Who’s gonna wipe your ass when you can’t?

It was another week of mind-numbingly stupid decisions from the court that decided Donald Trump was special and shouldn’t go to prison for committing crimes while in office. Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the temporary protected status (TPS) of immigrants coming from places where their lives are endangered. The decision affects the lives of nearly 350,000 Haitians living in America.

Let’s start with looking at the cruelty of this decision (Pope Leo, care to weigh in?). Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has been beset with problems and disasters for decades — a 2010 earthquake that killed 220,000 people and displaced 1.2 million, hurricanes that destroy homes, 12 million people going hungry, collapse of the government that has left violent gangs running the country. In short, for much of the population, Haiti is a living hell, causing hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in the United States.

If empathy is not your thing, there’s a big reason why it’s a bad idea to send Haitians living here under TPS back to their home country: It will create labor shortages in critical areas, particularly health care for the elderly. From the New York Times:

The Supreme Court’s decision will fall most heavily in the health care industry, where Haitians in particular have been concentrated, especially in elder care facilities. Health care has been the American economy’s fastest-growing industry for years now, and the vacancy rate is substantially higher than it is for others, so finding new workers on short notice will be very difficult.

“Providers will have to make tough choices, which could include limiting nursing home admissions, closing units or turning away requests for home health and home care, until the vacant jobs are filled,” said Katie Smith Sloan, chief executive of LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit aging services providers.

Supporters of the immigration crackdown and mass deportation policy justify these actions by saying that foreigners take jobs away from American citizens. There are two big problems with that argument:

• Most of the jobs immigrants perform are jobs Americans have little or no desire to do — harvesting crops, cleaning infirm seniors in nursing homes, mowing yards, cleaning homes, meat processing.

• We don’t have enough workers. As I mentioned in a previous post, birthrates have dropped below replacement levels, primarily because of affordability issues. The Baby Boom generation is now retired, and we need more workers to manufacture goods and provide services. With fewer workers paying into Social Security, retirees will see cuts to payments unless more people enter the workforce.

The health care industry is not the only sector experiencing labor shortages because of short-sighted immigration policies. You may have noticed we have an affordability crisis with housing caused by a shortage in the construction of houses and apartments. It’s estimated that about 20 percent of the workforce in the construction industry is undocumented. Deporting all these workers under the administration’s mass deportation policy will exacerbate the affordability crisis in housing.

Tariffs and the war in Iran are sending grocery prices soaring, but things will get much worse if farmers can’t find enough laborers to harvest their crops. Deportations, along with the fear of deportation, throws a big monkey wrench into the process of getting food from the field to the grocery store shelf. Demand for food does not go down, so when the supply decreases because crops are left to rot in the field, prices go up.

We must inject a healthy dose of common sense into our immigration policies. Given the unmet need for workers in health care, agriculture, construction and other areas, the government should assess that need and expand the number of immigrants coming into the country to fill that need.

The suspension of temporary protected status isn’t just a matter of creating labor shortages in critical areas; sending people back to places where their lives are endangered, people who have lived here for years, is a moral failure that diminishes America’s standing in the world.

The Supreme Court’s ruling on TPS is one more example of why drastic measures, like expanding the court, are needed to prevent more disastrous decisions.