It’s hard to disregard Trump’s unorthodox comments about Haiti and migration when he continues to add fuel to the fire.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just removed three countries from its temporary visa list and Haiti is one of them, TIME reports. The DHS’ decision to remove Haiti from the list is uncanny as they’ve maintained Temporary Protected Status since their 2010 earthquake and the decision followed Trump’s “sh*thole countries” comment. Their designation will now end in July 2019.
The DHS list has about 80 eligible countries at any given time and permits seasonal and temporary legal work programs. The list is released, annually, and seldom removes any countries so there are concerns about whether this was done in support of Trump’s migration biases.
The DHS, which permits Immigration Services to give visas to foreign citizens, removed Belize, Samoa, and Haiti from the list but they claim that they’ve done so with reasonable justification. Belize has been removed because it “does not meet standards on human trafficking and is not making efforts to do so,” according to the notice. In the case of Samoa, the U.S. will not be taking any more of its citizens because the country does not accept its nationals upon return.
For Haiti, there are reported “extremely high rates of refusal,” “high levels of fraud and abuse,” and a “high rate of overstaying their H-2 admission.”
Despite the reasons cited, the DHS has failed to supply many of the statistics that back their claims about the 60,000 Haitians that benefit from the policy.
Trump suggested that he would be willing to accept more immigrants from Asian countries and in line with that, Mongolia will be added to the list, Time reports.