ICE Adds Haitians to Hit List Starting Friday

Excuse U.S. While We Slit Our Own Throats

Come this weekend 350,000 Haitians (and 4,000 Syrians) will experience in a legal way what many Americans the past ten years have begun to appreciate on a deeper level: They will have lost their protected status.

Not that it wasn’t always pretty provisional, if you weren't white and male, or as political scientist Frances M. Wilhoit put it....

At the end of last month the Supreme Court granted the Trump Administration the ability to end Haitians' Temporary Protected Status (TPS) status, dismissing lower court rulings that DHS had improperly rescinded that status. The designation is for people in countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other dysfunction, allowing them to work and live in the United States until it is safer to return home. Haiti received TPS status in 2010 after an earthquake ravaged the country, collapsed the government and led to armed motorcycle gangs which now control 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Internal documents repeatedly revealed Trump political appointees overruling career experts on the dangers of particular countries, failed to properly consult the appropriate agencies (like the State Dept.) or consider the danger to these people.

Many have probably forgotten, but the first Trump Administration tried to end TPS for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan only to lose in court because the order was capricious and seemed grounded in racial animus. However the SCOTUS decision turned a blind eye, saying the provocations didn't rise to the level of unconstitutional animus. You'll recall the court also allowed his first term "muslim-ban." Nothing but Calvinball from those Brooks Brothers Mutineers.

At of last March, TPS applied to nearly 600,000 people (about 2% of all immigrants) from 17 countries, including Haiti, El Salvador, Ukraine, Syria and other countries. Just this afternoon U.S. ‌District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston ruled against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving forward with a series of policies designed to implement new immigration-related restrictions enacted by Congress last year, which for the first time imposed fees to apply for asylum and restricted ​employment authorization.

Among these were attempts to cut off work authorizations early for those still under TPS, notably 170,000 Salvadoreans who were facing a September cut off and citizens of the Ukraine and Sudan.

It's an especially hard pill to swallow for elderly and home health care, disproportionately a job for immigrants because the pay and hours suck, only because nobody stays in the job, there are always openings. Emphasize ALWAYS.

One low pay job immigrants favor is early child education ($14.60/hr median, 2023) which often doesn't require any education and has 15% turnover, 65% higher than most jobs. Compare that to, arguably the most popular immigrant jobs are home care workers ($16.10/hr) despite/because of the 80% turnover. Many older immigrants find jobs in this field, where perhaps foreign norms favoring elders engender different attitudes than prevail here.

“People who do this work love it. You have to love working with people,” nurse and State Assembly member Karines Reyes told City Limits in 2021. “If you can get a job doing work that’s not as heavy and not as demanding and make more money, why wouldn’t you?

Almost three quarters—74 percent—of New Yorkers  needing home health aides were unable to retain a worker in 2021. That's very bad news as many baby boomers seek to age in place over moving into a nursing home.

“This crisis has been created by stagnant wages in this sector,” concurred Meghan Parker, advocacy director at the New York Association on Independent Living, in the same article. "There are just a lot easier jobs. Flipping burgers is a lot easier than going into someone’s home and doing the most intimate care.”

Immigrants Get Their Knees Dirty

The irony is that it's Trump's biggest supporters kneecapping themselves. Baby Boomers are the ones most likely to suffer for this mad immigration putsch. Immigrants disproportionately maintain health care and, more recently, early education (daycare, preschool, early ed).

(Immigrants have grown from 5% to 20% of all early educators since 1980, and nearly half of all women early educators in cities like Los Angeles and New York are immigrants.)

At least 28% of all direct care is provided by immigrants, compared to 17% of the entire workforce. According to a recent Axios article, 41% of home health aides are foreign-born, as well as 22% of nursing assistants and 28% of personal care aides. According to a KFF study, they provide 30% of direct long-term care.

Indeed, Florida is a disproportionate home for both. Over 150,000 of the 350,000 Haitian under TPS live in Florida. (Indeed, 400,000 of the 600,000 TPS individuals live in Florida, half from Venezuela.) Estimates vary on how many work in healthcare fields running as high as six-figures though that doesn't seem credible. Other numbers suggest around 35,000 Haitians working specifically in long-term care and nursing homes in Florida.

