Trump’s Decision to Expel Salvadoran Immigrants Reverses an American Tradition

For a nation of immigrants, the challenge is where to draw the line. A decade ago, Gallup asked adults the world over whether they would like to live somewhere else, if they could. They got a yes from 700 million people. Asked where they’d like to go, the destination of choice–named by 165 million people–was the U.S.

America can’t take them all in, of course. But the idea of the nation as both a beacon and a refuge has softened the landing for millions of people who arrived without papers and over time became Americans.

It’s an idea the Trump Administration is snatching back. The announcement on Jan. 8 ordering nearly 200,000 Salvadorans to return to Central America is only the latest inversion of an Executive generosity that extends back at least six Presidents. About 46,000 Haitians were ordered out in November, when 2,500 Nicaraguans were also put on notice. Tens of thousands of Hondurans living in the U.S. await the next Department of Homeland Security take-back of what’s called Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

TPS thus takes its place on protest signs alongside DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in undoing the founding assumption of national identity since at least Plymouth Rock: that becoming an American was basically a matter of showing up and acting like one.

TPS was granted to Salvadorans already in the States in 2001 on the notional premise that they could hardly be expected to return to a country just hit by an earthquake. Today the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to El Salvador, and it’s far more perilous for Salvadorans, given the extraordinary violence of urban gangs that operate with impunity there. Honduras is similarly afflicted. Together with Guatemala, the nations have some of the world’s highest murder rates.

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