Washington, DC — Thanks to widespread support for Liberia's fledgling post-conflict democracy in the U.S. Congress and within the Bush administration, several thousand Liberians living in the United States who are facing deportation in 60 days are likely to win a reprieve.
Liberia is striving to recover from a quarter century of unrest, including 14 years of conflict that spilled into neighboring countries and killed or uprooted hundreds of thousands of people and left many stranded in the United States.
Congressional backing has been growing for extending what is known as temporary protective status (TPS), which has allowed some 3600 Liberians and their families otherwise ineligible for immigration to the United States to stay to work here. President George Bush has signaled his support for an extension, despite a ruling last September by the Department of Homeland Security that TPS for Liberians would expire on October 1 this year.
"Liberia needs time to rebuild and recover and is unfortunately not in a position to absorb and provide for an influx of refugees," President Ellen John Sirleaf said in an April letter seeking Congressional support.
The extension of temporary status "is going to happen," Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert Johnson told a gathering of several hundred Liberians at an Independence Day celebration Thursday night in Washington, DC. Johnson, who has pledged to assist Liberia with both investment and political clout, met earlier on Thursday with President Bush at the White House to discuss U.S.-Liberia relations.
An extension could be effected either by Homeland Security reversing its 2006 termination and issuing another extension or by Congress adopting legislation to extend TPS or to grant permanent residence to Liberians currently in the United States on temporary status. A bill approving a one-year extension for Liberians with temporary status is being debated by the House of Representatives today (Monday).The measure is supported by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led a Congressional visit to Monrovia last year, as well as by two top Republicans, Minority Leader John Beohner (Ohio) and his deputy, Roy Blunt (Missouri).
"There's grass roots pressure and overwhelming support for this from Democrats and Republicans alike on the Hill," said Riva Levinson, a veteran lobbyist who represents Liberia in Washington, DC.
Congressional intent
Both houses of Congress are scheduled to adjourn later this week for the August recess, which limits the number of days they will be in session before TPS expires at the end of September. To gain approval in the time available will require that no member of either house registers opposition. Action by either Congress or the administration is made more difficult by the fact that immigration is currently the most controversial domestic issue in American politics.
Bob Johnson came away from his meeting with Bush convinced that the administration will act on its own if Congress fails to enact an extension in time. "With congressional intent so clear, the president has the political cover he needs to do what he wants to do - extend TPS," said one official who was not authorized to speak for attribution.
A letter asking the president to defer deportation of Liberians pending approval of permanent residency is being circulated in the House by Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island Democrat. "Aside from the prospect that Liberian-American families could be uprooted or forced to separate," Kennedy's letter says, "Liberia's recovery effort could lose an important source of financial aid and technical expertise." More than 60 members have agreed to sign the letter, including Rep. David Price (Democrat-NC), who chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, and Donald Payne (Democrat-New Jersey), who chairs the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health. Republicans signatories include Frank Wolf from Virginia and Jeff Flake from Arizona, both of whom have taken a leading role on African issues.
Kennedy introduced a bill earlier this year that would grant permanent residency to Liberians with temporary status. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate in February by Jack Reed, also a Democrat from Rhode Island, where a large number of Liberians have settled. The legislation on the House floor today represents a bipartisan compromise designed to sidestep opposition from anti-immigration interests who oppose the granting of permanent status but have agreed not to try to block a TPS extension.
The Liberian government estimates that remittances to Liberia from the United States average $6 million each month, according to Charles Minor, the country's ambassador in Washington. Boniface Satu, president of the Liberian Community Association serving the Washington, DC area, said most Liberians in the United States support 10 people or more back home and says these remittances are vital to Liberia's recovery. "Every quarter, I send $300 to $400 to Liberia," he said. "I support not only my family but also extended family and friends."
Forcing Liberians living in the United States on temporary status to leave would cut off critical sustenance for thousands of Liberia's three million people. It would also deprive the country of vital foreign exchange. "This could jeopardize our progress," said Ambassador Minor. "We don't have the housing stock, the schools or the medical facilities to support this many returnees as yet." President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made job creation a top priority, Minor said, but the country cannot yet provide employment for thousands of returning Liberians, even if they have skills and experience.
Sirleaf's election as Africa's first woman president following the end of Liberia's lengthy civil war attracted world attention and generated widespread interest in the country's reconstruction efforts. Goodwill towards Sirleaf, who after growing up in rural Liberia earned a Harvard degree and became a successful investment banker and high-ranking United Nations official, has given Democrats and Republicans an issue on which they can agree. Sirleaf has instilled confidence "that she will set Liberia right," according to Pearl-Alice Marsh, who handles African issues for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Members of Congress want Liberia "to succeed in overcoming it's pretty desperate past" and understand the importance to the United States of "having another stable democracy in west Africa," she said.
From 1991 to 1999, while ongoing unrest made it dangerous or impossible for many Liberians to return home, the U.S. government renewed TPS every year. Continuing instability prompted the Clinton and Bush administrations to defer deportations annually for three more years until TPS was formally reinstated in October 2002 after full-scale fighting resumed throughout Liberia.
The TPS program was established by Congress in 1990 to allow nationals of countries at war to stay in the United States without fear of deportation. Those registered under TPS may receive work authorization and are required to pay taxes, but they cannot qualify for benefits such as welfare or food stamps.
Longstanding ties and disappointments
Many Liberians feel a special bond with the United States. The country was settled by freed American slaves. The founders adopted the American model for their flag and constitution and named the capital Monrovia after U.S. President James Monroe. The country declared war on Germany during World War II and provided vital rubber and a strategic airstrip to back the American cause. During the Cold War, the nation hosted a Central Intelligence Agency listening post and a powerful Voice of America transmitter and continued to extend landing rights for U.S. military planes.
