DREAMERS/IMMIGRATION/LABOR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “They clean federal office buildings in Washington and nurse the elderly in Boston. They are rebuilding hurricane-wrecked Houston. The Atlanta Falcons’ new stadium, plumbing and heating systems at Fannie Mae’s new headquarters, the porterhouse at Peter Luger Steak House and even the Disney World experience have all depended, in small part or large, on their labor.
They are the immigrants from Haiti and Central America who have staked their livelihoods on the temporary permission they received years ago from the government to live and work in the United States. Hundreds of thousands now stand to lose that status under the Trump administration, which said on Monday that roughly 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador would have to leave by September 2019 or face deportation.
Even if they remain here illegally, they, like the young immigrants known as Dreamers whose status is also in jeopardy this winter, will lose their work permits, potentially scratching more than a million people from the legal work force in a matter of months. And the American companies that employ them will be forced to look elsewhere for labor, if they can get it at all…
Concentrated in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia and Maryland, those with protected status work mainly in construction, restaurants and grocery stores, and as landscapers and day care workers, according to data on recipients from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti assembled by the Center for Migration Studies, a nonprofit that has argued for extending the program.
Another report, by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, estimates that stripping the protections from Salvadorans, Hondurans and Haitians would deprive Social Security and Medicare of about $6.9 billion in contributions over a decade, and would shrink the gross domestic product by $45.2 billion…
The administration and its supporters do cite one economic argument for tighter controls on immigration: Those jobs, they say, could be done by Americans.”
-Vivian Yee, Liz Robbins, and Caitlin Dickerson, “From Offices to Disney World, Employers Brace for the Loss of an Immigrant Work Force,” The New York Times online, Jan. 9, 2018