I hope Trump, Miller, ICE and all the haters have a great celebration about their Supreme Court’s greenlight for the president to end of temporary protective status for Haitians and Syrians. I’d make a bet this is going to be a case of maybe “they should have been careful about what they wished for.” They’ve already seen fierce push back from agribusiness and farmers on all sides of the political spectrum for diminishing their workforce, forcing them to make allowances or look the other way. Now with more than 1.1 million workers at risk of losing the right to work based on a protective status, they can’t imagine the whelping from their allies and foes in the healthcare, service, industrial, and agricultural sectors.
Within 24 hours of the decision with the ink hardly dry, nursing home owners were warning that they would have to reduce the number of beds. Various industries around the country were saying the same thing, as were farmers in different parts of the country. Keep in mind, Trump has already threatened Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and others that have often been in the country for decades with the loss of their status. Whether its their immigration obsession or war, the Trump team never seems to spend a minute thinking about the economic impact of their hatefulness.
Besides pushback from some of his base and donors, they are going to see major disruption in many communities. Reportedly many immigrants in the US are already trying to figure on how to handle joint custody situations, close bank accounts, sell houses and more. Others, predictably, will go into the shadows, rather than leave. Many have families, spouses, and children native to the US, making it hard to leave and tempting to stay and hope the wind blows the other way.
The decision, predictably, was written by Justice Alito, who remains in the first ranks of 19th century Know Nothing throwbacks. In a twisted argument, he agrees that places like Haiti are unstable and poor, but as Justice Kagan decisively point out in her dissent could share a single instance to establish that Trump’s vitriol, especially torrid against Haitians, was anything other than spitefully and brutally racist.
A respected researcher produced a study in fact that made the case that the entire impact of the president’s deportation campaign has not been to “protect jobs for Americans” but to cost Americans jobs. He looked at the top 86 markets in the country. The job loss in the first nine months of the anti-immigrant push meant the loss of 668,000 jobs with cities in red states hurt the worse, especially Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
Like Trump says, he doesn’t care about the financial impact on families. This will be another case in point, mark my words.