This week the Biden administration announced that it is granting temporary legal status to potentially more than 700,000 Venezuelans, protecting them from deportation orders. The administration is also working to grant to over half of the same population work permits that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas indicated would be good for up to five years. Normally, such work permits are limited to just two years.

This announcement comes as Eagle Pass, Texas, is once again getting overwhelmed by the thousands upon thousands of migrants who have thrown themselves at the border in just the last week. The mayor of Eagle Pass has declared a disaster and state of emergency while Customs and Border Protection is rushing personnel there. Alongside the massive amnesty for Venezuelans, Mayorkas announced that the Defense Department would commit 800 troops to help secure the border, joining another 2,500 from the National Guard — a nice, but ultimately meaningless, gesture without a serious political commitment to enforcement.

New York City mayor Eric Adams and New York governor Kathy Hochul praised the new amnesty. Nearly 40 percent of the 100,000 migrants who arrived in New York City since this spring are Venezuelans, according to City Hall. Mayor Adams has repeatedly asked for them to be granted work permits in order to relieve the city from the burden of sheltering them on the taxpayer’s dime. But going down this route is foolish and shortsighted.

The original idea of temporary protected status was to provide a legal humanitarian arrangement for aliens whose home country was subject to a hurricane, earthquake, or famine. The key word was supposed to be “temporary.” But the status has become a favorite legal tool of those who want to provide backdoor amnesty because the letter of the law allows endless extensions, and ample stretching of the definitions, for those who qualify. Venezuela’s government has made it a basket case for a decade; it has not suddenly gotten worse to justify immediately granting relief and work permits to a population that sits somewhere between the size of Sacramento and Boston.

While the temporary protected status and work permits are only supposed to be given to those Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before July 31 of this year, the announcement of this policy is bound to cause a surge of further migration from Venezuela, and elsewhere, among those who hope to obtain, by hook or by crook, this temporary amnesty, and then amnesties to come as they establish their lives here. The sheer number of those applying for temporary protected status and work permits will mean months of administrative backlog and opportunity for those who get in now. The length of the work permit is almost invaluable as it gives “temporary” migrants time to settle down, marry, and have children who become permanent U.S. citizens and a further reason to extend their temporary status or grant them amnesty outright.

The constant stretching of our legal definitions of “refugees” or “temporary status” makes a joke of our immigration laws and invites more law-breaking, even as it sows distrust between citizens and their government that makes salutary reforms to our immigration system impossible.

Americans across the country are tired of dealing with the consequences of the chaos at the border in their communities. Republicans need to remind American voters that the Biden administration chose this disorder — and is choosing, as even Democrats beg for relief, to apply legally dubious Band-Aids that will only perpetuate the problem, or make it worse.