Washington Post: Mr. Trump, don’t send 50,000 Haitians back to a life of hardship
Editorial Board

“Last month, on the very day the State Department cautioned Americans on the dangers of traveling to Haiti, the Trump administration warned more than 50,000 Haitians living legally in the United States that they may be forced to return home en masse next January because conditions in their native country had improved so markedly. … The Haitians in question have been allowed to stay in the United States since 2010, when a massive earthquake struck Haiti, as beneficiaries of a U.S. government program called [Temporary Protected Status (TPS)]. TPS extends humanitarian relief to people from impoverished, war-torn, or disaster-wracked countries who are already in the United States when calamity strikes their homelands. … Haiti is a special hardship case. … The staggering poverty is compounded by the earthquake’s lingering effects, the world’s worst cholera epidemic, and a major hurricane (Matthew) … It’s fair to wonder whether there will ever be, in the foreseeable future, a right time to send more than 50,000 Haitians back to a country so beset with chronic problems. … The question is one of comparative burdens. The truth is that the United States can easily absorb Haitians and others from TPS nations, already living here legally, whose home countries would struggle to receive them. To this country, already home to more than 600,000 Haitian immigrants, the additional 50,000 are a blip. To Haiti, wracked by natural disasters, their arrival en masse would be a new, man-made hardship. Why would the hemisphere’s richest nation do that to the poorest?” (6/3).