Development & Aid, Headlines, North America, Population

POPULATION: Salvadorans Worry Over End to Temporary U.S. Status

Jeremy Bigwood

WASHINGTON, May 15 2003 (IPS) - While observers and officials disagree on whether nearly 300,000 Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States will have their temporary status extended like their Nicaraguan and Honduran peers, the workers say the stress will weigh heavier as the July decision deadline nears.

Late last month the Department of Homeland Security extended the TPS (temporary protected status) for about 87,000 Hondurans and 6,000 Nicaraguans living here until January, 2005, because of the devastating effects of 1998’s Hurricane Mitch on the region.

TPS benefits for immigrants from the three Central American nations originally expired in 2000, but have been renewed three times since then.

The deadline for the decision on the Salvadorans, who have been arriving in this country in large numbers since the civil war (1980-1992) is Jul. 9, 60 days before the programme expires. While observers and people who work with the community are optimistic of an extension, one government official who asked to remain anonymous told IPS that Washington is ”unlikely to grant the extension of TPS for Salvadorans for various reasons, including the precarious state of the U.S. economy”.

Regardless of the speculation, the process is already putting pressure on those here under TPS, many of whom support families in their home country. ”It is something all of us think about every day as we get closer to September. The uncertainty weighs on us all,” said Mauricio Tejada (not his real name), a resident of Mt. Pleasant, a predominantly Salvadoran neighbourhood of Washington, DC.

”My family in El Salvador would not survive without me working up here, and whether or not we will be able to get a TPS extension worries me sick,” he added.

According to a study released earlier this year, remittances to El Salvador from nationals working abroad accounted for 15.1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) or more than two billion U.S. dollars.

Latin American and Caribbean nationals working in the United States sent home 25 billion dollars last year, added the study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

If TPS is not extended, Salvadorans working here under the programme would become subject to deportation. Once home they would have to deal with an official unemployment rate estimated by the World Bank to be 7.5 percent in 2001. About one-half of workers toil in the informal sector, as street vendors or in other self-employed roles where they earn subsistence wages, according to El Salvador’s National Foundation for Development (FUNDE).

TPS status is granted to immigrants who are temporarily unable to return home because of ”ongoing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions”, following an official request from their home government. Now, immigrants of nine countries are eligible for TPS, which lasts up to 18 months: Burundi, El Salvador, Honduras, Liberia, Montserrat, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan.

Salvadorans have established large communities in some U.S. cities, including in the capital, where a large group of immigrants from the Salvadoran department of La Unión, particularly the town of Intipucá, live.

TPS was initially granted to Salvadorans on Mar. 2, 2001 for 18 months following the earthquakes of early 2001. (An earlier 1990 designation expired in 1994). The status was renewed for 12 months on Sep. 9, 2002 and will expire Sep. 9, 2003, unless the government grants a new extension.

”If these U.S. government entities feel that the country is not ready to receive the population living in the U.S., or would be seriously harmed by the loss in remittances, then they make a decision to continue TPS,” said Saúl Solozano, executive director of Carecen, the Central American Resource Centre in Washington.

San Salvador’s petition to extend TPS to Salvadorans in the U.S. has ”possibilities of success”, Rose Likins, the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, told Washington’s ‘La Nación’ newspaper.

Washington attorney José Pertierra, who has worked extensively on U.S.-Latin American issues, agrees. ”The fact that the Hondurans and the Nicaraguans got an extension is a very good sign for the Salvadorans. I can’t conceive that this administration would give an extension of Hondurans and Nicaraguans and deny it to the Salvadorans.”

”The economies are so precarious in those countries that they need all of the help that they can get from remittances from family members working in the U.S. So I am fairly optimistic that is going to happen. Not extending TPS would not only mean a loss of revenues from the remittance, but the necessity of suddenly creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the returning nationals,” he added.

TPS was extended to Hondurans and Nicaraguans for 18 months, until Jan. 5, 2005, but the Salvadorans would receive 12 months at most, according to Dan Kane of the department of homeland security’s bureau of citizenship and immigration services (BCIS – formerly known as INS).

Besides the TPS beneficiaries, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central American immigrants live and work in the United States, including 30,000 Costa Ricans, 100,000 Guatemalans, 90,000 Hondurans, 50,000 Nicaraguans and 100,000 Salvadorans.

An extension would create other – though less dire – problems for the Salvadorans. Many of them say the TPS system is incredibly confusing. ”A big problem is the rules for TPS – sometimes you just don’t know what to do or when you should do it,” says Tejada.

”A big problem that the Salvadoran community has is that the rules regarding deadlines for TPS are extraordinarily confusing,” says Pertierra. ”The last time that TPS was extended for Salvadorans, many of them were given employment authorisation documents that showed that their work authorisations were valid until March of 2003.”

”Yet they had to re-register for TPS within a very narrow window of 60 days – between September and November of 2002. And many people didn’t do it because it is counter-intuitive to have to register for a programme when your work authorisation is still valid.”

Many of the Salvadorans found that when they tried to renew their authorisation they had problems because they hadn’t registered for TPS, adds Pertierra. "It is an extraordinarily confusing program and burdensome in terms of deadlines, and it is targeted unfortunately at a community that ill-equipped to understand all of the nuances of these regulations and these deadlines..”

”Many of the people in this case are functionally illiterate, and you are imposing on them a set of rules and regulations that most lawyers find difficult,” he added.

The lawyer thinks the U.S. government could do better for the El Salvadorans, who are not a burden on their host country. ”On the contrary, they are contributing to this economy, and some of them are even creating jobs to employ others; there has to be a way for this society to recognise that with something a little bigger than a Temporary Protected Status.”