She was supposed to start a new job two weeks after the ruling. Instead, she woke up to the news and felt as if something were sitting on her chest. “I had so much hope,” she said.¹
There is no easy answer to Marker’s question. FWD.us estimates that about 830,000 TPS holders are working in the U.S. labor force: 130,000 in construction, 130,000 in wholesale and retail trade, 120,000 in leisure and hospitality, 110,000 in transportation, warehousing, and utilities, 110,000 in business services, and 85,000 in manufacturing. These are not marginal sectors. They are the practical economy, the places where America already complains that service is slow, housing is too expensive, shelves are thinly staffed, and care is hard to find.⁵
Removing authorized workers from sectors already struggling to hire risks deepening shortages that employers have spent years trying to manage.
Springfield, Ohio, may be the sharpest example because it became a national symbol of anti-Haitian hysteria. Haitians there were smeared with the false claim that they were eating people’s pets. Away from the rally stage, employers were telling a different story.
Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said local employers told him Haitian workers show up, work hard, want overtime, are reliable, and pass drug tests. “You’re going to have a lot of unfilled jobs,” DeWine warned.⁶ In a city that needed workers, Haitian immigrants became part of the answer. They worked in factories, warehouses, health care, and service jobs. They opened businesses. Their children went to school. They became part of the place.
The Guardian reported on a Springfield plaza that had been “dead” before Haitian businesses opened there. Now it has seven Haitian businesses, many owned by people on TPS. If those owners and workers are pushed out, the result will not be a cleaner economy. It will be an emptier one.⁷ A worker is also a tenant. A tenant is also a parent. A parent is also a customer. A customer is also a church member, a teammate’s father, a neighbor, a person who knows someone and is known by someone. It takes years for that web to form. A government notice can cut through it in a day.
Economics is only part of the story. Race has also shaped the politics surrounding TPS. TPS holders are not a racially uniform group. They come from Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and other countries. But the burden of this campaign falls heavily on immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent pointed to a record of racially charged statements about Haitians and other immigrants. The majority was not persuaded. The rest of the country still has to live with the consequences of a politics that teaches people to fear the same workers their communities rely on.²
That is the uncomfortable contradiction. A country can be taught to see certain immigrants as threats while depending on them to do its hardest work. It can cheer their removal in the abstract and then discover their absence in a nursing home, a construction crew, a warehouse, a restaurant kitchen, or a downtown block that had started to come back to life.