Spending Bill Grows Visa Program for Afghan War Allies
State Department's Special Immigrant Visa Program Stops Short of Citizenship
On Tuesday, Punchbowl broke the news that 12,000 new special immigrant visas will be made available for Afghan war allies as part of the State Department and Foreign Operations funding bill that Congress is expected to vote on later this week. The new allotment would increase the special visa program to 50,500 total visas available for Afghans who assisted the U.S. and our allies in the War on Terror.
“This is good but it’s not enough,” Joseph Azam of the Afghan American Foundation tells Capitol Press. “At some point, our government has to hunker down and do its part to make sure every Afghan ally in harm’s way is able to make it over the top to safety. We’ll be here until it happens.”
Tens of thousands of Afghan war allies and their families remain in legal limbo since the U.S. Embassy in Kabul fell to the Taliban in August, 2021. Since then congressional efforts to secure citizenship pathways for America's war allies have failed, forcing migrant allies to rely on the State Department's special immigrant visa program as a sort-of stopgap status.
Special immigrant visa status falls short of the promised citizenship pathway many Afghan war allies say they were promised during the two-decade war. To this end, Azam and other advocates have been working for years with Congress and veterans groups to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a wildly popular bipartisan bill by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would offer a residency pathway to 70,000 Afghan war allies and their families.
Afghan Adjustment had been gaining traction in the Senate until last July when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) torpedoed the proposal by claiming the migrant vetting standards were insufficient. Bizarrely, Cotton then introduced a competing migrant relief proposal with much weaker vetting standards for applicants than those required in Afghan Adjustment. Cotton's bill also included an unrelated poison pill on migrant parole guaranteed to get a veto from President Joe Biden.
For advocates like Azam, the fight to fulfill America’s promises to our war allies is far from over. “Like so many things relating to helping Afghans, Congress is offering up a 12 foot ladder to climb a 20 foot wall,” he said. “We’ll take the ladder, we’ll climb the 12 feet, and wait at the top to see what the plan is for the rest.”