It's just a microcosm of a larger problem we mentioned earlier. They're not easy jobs to fill. They’re low paid, emotionally and physically demanding with few or no benefits. Right now over 800,000 are on waiting list for formal home-based care. There's expected to be demand for over 700,000 more direct care jobs by 2034.

It will be one of the fastest growing areas of the economy in ten years. Already personnel shortages, particularly nurses and support staff, have caused about two-thirds of U.S. hospitals to operate below capacity. Half of all nursing homes report limit admissions because of staffing shortages, and just 19% met impending minimum staffing requirements for 2029 (that Trump has since pushed back to 2034, not long after a SuperPac donated $4.8 million).

That rule would've cost nursing homes $3.4M/yearly (double that if the industry's numbers are reliable) and would've meant hiring up too 100,000 new nurses or aides, and would've saved 13,000 lives a year, based on a 1999 Rand study that connected levels of nursing home staffing to chances of dying, something people cared about for almost 15 minutes after the pandemic was over.

"People who run nursing homes, chronic care hospitals and home care agencies, they are all saying this is a crisis," Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a distinguished professor of public health at City University of New York’s Hunter College, told NBC. "There has long been a shortage of folks who are willing to do direct care work as nursing aides, and there’s still a shortage now, so of course if the U.S. deports them all it’s just going to make it worse."

Stale Old Spice Bomb

The need for health care workers is integrally tied to the aging of our population, and specifically the population bomb that was the Baby Boomers. That bomb is about to drop imminently.

The U.S. 65-and-up population is expected to jump from 58 million to 82 million by 2050 — a 42% increase. As of 2019, the number of people over 80 to working age adults (ages 16-64) was 6.1%, but in just four years that is expected to reach 9%, a 50% increase. With greater age comes greater need for help. Over 40% of those over 80 have some difficulty with cognition, mobility, taking caring of themselves, seeing, and/or hearing. This figure rises rapidly with age and is above 70 percent for those aged 89.

Staffing levels often force people into nursing homes against their wishes. Especially as the family fabric frays. In New York, the Department for the Aging estimates that some 900,000 to 1.3 million New Yorkers each year serve as unpaid caregivers to family or loved ones, about half of whom spend at least 30 per week providing that care; many are older adults themselves, and lack the training to formally fill such a role.

“There’s an argument that bad things happen oftentimes to older adults in nursing homes. When you’re in those congregate settings, you’re more likely to have an infection, more likely to have weight loss or hospitalizations,” said David Grabowski, author of a study which found the addition of a thousand new immigrants in a metropolitan area reduces elderly mortality by about 10 deaths. “When you’re in the home your mental health is better. It’s where everybody wants to be.”

Malthusian Thinking?

It's difficult to discern a good reason for this obviously self-destructive behavior, though we've grown used to it under Trump. Obviously part of it plays into Stephen Miller's whole fascist white nationalist play. The whole "they-will-not-replace-us" bit is based upon cold, demographic facts. Between 2002-2022 the number of prime working age native-born Americans grew by 2.9 million while prime-age immigrants (documented and undocumented) grew by 7.7 million. During the same period the number of Americans over 65 grew by 18 million.

The only thing immigrants are filling is the growing gap in working age population as population growth slows among the middle class and above. This is also hugely important in funding our social security and medicare system which are funded from the wages of working adults. This is poised to become an even greater challenge as migration turns negative under Trump. Who will fill the jobs nobody wants?

Look what happened to the construction trades where one in three is foreign-born.

A survey by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) conducted over the summer found that 92% of construction firms struggle to fill positions. In the past six months, 28% of the surveyed firms said they were affected by immigration actions — 5% said ICE agents had visited a jobsite, 10% said they had lost workers due to actual or rumored ICE raids, and 20% reported those concerns caused subcontractors to lose staff. The roots go back to the financial crisis, when we failed to bail out builders the way we did automakers, as NPR explains.

While we would never argue against anyone suggesting Trump is engaged in some sort of Brewster's Millions scheme to bankrupt the US Treasury through embezzlement and graft, the simpler explanation is that the tumult helps those at the top.

