As a nation founded by immigrants seeking freedom from oppression, the United States of America bears an important and uniquely inherent responsibility to help immigrants obtain refuge from dire situations across the globe. This is especially true for the people of Venezuela, where, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Venezuelan exodus of the past few years represents a quarter of Venezuela’s entire population. This constitutes the world’s second-largest refugee crisis, and it has led many Venezuelans to search for refuge here in the United States.
Several prominent cities throughout the U.S. have received this ongoing migration flow from the region. In my home city of New York, we have welcomed over 110,000 new immigrants since the Spring of 2022, and roughly 41 percent of these new arrivals are of Venezuelan descent. The city has also opened over 200 emergency shelter sites and over a dozen large-scale humanitarian response and relief centers (HERRCS) to house and care for these new New Yorkers. Nevertheless, food and shelter are not free, and providing for the basic humanitarian needs of these immigrants is still estimated to cost the city a tremendous amount of money. We are also witnessing similar accounts in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, Washington, D.C. and more.
While seeking asylum in the U.S. is a federally established legal right, a decades-old federal law also simultaneously bars asylum seekers from working to support themselves and their families for a minimum of six months after they arrive in the U.S. and apply for asylum. That is six months too long without any means to get by. Yet, this ill-advised mandatory waiting period has created a highly strenuous situation where—for at least six months—asylum seekers that come to the U.S. desperate to find work to support themselves and their families are nevertheless forced to rely upon public assistance for shelter and food. Without question, Republicans in Congress should partner with Democrats, who have already offered a legislative solution to change this law and allow work authorization for all asylum seekers as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, ongoing gridlock in Congress has required city, state and federal officials to look for alternative solutions to provide quick work authorization for migrants. For cities and localities like New York, that are welcoming these asylum seekers with open arms, swift financial relief is both sorely needed and deserved.
The search for these solutions will require a whole-of-government effort. However, while there is no one-size-fits-all quick fix, there is one important tool that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has underutilized so far: specifically, redesignating “Temporary Protected Status”—or TPS for short—for migrants who meet TPS’s statutory requirements.
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a program that allows all immigrants from specific countries, as designated by the DHS, who are experiencing armed conflict or other extraordinary circumstances to receive temporary protection from deportation in the United States. Importantly, TPS also allows immigrants to receive immediate work authorization in the U.S.—without having to undergo a six-month waiting period. A few countries with designated TPS beneficiaries in the United States currently include Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and others.
To be eligible for TPS, immigrants from a specific TPS country are required to have arrived in the U.S. on or before a specific date and, amongst other criteria, to have “continuously resided” in the U.S. since that date. These eligibility dates can vary widely. For instance, for immigrants from Ukraine, this eligibility date is presently Aug. 16, 2023, or earlier; conversely, immigrants from El Salvador are only eligible for TPS if they entered the United States on or before Feb. 13, 2001.
Conditions in many of these countries—especially several poverty-stricken nations in the Western Hemisphere—deservedly merit a new TPS “redesignation.” New “redesignation dates” for these nations would provide TPS eligibility for hundreds of thousands of deserving migrants in the United States. Immigrants from Venezuela have a uniquely strong case to receive an immediate TPS redesignation from the Biden administration without delay, given the ongoing turmoil in their country.
Under Venezuela’s present TPS designation, Venezuelan immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after March 8, 2021, remain ineligible to apply for or receive TPS—even if they meet all other TPS eligibility criteria. However, the conditions that led to the previous designation of Venezuela for TPS in 2021 have only continued to worsen. Over the past few years, rampant corruption, government-sponsored repression and human rights violations, widespread gang violence, and massive hyperinflation have resulted in a monumental economic and political collapse that has caused over seven million Venezuelans and counting to flee the country since 2015. In fact, Venezuela’s displacement crisis is second only to Ukraine, and economists from Harvard and the International Monetary Fund have described Venezuela’s situation as the “single largest economic collapse outside of war” in decades.
As mentioned before, nearly 41 percent of all migrants that have arrived in New York City since Spring 2022 hail from Venezuela—more than doubling the next largest population of immigrant arrivals to the city. In turn, the DHS opting to redesignate newly-arrived Venezuelan migrants for TPS would immediately allow tens of thousands of new Venezuelan New Yorkers to apply for immediate work authorization—granting these migrants the chance to work to support their families, while alleviating the current financial burden that is being placed on New York and countless other cities that are supporting these migrants.
As Americans, our obligation to these migrants and their families also goes beyond mere financial considerations—it is moral as well, and redesignating Venezuelan migrants for TPS is simply the right thing to do. The last couple of years has seen hundreds of thousands Venezuelan migrants—often families with children—cross rivers, scale mountains, and traverse the dangerous “Darien Gap” in Panama to reach safety in the U.S. To treat these migrants, who have traveled thousands of miles to live and work here, with anything other than the utmost compassion would be to disrespect the American dream. Allowing newly arrived Venezuelan migrants the ability to work, support their families, and live without fear of deportation via a TPS redesignation is an easy way for the DHS to help cities better address the current influx of migrants and help us remember who we are as Americans. Venezuelan families just want to put a roof over their heads and live safely. Is that too much to ask?
Adriano Espaillat represents the 13th District of New York.