During the civil war, most of the country's population was displaced and an estimated 150,000 people died. The conflict fueled instability in neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and decimated the country's infrastructure. Charles Taylor, who is currently on trial for war crimes in The Hague, launched the rebellion at the end of 1989 and, after seizing control in 1994, presided over the country's descent into chaos that ended when he was forced into exile by a peace accord that was adopted in 2003 with the support of African leaders and President Bush.
Since coming into office in January 2006, Sirleaf has been directing a reconstruction effort aimed at providing water, electricity and medical care for the population and rebuilding the economy to create jobs. There is widespread agreement that Liberia's recovery will be challenging. "It's a constant one-step-forward, one-step-backward process," said Barbry Keller, the World Bank's country officer for Liberia. "It requires a lot of management to implement development projects, knowledge that people don't have in Liberia, so you've got to build that up."
Satu, who works as a finance manager in the Washington area, said some Liberians have already gone back and many more are eager to return to contribute to reconstruction once jobs are available. "At the appropriate time, a lot of Liberians will want to go home," he said.
Liberians have had temporary status in the United States longer than nationals from any other country. But U.S. law does not have the provision found in several European countries allowing persons with temporary protective status to transition to permanent status after a certain number of years, so their TPS longevity offers them no advantage. Congress has granted exceptions through legislation that enabled some 200,000 Salvadorans and more than 50,000 Chinese to become permanent residents. But many others, including Haitians and Central Americans, are vying for special status, and these competing interests have complicated action on Liberia by Congress and the administration.
Some proponents of stricter immigration controls argue that temporary status for Liberians should end. "We believe the law should be enforced," said John Vinson, editor of Immigration Watch, a publication of Americans for Immigration Control, which favors stronger limits on immigration. While he says he's not against temporary status for needy refugees, he is opposed to repeated extensions, which he believes have become far too routine. "After a certain period of time they have to go back," he said.
Ambassador Minor says this is not yet the right moment for sending these Liberians home. "We need to phase this in – otherwise people will suffer and the country will suffer as well," he said.
Advocates for Liberia argue that the country should be a treated as a special case because of its longstanding ties and record of loyalty to U.S. interests and because Washington abandoned its responsibility to assist Liberia when conflict was brewing and assistance could have averted the tragedy.
Getting off the list
While the ticking clock has pushed the immigration issue to the top of the legislative agenda, Liberia's supporters are also pressing for passage of an amendment to a law that requires the administration to obtain Congressional approval for the funding of each foreign assistance project in designated problem-plagued countries. Liberia is on that list, along with Sudan, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Writing in the Washington Post in May, Bob Johnson said the restriction "delays unnecessarily the disbursement of the $270 million the United States has made available to Liberia and conveys the impression that Washington is indifferent to Liberia's challenges."
Last month, the House approved an amendment introduced by Rep. Gwen Moore (Democrat-Wisconsin) to lift the restriction on Liberian aid. The Senate is scheduled to take up the foreign operations appropriation bill, to which Moore's amendment is attached, sometime in September.
Johnson said he had been inspired by Sirleaf's "courage and vision" to lobby for Africa with the same intensity as Jewish Americans work on behalf of Israel. He has contributed $3 million to an investment initiative, the Liberian Enterprise Development Fund, which, with another $3 million from the U.S. African Development Foundation and $20 from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government entity, is scheduled to become operational in Liberia by September.
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Johnson is also advocating relief from the $3.7 billion Liberia owes to international creditors, and he supports Liberia as a location for the United States Africa Command, known as Africom, which will be established next year, headed by a four-star Army general, William E. ``Kip'' Ward with a civilian deputy. Currently, the United States has one permanent base on the continent, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, and the Pentagon has said no more bases are planned. Africom, which will be the U.S. military's sixth worldwide command post, will have a staff headquarters with about 1,000 people that will likely operate from several African locations.
Debating Africom
Addressing Africom and what she called "skepticism over its intent and what it will be able to achieve", Sirleaf last month provided a prescription for how the new command can be shaped to serve not only U.S. interests but also Africa's development. "If Africom aims to use its 'soft power' mandate to develop a stable environment in which civil society can flourish and the quality of life for Africans can be improved, African nations should work with Africom to achieve their own development and security goals," she wrote in a guest column on allAfrica.com. "Africom is undeniably about the projection of American interests—but this does not mean that it is to the exclusion of African ones," she said.
Not everyone agrees. "Consolidation and expansion of U.S. military power on the African continent is misguided and could lead to disastrous outcomes," two well-known Liberian civil society activists, Ezekiel Pajibo from the Liberia-based Center for Democratic Empowerment and Emira Woods from Foreign Policy in Focus in Washington, DC, wrote in an article published by the social justice network Fahamu. "Liberia, long suffering the effects of militaristic 'assistance' from the United States, would be the worst possible base [for Africom]," they wrote.
Patrick Kennedy, the Rhode Island congressman, believes Liberia should be one of the operational nodes for Africom, and he says Rhode Island's two U.S. Senators also support the idea. The U.S. presence could contribute to stability and help make Liberia an even stronger ally in the region, he told The Hill Newspaper last month. Kennedy said.
"Africom is the recognition that African growth can only occur in an environment where security, development, and good governance are integrally linked," Sirleaf said in her column. "Liberians can only hope that the United States will use Africom to raise standards for engagement and help change "the way of doing business" in Africa."
