Zar Mohammad Stanikzai remembers the promise made to him when he became a translator supporting the US military in 2012: Help us, and we will keep you safe. Four years later, his fear of Taliban reprisals has made him a prisoner in his Afghan home, he said, and he is still waiting for the US to honor its commitment.
Instead, US Congress is bickering over the program meant to be his deliverance.
US Republican infighting, infused with nativist tones, has left in question whether a special visa program for translators and interpreters who assisted the military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be renewed, a potentially devastating blow to approximately 12,000 Afghans whose immigration applications are in limbo.
“We’ve really been trying to reinforce the fact to Afghans that we are committed to you, and this gives the enemy some propaganda to say: ‘Hey, these people really aren’t committed to you,’” said Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, spokesman for the US command in Afghanistan.
“It’s our credibility that is on the line,” he added.
US Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and a long-time champion of the visa program, was blunt.
“People are going to die,” McCain said on the Senate floor, challenging a fellow Republican who was blocking more visas. “Don’t you understand the gravity of that?”
For more than eight years, the US Department of State has offered a visa program designated for many of those who face an “ongoing serious threat” as a result of having provided critical linguistic support — whether in oral interpretation or written translation — in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the past two-and-a-half years, officials said, they have issued visas to more than 8,000 Afghans and their immediate families through the program, which members of the armed services, military officials and lawmakers from both parties have hailed as indispensable to national security.
Congress has responded to the department’s program parsimoniously, allocating the special visas piecemeal through its annual defense policy bill. Since the end of 2014, lawmakers have set aside about 7,000 visas for Afghan translators and interpreters. As of July 10, fewer than 3,000 of those visas remained, but about 12,000 individuals have at least started the application process, according to the department. Applicants must apply by Dec. 31.
Then this year, something changed: A few Republicans said “no,” asking whether more visas were necessary when the department still had thousands of visas from previous years yet to be distributed.
US Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary — which has jurisdiction over immigration matters — also questioned the cost of adding the 4,000 visas that the administration of US President Barack Obama requested this year, pointing to a US Congressional Budget Office estimate of US$446 million over the next 10 years.
After Congress failed to approve more visas in the House of Representatives and Senate defense bills, a bipartisan group of senators tried again last month with a compromise that would have added 2,500 visas — only to be blocked by Senator Mike Lee, who said his quarrel was not with the visa program, but rather with the fact that it was getting a vote while one of his own, unrelated measures was not.
McCain responded by accusing Lee of “signing the death warrants” of people who had put their lives on the line to help the US.
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