So if the United States is really interested in helping Haiti and other countries get back on track in the aftermath of a natural disaster, it should use migration as a tool for disaster recovery. And, in addition to the temporary protected status designation, there are two other approaches that can be implemented, despite the toxic environment for sensible immigration policy on Capitol Hill.

First, the United States has a temporary work visa for low-skilled workers. The “H-2” program admits about 100,000 migrants for seasonal employment in agriculture and vacation resorts each year. Haitians are ineligible for the program, however, because the country is not on an approved list maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. But the administration can add countries to the program list without congressional approval, if the secretary of Homeland Security deems it serves the national interest. Surely fostering recovery in a destitute neighbor counts on that score.

Michael Clemens estimates that each H-2 worker admitted from Haiti would typically raise their family’s income by $19,000 a year, and that each worker would send as much as 50 percent of their earnings back home. If there were just 2,000 Haitians in the United States under the program in 2012, that would amount to more than $20 million. That’s almost twice the amount that the United States has awarded in contracts to Haitian firms and provided in direct budget support to the Haitian government combined, since the earthquake.

Second, the Department of Homeland Security can selectively grant legal entry to Haitians already approved for a green card — a permanent residence visa — on the basis that a family member is a U.S. citizen. A little more than 112,000 approved Haitians are still on the waiting list, however, because the total number of green cards issued to non-immediate family members is capped worldwide each year. But there is already a “parole” program for Cubans in similar situations, which allows family members to legally enter the United States and wait for the green card here, rather than in Cuba. The Secretary of Homeland Security is authorized to do exactly the same thing with other countries, and Haiti is a good candidate. Clemens suggests about 16,000 Haitians on the green-card waiting list are spouses or minor children of U.S. green-card holders, for whom the case is particularly compelling, so let’s start with them.

It is worth noting that neither of these proposals would necessarily lead to a larger migrant stock in the United States over the long term. It would simply mean that a few more of the migrants the United States was planning to admit anyway came from Haiti, rather than other countries. Surely, the desperate situation that Haiti finds itself in, and the powerful boost only a few more migrants would provide to the country’s economy, justifies a small reallocation.

Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, and author of “Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More.”