporary Protected Status’ negotiated between the United States and their home governments. They were here without documents when Honduras and Nicaragua were struck by major hurricanes in 1998 and when El Salvador was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2001. The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has been renewed several times..

If it were to end and the persons covered by it were deported, El Salvador especially would not be able to deal with the sudden addition of 220,000 people to its labor force, in a country of only 6,900,000 inhabitants.

Also, Salvadorans living in the United States, including TPS people, send home over $2.5 billion each year in family remittances, which would be reduced if the TPS people were deported. All three countries are desperately dependent on TPS, and this gives the United States leverage over their governments. Many Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. believe that the otherwise nonsensical presence of a contingent of Salvadoran troops helping the U.S. in Iraq must surely be a quid pro quo for the continued extensions of TPS.

The United States has also used the TPS program to manipulate Salvadoran internal politics. During the campaign for the March 2004 presidential election, the U.S. government put out the word that if FMLN party candidate Shafik Handal were to win, TPS would be canceled. The presidency went to right-winger Antonio Saca.

Anti-immigrant forces in the U.S. demand that the TPS program be ended and its participants be deported. Nevertheless, this week Haiti requested that Haitian immigrants be brought under a Temporary Protected Status, and last year Guatemala made the same request after heavy damage from hurricanes. Colombia and Pakistan have made similar requests. Anti-immigrant spokespeople claim that the TPS people are not really refugees from natural disasters, but from poverty and underdevelopment.

In this they are probably to some extent right, but draw the wrong conclusions. El Salvador would be an economic basket case with or without earthquakes. The whole Latin America and Caribbean area has been struck by a disaster bigger than any hurricane or earthquake, namely the neoliberal ‘free trade’ and privatization policies imposed on them by the wealthier countries, especially the United States, and the international lending institutions.

Source: People’s Weekly World

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