When the disaster is no longer temporary, relief shouldn’t be either 

On Aug. 20, the United States deported more than 160 people to Haiti on the first removal flight since the government ended temporary protected status, or TPS, for approximately 350,000 Haitians. That plane, which included some former TPS holders, landed in Cap-Haïtien rather than the capital Port-au-Prince, because continuing insecurity has made the airport too dangerous for U.S. commercial flights. 

TPS allows eligible foreign nationals already in the U.S. to remain and work legally when conditions in their home country prevent safe return. Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and displaced 1.5 million, seemed to fit the model. 

For 15 years, successive administrations renewed or redesignated Haiti for temporary protection. But this June, after a lengthy legal battle culminating in a Supreme Court decision, Haitians lost their protection. 

Advocates and critics of TPS point to the same 15-year duration as evidence for their positions. Both sides overlook a more fundamental question: What should we do when the disaster becomes chronic?

My parents immigrated from Haiti to the United States in the 1980s. Their story is not a TPS story, but it taught me that migration often begins long before disaster strikes. My work has reinforced that lesson. 

I lead the development of networks — subsea and terrestrial — that connect people and economies. I think a lot about resilience, redundancy and a system’s capacity to absorb failure. A well-designed network should be able to lose a link and reroute. But when recovery is incomplete, the system becomes more vulnerable and, without sufficient investment, may never return to full capacity. 

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, between 2008........

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