GREENSBORO, N.C.—When Asrar boarded a plane with more than 400 other Afghans fleeing Kabul for America last year, the longtime intelligence officer said he felt something he hadn’t in a long time: safe.
But more than a year later, the former Afghan colonel who spent two decades hunting Taliban fighters before arriving in North Carolina, says he has seen that sense of safety replaced by uncertainty and dread.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What steps should authorities take to provide evacuated Afghans a more straightforward path to U.S. citizenship? Join the conversation below.
Asrar and his family are among some 80,000 Afghans who were evacuated to the U.S. when the Taliban regained power, and many are still uncertain about whether they will be permitted to stay.
Even as they have started finding homes and jobs, they have been caught in legal purgatory as paths to a coveted visa or green card remain hazy. The Biden administration’s calls on Congress to provide all evacuated Afghans a path to citizenship—as the government had done after similar evacuations from Vietnam and Iraq—have so far gone unheeded.
Bipartisan legislation in Congress, sponsored by Sens.
Amy Klobuchar
(D., Minn.) and
Lindsey Graham
(R., S.C.) and based off the Biden administration’s proposal, would address the issue by providing evacuated Afghans a direct path to green cards pending additional security checks.
The bill, known as the Afghan Adjustment Act, is modeled on a similar law passed after the Vietnam War to provide a path to citizenship for the more than 100,000 refugees from southeast Asia the U.S. airlifted after the war. Similar laws also were passed for Cubans after the 1959 communist revolution and for Iraqi Kurds after the first Iraq war.
Americans and Vietnamese were airlifted from Saigon in 1975. A law passed after the Vietnam War provided a path to citizenship for refugees.
Photo:
Pictures From History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at WSJ.com: World News…