The pictures from Afghanistan in August 2021 are indelible: As the Taliban swept through the countryside and stormed Kabul, reclaiming the country from Western-funded elites, the U.S. presence in the country evaporated overnight, and thousands of Afghans tried in desperation to escape the country on the last few U.S. aircraft to leave. Approximately 76,000 escaped in the cargo holds of American planes, the largest humanitarian airlift in recent history.
Compared to many Afghans who remained behind, these escapees were the lucky ones. Six months after the takeover, in February 2022, NPR reported that Afghans felt safer but less hopeful, and that same month a Voice of America poll found that nearly all Afghans said they were suffering. Now, two years after the U.S. evacuation, the majority of Afghans face crushing food insecurity, terror attacks are on the rise, summary executions of the political opposition are rife, and human rights groups are warning of a potential genocide against the Hazara. Women have been largely erased from public life, banned even from working for NGOs, and suicides among women are on the rise. Girls remain largely out of school, and boys who can access education are being indoctrinated in extremist ideology. Therefore, it is little surprise that a significant number of those Afghans who have been able to get a passport, board a flight or cross a border have continued to flee the country in the two years since the U.S. evacuation. In addition to those who got out on the U.S. airlift, an additional 9,000 or so have made their way to the United States since then.
Even those who have escaped Taliban rule face numerous hurdles. The vast majority of the 1.6 million Afghans who have left the country since 2021 did not do so on U.S. flights but by crossing land borders to Pakistan, Iran or Tajikistan. There they may languish in refugee camps for years before their asylum applications to the U.S. or other countries are even processed. In Pakistan, refugee cards are now expiring and some are being deported back to the Taliban. Many of those who did get out on flights out rather than by land routes have ended up flying not to the U.S. but the Middle East, Turkey or Africa. In recent years, many leaving by air have flown to Brazil with a view to taking the perilous journey north to America through the treacherous Darien Gap.
The approximately 90,000 Afghans who, according to the State Department, have made it to the United States since mid-2021 have had advantages not only over their fellow countrymen who were left behind but over other refugee groups seeking asylum in America. According to the Washington Post, approximately 60 percent of those 76,000 who made it out had connections to the U.S. government that qualified them for the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program. Others may have had family connections to those eligible for SIVs, or social connections to Afghan veterans or other American expats who mobilized to help get them out. Yet others secured scholarships to enroll in U.S. universities, providing community, stability, and educational prospects while they awaited a long-term solution. This is a softer landing than Afghans arriving in other countries likely experienced, and also softer than many other refugee populations who arrive in the United States. Indeed surveys have shown that American public opinion is uniquely sympathetic to Afghans (especially those who supported U.S. forces), far more so than many other nationalities.
Whereas Americans sometimes question whether refugees from other countries meet the ‘persecution’ standard, there is almost no question in most Americans’ minds that Afghan allies who assisted U.S. forces would face such persecution or death if returned.
Yet even these Afghans—the luckiest of American asylum-seekers other than Ukrainians—were offered only a temporary solution rather than a permanent path to citizenship. Two years later, they are now facing bureaucratic obstacles, uncertain futures, and the possibility of being returned to Afghanistan, despite international treaties and domestic legislation that should in theory protect people from being forcibly returned to a situation where they would surely face persecution.
The Refugee Convention’s key rule is the prohibition on returning those with a well-founded fear of persecution to their former country. Whereas Americans and policymakers sometimes question whether refugees from other countries meet the “persecution” standard, there is almost no question in most Americans’ minds that Afghan allies who assisted U.S. forces would face such persecution or death if returned. Moreover, Americans understand that every woman inside Afghanistan faces what UN experts are calling gender persecution or gender apartheid. The situation of Afghan asylum-seekers in the U.S. would seem to be the hardest possible case for sending people back, and a politically easy case for an open-arms policy.
So why are so many Afghan refugees facing limbo and potentially life-threatening deportation? The main reason is bureaucratic: Most of them have not entered the country as refugees per se but rather as humanitarian parolees. They can apply for asylum, but that requires an extensive period of vetting in a system that was largely dismantled under the Trump administration. Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to rebuild it and the extraordinary demand, asylum processing is so backlogged and short-staffed that in 2022 actual refugee admissions fell 80 percent below the target established by the administration. The option of humanitarian parole allowed these asylum-seekers immediate entry to the United States but, unlike refugees, parolees have no secure pathway to remain longer than two years—less time than it often takes to receive a favorable asylum ruling. Thus far, Biden has extended humanitarian parole but since this is subject to executive review, it could be struck down by an incoming Republican president.
The second reason is that the legislation required to get these Afghans out of limbo, and help reunite them with their families still stuck in Afghanistan, has stalled in Congress. The Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at providing green cards and a path to citizenship for Afghan parolees without forcing them to navigate the asylum process, faces two hurdles: first, a narrative that it risks allowing Taliban terrorists into the country; and, second, competing legislation being pushed by Republicans that would, if passed, also limit the president’s ability to offer the humanitarian parole program to other vulnerable populations in the future.
The anniversary of the withdrawal this month coupled with looming parole deadlines has brought renewed pressure on Congress to support Afghan arrivals. But with all the attention on those parolees who made it to the U.S., it is important to consider ways to ease pathways for other Afghans to gain entry to the United States—especially women, those who would have been eligible for SIVs but didn’t make it out, and those who supported the U.S. in ways that didn’t strictly qualify them for SIV status but have put them at risk, such as workers in women’s domestic violence shelters funded by the US government.
Indeed, America has made it very difficult for most Afghans at risk from the Taliban to get to the United States in the first place. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service has denied 90 percent of parole applications from those who didn’t make it out in August 2021—even those qualifying for SIVs. Students applying for visas in third countries such as Pakistan are being rejected by U.S. consular officers if they cannot “prove” they don’t intend to remain in the U.S. after school. Such proof is difficult when fleeing a situation of gender apartheid without relatives in third countries, or when applying from a country like Pakistan that has not signed the Refugee Convention.
Both Congress and the Biden administration should explore all options for providing ways around these senseless bureaucratic hurdles. In fact, Afghanistan’s status as a country whose nationals are eligible under U.S. law for temporary protected status means the Biden administration could ease such rules by executive order. Both Afghans left behind and those who have been lucky enough to arrive safely on U.S. shores deserve better than the treatment they have received in the last two years.
Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter.