The Trump administration revokes Haitians’ TPS, creating roughly 330,000 new unauthorized residents and signaling deportations of about 10,400 people annually.
After stripping more than 300,000 Haitian immigrants of a special legal status that allowed them to live and work in the United States, the Trump administration is now beginning efforts to deport them.
The administration intends to “expel thousands of Haitians” who won’t consent to return to the war-torn, earthquake-prone country, The New York Times reported on Thursday. Documents reviewed by the Times indicate the government is aiming to “increase the pace of flights from once a month to once a week.”
A deportation flight carrying 57 people (including several children) touched down in Haiti on Thursday, according to the Miami Herald. A flight the previous week carried 160 deportees.
But let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation—credit to Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute.
Suppose the Trump administration achieves its stated objective of one deportation flight to Haiti each week. And suppose each flight is full. If we grant the assumption and say there are 200 deportees on every aircraft,
that amounts to 10,400 deportations in a year. It is by no means a small figure. But you might still believe the government won’t make any mistakes and that every deportee is a hardened criminal (even the kids, apparently) who deserves to be dropped into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
That figure remains only ten thousand four hundred people out of more than 300,000 Haitians in the United States who previously held temporary protected status (TPS) before it was revoked.
Those 300,000 Haitians could work legally under TPS, which also meant they were contributing through taxes. Now, with their legal status rescinded, they cannot.
In Florida, where roughly half of the Haitian TPS population resides, this could translate into losses of “$1.5 billion in annual economic contributions, along with $174 million in federal and payroll taxes, and $176 million in state and local taxes,” according to a Princeton University analysis cited by the Miami Herald.
Before their TPS status was revoked, Haitians comprised about 25 percent of the total TPS population in the U.S., a group with a labor-force participation rate nearly 15 percentage points higher than that of U.S.-born individuals, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model. That same study found that TPS recipients are “5.4 times more likely than U.S.-born workers to be employed in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance” and are “3.2 times more likely to be employed in construction.”
In other words, this is a population that is working at high rates, filling jobs that few Americans take on—and, particularly in construction, helping to ease a substantial labor shortage.
Now, those Haitian immigrants cannot work legally and cannot pay taxes. But even if you accept the administration’s deportation targets, most of these Haitians won’t be deported any time soon.
So what will they do instead? Many will continue working, albeit illegally. Some may turn to crime. Those who require emergency health care and other public services will now rely on them without contributing tax revenue. The administration therefore frames undocumented immigrants as a burden; but by removing Haitians from the workforce, hasn’t it contributed to the very problem it says it wants to fix?
All of this, it seems, is aimed at a public-relations show of deporting a few thousand Haitians. The math simply doesn’t add up.
