For twenty years the line has been "just come here legally." Wait your turn. Fill out the forms. Do it the right way. It is the thing your uncle says at Thanksgiving right before he explains that he is not against immigrants, only the illegal ones, and that this is a very important distinction that he has thought about a great deal.
On Monday, July 27, roughly 7,000 people in Indiana who did exactly that lost the legal right to work.
They were here on Temporary Protected Status, a program Congress created in 1990 for people whose home countries are too dangerous to send them back to. Nobody sneaks into TPS. There is no coyote. There is a fee schedule. You register with the federal government, you pay, you get authorization to work, you renew it on a calendar, and you do it again. It is the single most documented way to be an immigrant in this country. Every one of these people is in a federal database, by name, because they put themselves there. They filled out the form that says here I am.
Hold that thought.
On June 25 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that courts have no business reviewing the Homeland Security Secretary's decision to end a country's TPS designation. Note what that does and does not say. Not that the decision was correct. Not that it was reasonable, or supported, or even coherent. That nobody gets to ask. The case was Mullin v. Doe, and it cleared the way to strip status from roughly 350,000 Haitian and Syrian nationals.
What Indiana actually loses
Indiana has around 11,000 Haitian TPS holders, one of the largest populations in the country. About 7,000 of them work. Carson Gerber reported for Free Press Indiana that FWD.us puts their contribution at $209 million a year to the state economy and $55 million in federal, state and local taxes. Around 3,000 work as stockers and packers. Another 1,000 drive delivery. Which is to say: the people who move everything you order and stock everything you buy.
Roughly one in five works in healthcare. The Florida Health Care Association wrote to Homeland Security on July 7 asking for some administrative exception, warning that "the loss of even a small percentage of these experienced caregivers would be detrimental to residents' continuity of care as well as providers who are already struggling to fill essential positions." That is the nursing home industry saying please do not do this to us. No exception came.
Even the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has never once been accused of sentimentality about labor, said the quiet part in a press voice. "When changes affect the legal work status of people already contributing in the workplace, businesses can face real disruptions at a time when many are still working to fill critical positions," said president and CEO Vanessa Green Sinders. Translated out of Chamber: we cannot fill these jobs and you just deleted the people doing them.
So the ledger reads: $209 million out of the state economy. $55 million out of the tax base. Nursing homes losing caregivers they were already short of. Warehouses losing team leaders. And on the other side of the ledger, Indiana gets nothing. There is no upside column. Not one official has stood up and explained what the state gains. Not one press release has tried. The column is blank because nobody has bothered to fake it.
The part that gives it away
Weedberline Cetoute is 27, owns a flower shop in Indianapolis, and studied business at Ivy Tech. Her father is a team leader at a warehouse and has been in this country about ten years. He is the one who pays the mortgage on the house they all share. She asked that his name and employer be withheld, which tells you exactly how safe legal status feels in America this week.
"We are very hard workers," she told Free Press Indiana. "We know how to provide for our families."
Now pick that earlier thought back up. If any of this were actually about illegal immigration, these people would be the exception. They are the ones who did it the way you said to do it. They registered. They paid. They renewed. They are the walking, working proof of concept for the entire "right way" argument. If rule-following were the point, they would be the last people you touched.
They went first because they were the easiest to find. That is what a registry is for. They handed over their addresses in good faith and the government kept the list.
So your uncle is going to need new material this November. The old line just cost 7,000 Hoosiers their jobs, most of a quarter billion dollars, and a nursing shift somebody's grandmother was counting on.
You do not get to spend twenty years saying "do it the right way," then remove the people who did it the right way, and still pretend the objection was ever about paperwork. The paperwork was perfect. The paperwork was never the problem.
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