Everyone will feel the pain when our economy shrinks because we don't have the labor to meet capacity, and when labor costs rise because of a tight market (that will drive up inflation), though employers will be able to count on stealing from and poisoning both their employees and their customers. (Shout out to Taylor Farms!) So there's that.

Perhaps it's old hat, but most conservative thinking these days seems to be Malthusian – which is to say based on the English economist Thomas Malthus' 18th century (1798, ngl, nothing new...) ideas concerning population growth and limits. Malthus was obsessed with scarcity and believed you needed to weed out the population, lest it grow too large (and lazy), leading to societal collapse.

So you know, a quarter-century later, after we put people on the moon, deciphered the human genome and split a quark, they're on this thing about how we can't actually sustain things unless we start paring away the old, disabled and vulnerable.

Don't Hate Us for Being Rich, Love Us for Being Different

It's like the old joke about how we should trade our poor to Russia for their rich oligarchs. Only Russia instead allowed us to grandfather in our local Oligospony, who are convinced the Fitzgerald quote about them is true (without having read the whole thing), and that it's not actually about how they blithely smell like farts.

The obvious problem with this kind of Malthusianism is – beyond the fact that it's a fatuous rationalization on par with Manifest Destiny for the exploitation by those who can of those who lack the resources to exist – that today's society operates on entirely different aggregated standards than the Industrial Revolution. That is to say, an abundant cheap labor pool is not necessary in a globally connected world.

(This may be the best explanation for Trump's tariffs and general war on free trade, imo, not his eighties fascinations. Putin's certainly not unaware trade wars precipitated the last two world wars, per the Brewster's Millions variant.)

In an Information Age as opposed to an Industrial Age, your GDP is generated less on your ability to pump out a lot of prime age workers – though that's still important – as by the educational plasticity of your workforce, which thereby allows them to adopt new skills in a rapidly evolving digital world. Smart people can adapt to these changes. This is known as human capital.

Obviously this isn't the space to go into how Trump has also attacked our education system, science and health institutions. If you knew nothing other than what you saw, you'd argue that the Trump Admin and its allies are trying to literally devolve our economy into a ditch, and rob it of all its vitality, from population growth, to education and health to improve ourselves and our communities, to its ability to buy homes and draw young hungry workers/students from around the world to bolster our flagging population growth (and tourism!).

It probably doesn't dawn on the choads cheering the GOP on, that foreign investors, religious zealots, and private equity in a cabal of obscenely wealthy low-info autocrats are attempting to crash the American economy, government, media and normative system essentially so they might freeze/end the game while they have the most toys.

How does it hurt them if everyone suffers – they have the best cushions to survive catastrophe? Not sure, but if that's not evil, it's definitely nihilistic. It's also hard to imagine what that aforementioned plutocrats would do differently if that WAS their plan.

You Are HERE

As with all these things, knowledge doesn't feel particularly powerful. It isn't always enjoyable learning the new ways the neckbones are bankrupting our cultural inheritance. But these memories might be useful when we get back the reigns and have to fight off the Democratic Leadership Cowards' (DLC) appeasement wing.

Of course there's a bill that passed the House 224-204 in April reinstating the Haitians TPS status with 10 Republican votes (including three representatives from Florida). But as you may know or readily guessed, it hasn't been taken up by the Senate and there is no reason to believe it will.

It's also hopefully useful to recognize how the Trump Admin are throwing wrenches in any gears that make our world a better place. Understanding they are very much strip mining our future to bet on crypto (while hoping to buy it back for pennies on the dollar) is supposed to piss you off. Anything less is to get a WELCOME face tattoo.

In a smart country we'd make efforts to help those who do our worst, least desirable jobs. We'd work sure that everyone has opportunities to excel, and help uplift people over life's potholes and ruts, smoothing those wrinkles. (Grifters prey on vulnerability and weakness.)

As the rising tide lifts all ships a healthier, better educated populace raises the bar for everyone. Those who already have everything are more concerned with minding the gap than our general well-being; they only know zero-sum. They don't hope to raise the bar so much as lower the shackles: Captive labor is happy labor. Or it better be.

They may be overestimating the level of demoralization at our declining circumstances, versus our aggravation at those within arm's length holding the bag.