‘I have been doing my taxes every year,’ Lynn immigrant in US on TPS says as he lobbies for path to citizenship

April 17-- Apr. 17--As the tax deadline rolls around in Massachusetts, immigrants with temporary protections lobbying for a path to citizenship argued that their deportation could cost the country billions in the long term.

"We are not asking for charity. Temporary Protected Status families have already contributed to this country," said Jose Palma, coordinator for the National TPS Committee and a TPS recipient from El Salvador.

Palma, other members and their children stood in the Boston Common Tuesday morning, a day before Massachusetts residents' taxes are due, holding a large symbolic check in the amount of $4.6 billion symbolically made out to the federal government. A study published on Monday from the University of Southern California estimates that's how much immigrants with temporary protections contribute in federal, state and local taxes. The study suggests that the country could lose $35.2 billion in gross domestic product if immigrants with temporary protections leave the country.

"For the last 20 years, I have been doing my taxes every year," said Palma, a Lynn resident who works as a paralegal for Justice At Work. He arrived in the U.S. in 1998 and received temporary protections in 2001 after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck El Salvador.

More than 12,000 Massachusetts residents have protections under TPS, a humanitarian program that offers a work permit to foreign nationals of countries marred by civil war, natural disasters, health epidemics and other crises. The U.S. grants TPS to eligible nationals of El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan.

TPS grants no direct path to citizenship, but some recipients have married U.S. citizens and become legal permanent residents.

The Trump administration is trying to end the programs, which critics argue were always designed to be temporary. The administration's efforts have been stymied by lawsuits from advocacy groups challenging the wind-down. Federal judges in California have ordered the federal government not to end TPS for several countries while the lawsuits are heard in court.

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While the fate of the temporary program is determined in the courts, immigration activists are pushing for Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, a bill that would offer immigrants with temporary protections a direct path to citizenship.

Critics of the TPS program, however, argue that there are several other countries without TPS designation that are in much worse shape economically and politically than Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Art Arthur, fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, said in a Congressional hearing in March that the legislation would encourage other immigrants to enter the country illegally and put a strain on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes visa and citizenship applications.

"A Dream Act amnesty alone would be expensive from a fiscal point of view, and that cost would only be compounded by adding in an amnesty for TPS recipients," Arthur testified.

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Instead, Arthur suggested that TPS recipients sell their homes and other assets or leave them in the care of relatives. He also said that when the U.S.-citizen children of TPS recipients turn 21, they can petition for their parents' return to the country as green card holders.

"They have already been the beneficiaries of a generous program that has protected them against hardship in their countries," Arthur said.

Immigrant advocates argue that sending TPS recipients back to their native countries would not only endanger them, but hurt the economy.

USC's Dornsife Center for Immigrant Integration partnered with the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, and found that the bill could help nearly 1.3 billion people who have temporary protections or live with someone who does. The report released on Monday suggests that their sum of household income is about $17.9 billion and that nearly 26 percent, or $4.6 billion, goes to taxes.

Massachusetts's 5th congressional district, represented by Democratic Congresswoman Katherine Clark, had one of the highest tax contributions from these recipients. About 4,100 immigrants with temporary protections live in the district, according to the Center for Immigrant Integration.

Doris Landaverde, a TPS recipient from El Salvador, has worked as a custodian at Harvard University since 2006. On Tax Day, she joined activists and politicians calling for a path to citizenship.

"I'm paying taxes every year. I think that's a way to contribute to the community and to the government," Doris Landaverde, a custodian at Harvard University, said Tuesday at the Boston Common.

Landaverde said she arrived in the country in December 2000, just a few months before a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck her native El Salvador. She received temporary protections a few months later.

She was hired at Harvard in 2006, according to the university website. She raised her daughter alone until marrying her husband, a Moroccan national named Mohamed, in 2009. They had two daughters together.

If she loses her protections under TPS, Landaverde said she would be sent back to El Salvador and be separated from her husband and daughters.

Politicians who joined the TPS recipients on Tuesday called for a path to citizenship for immigrants with TPS.

"It's bad for our economy, it's bad for our neighborhood, it's bad for our businesses if we do not support TPS holders," said Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards. "If we do not stand with them and make sure that they stay here, then it will actually be worse for us and worse for our economy."

Edwards said these immigrants are contributing more than major companies such as Starbucks and Amazon.

"And yet here we are having this horrible conversation about whether they should stay here or not, and the fact is they're everything that this country strives to be," she said.

Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone said his family immigrated from Italy and built their life in the city in the 1950s.

"They built a better home and life for their family and their community," he said. "Immigrants today are doing the same thing in Somerville and around the nation."

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