The Big Book: Economic Development
New crackdown on immigrant wor kforce
By 2020 many Virginia workplaces could look very different by Tim Loughran
S
ince the Trump administration announced in January that it was terminating a federal program
benefiting immigrants from El Salvador, the decision has raised concern about its effect on economic growth in Virginia. Signed into law in 1990 by President
George H.W. Bush to provide relief to nations recovering from war and natural disasters, the federal government’s Tem- porary Protected Status, or TPS, was first extended to Salvadorans fleeing the Central American nation’s 12-year civil war that ended officially in 1992. Two massive earthquakes in 2001 that
devastated the capital, San Salvador, per- mitted another wave of legal immigration from El Salvador in the years that followed. This year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ruled that reconstruction from those disasters was complete and the 190,000 to 200,000 TPS beneficiaries now living across the U.S. will have to return home by September of next year. Most Salvadoran TPS families live
among their countrymen in and around a handful of large U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. The City Data real estate website, using what it calls a proprietary combination of data sets, reports that Maryland is home to five of the top 10 population clusters of U.S. residents born in El Salvador; Vir- ginia is home to 23 of the top 100 clusters. The Center for Migration Studies
and other demographers report that construction companies, landscapers, res- taurants, day-care providers and grocery stores are the U.S. businesses employing the highest numbers of TPS holders
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
CASA de Maryland, an immigration advocacy group, protests a Trump administration decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans living in the U.S.
from the 10 countries that now benefit from that program. The DHS ruling on El Salvador
followed last year’s decision to terminate the TPS program extended to Sudan, Nicaragua and Haiti. The TPS program for Honduras is under review. No decision has yet been made regarding the other nations still in the program, including Yemen, Nepal, South Sudan and Syria. In his successful 2016 campaign
for the White House, Donald Trump promised to cut the flow of refugees to enhance national security against terror- ism and to reduce immigration — both legal and undocumented — to protect jobs and raise wages for U.S. citizens. As this issue of Virginia Business went to press, the White House was supporting two immigration bills being evaluated in the Republican-controlled Congress. The Senate’s RAISE Act (SB1720)
www.VirginiaBusiness.com
and the House of Representatives’ Secur- ing America’s Future Act (HB4760) call for cutting legal immigration by more than 400,000 people by next year, ending the nation’s decades-old diversity lottery visa system and limiting to spouses and minor children the family members that U.S. citizens can sponsor for future citizenship. Virginia’s Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-6th
District), chairman of the House Judi- ciary Committee, introduced HB4760, which has more than 70 Republican co- sponsors. Privacy advocates and deficit hawks give it little chance of passing in its original form. It would mandate the use of a national ID card by all citizens and legal immigrants while calling for $130 billion in funding for the Border Patrol over the course of five years — with no budget cuts to pay for it. However, if HB4760 passes the
House and the Senate, the new law would require biometric identifiers for all legal
VIRGINIA BUSINESS 75
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156