Under Trump’s extreme, anti-business immigration agenda, not even Disney gets spared | Opinion

It’s not just the liberal bleeding hearts who are feeling the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this week to allow the Trump administration to terminate the Temporary Protected Status of 350,000 Venezuelans.

Just days after the high court delivered its ruling on Monday, one of Florida’s largest employers, the Walt Disney Company put 45 employees who have TPS on unpaid leave. They will lose their jobs in 30 days if they cannot show proof of alternative work authorization. It’s unclear how many of those employees live and work in Florida, the Miami Herald reported.

This is obviously bad for the Venezuelans who have lost their livelihood and will soon be subject to deportation if they cannot find another way to stay in the country legally.

But the Disney case highlights what the Herald Editorial Board and others have been saying since the Department of Homeland Security announced in February that it was ending a 2023 designation of Venezuela for TPS.

These faceless migrants President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem have painted as threats to the nation provide labor to companies, from small businesses to large corporations like Disney.

On top of that, they rent homes, pay taxes and patronize businesses, such as restaurants and markets that have opened in places like Doral — nicknamed “Doralzuela” because of its large Venezuelan community — to cater to Venezuelan customers.

Disney, with its vast reach and sophisticated human resources apparatus, could replace those 45 workers more easily than the mom-and-pop shops and small-and-medium-size businesses who will suffer the most.

Think of the owner of 15 restaurants and three markets, most of them in Doral, who told the Associated Press this week that at least 70% of his 150 employees and many of his customers are Venezuelans on TPS. Or the owner of a Weston-based real estate company who also employs several TPS holders. He told Channel 10 that his construction and renovation crews would be the most affected because they are “working together as a team, and everybody had the TPS.”

The likely response from Trump’s supporters would be that these businesses should hire more Americans. But it’s been long known that finding native-born Americans to perform jobs in construction, restaurants, hotels, agriculture and other industries is hard. Unemployment remains low despite fears of a recession.

The food service and hospitality industry, specifically, has a unique challenge with the high turnover of workers. According to an April U.S. Chamber of Commerce report titled, “Understanding America’s Labor Shortage: The Most Impacted Industries,” leisure and hospitality have experienced the highest quit rates of all industries, “with the accommodation and food services subsector of this industry experiencing a quit rate consistently around or above 4 percent since July 2022,” higher than all the other industries mentioned in the report.

As the Chamber report explained, jobs that are “fully in-person and have lower wages” — as most jobs at restaurants and hotels are — have a difficult time retaining workers. Florida’s labor shortage is not as severe as in other states, according to the Chamber, but for every 100 job openings, there are only 95 available workers.

What’s more, in a state where immigrants comprise 21.1% of the population, immigrants account for $106.3 billion of spending power and $31.4 billion in tax contributions, according to the Chamber.

It’s no wonder then that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which calls itself the world’s largest business organization, has asked for more legal immigration. The group has said that below-average migration contributes to the nation’s labor shortage, while it has also criticized “the chaos on our southern border” under former President Joe Biden.

These figures — labor shortage and spending of immigrants — show that Trump’s decision to expel TPS holders from Venezuela, Haiti and other countries is not rooted in data but on fear-mongering, stereotypes and generalizations about migrants. Not even Disney is immune from the impacts of his extreme immigration agenda.

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This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 1:33 PM.