Op-ed: TPS: Part of Immigration’s Empire of Lies

In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Peace headquarters was emblazoned with three mottoes: “War Is Peace,” Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”

A recent Biden administration action reminds us that immigration law and policy are replete with similar, if more specialized, inversions of the meaning of words.

There’s the “pierceable cap” on immigration numbers, which is no cap at all. And “dual intent,” wherein a foreigner seeking a visa to come to the United States can be considered to simultaneously intend to return home and to stay in the U.S.

And there’s “particular social group” persecution based on which is a grounds for asylum — except that the “group” doesn’t need to be particular or social or even really a group (kind of like Voltaire’s crack about the Holy Roman Empire). As Samuel Alito wrote while an appeals court judge, “Virtually any set including more than one person could be described as a ‘particular social group.’”

But the most egregious has to be Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. A reader of the previous paragraphs who knew nothing else about immigration would likely intuit the problem: There’s nothing temporary about it. DHS’s recent renewal of TPS for nearly a million illegal aliens highlights this problem.

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[Read the whole thing at National Review.]