Here’s how immigrants from countries Trump slammed really do in the US

By Lyman Stone  Jan 14, 2018, 10:00am EST

President Trump’s comment about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries,” — which he has unpersuasively denied — came in a very specific context: He was discussing with lawmakers under what conditions Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras might be renewed.

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, grants people fleeing specific crises in specific countries who have entered the United States without any permanent legal status the right to be to be temporarily shielded from prosecution for illegal residency. It doesn’t give them a visa or permanent status, but it does let them live and work here legally for the time being.

In the ensuing uproar, some on the right have asserted that President Trump was really making a good point, however crudely: Maybe we don’t want immigrants from poor countries, who, they assume, are low-skill immigrants. The administration is known to support a more “skills based” immigration system, and maybe Trump was just, in a clumsy way, trying to articulate that?

Foreign countries have interpreted his remarks very straightforwardly: a joint statement by all 55 African countries included an apology and a request for an clarification of which of them, exactly, President Trump considers to be a “shithole.” Critics from the left have argued that Trump’s comments were not only offensive but ignorant because, actually, immigrants from Africa perform extremely well in the United States.

Unfortunately, the debate so far has featured a dearth of up-to-date, solid empirical work on the countries that benefit from TPS.

In fact, we have quite a lot of data on how immigrants from TPS-receiving countries (and Africa more generally) do after arriving in the US. Countries receiving TPS have, by definition, experienced a severe disaster creating large amounts of emigrants. They also are almost always very poor countries. (It is precisely because some countries are extremely unsafe, poor, and dangerous that we provide TPS.)

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https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/1/14/16890042/immigrants-trump-us-tps-shithole-countries-economic-outcomes