What will happen to Afghan refugees trying to make it to the US?

A State Department programme set up to help eligible Afghans get US visas is now under more pressure than ever

In the weeks before most of Afghanistan and, finally, the capital Kabul effectively fell under Taliban control, Afghans who helped US operations in their country have been flown into the US under what is being called Operation Allies Refuge. The first flight carrying applicants to the programme landed at the end of July, bringing its passengers to Fort Lee in Virginia for the final processing of their visa applications.

And as the situation on the ground in Afghanistan changed dramatically, reports emerged that the Department of Defence has drawn up plans to house as many as 30,000 Afghan refugees and visa applicants on bases in the US, among them Fort McCoy in Wisconsin and Fort Bliss in Texas.

As Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby told Fox News, the two facilities potentially have the capacity to cope with tens of thousands of new arrivals. In line with standard refugee policy in the US – which now caps admissions at 62,500 per year – Afghans arriving in the country will be heavily vetted before state and local governments and refugee agencies step in to help them embed themselves in communities and build new everyday lives. That help can extend to everything from help navigating healthcare systems to learning English and obtaining school supplies for children.

But the reality of this programme is complicated by three main problems: the difficulty of getting people out of Afghanistan now that the government there has fallen and most US forces departed; the complexity and frustration of the bureaucracy in place for Afghan applicants; and political resistance on parts of the US political spectrum to letting in a significant number of refugees.

Many civilian routes out of Afghanistan are now blocked, and US immigration and border services on the ground there have effectively ended. Evacuation flights have been underway for some time, and one cargo plane this week took off with 640 Afghan passengers who had squeezed in straight off the runway, but others have been injured or killed while trying to board planes out.

The main initiative designed to help Afghans gain entry to the US is a State Department programme known as Special Immigrant Visas for Afghans (SIV), which offers places for Afghan citizens who worked with the US during its nation-building and security campaign. The programme was dogged by inefficiency well before the disastrous fall of much of the country to the Taliban, and was expanded via legislation this summer to raise the number of slots to 34,500 and open them up to surviving spouses and children of those killed.

However, a backlog of thousands of unprocessed applications was still in place by the time of the Taliban’s lightning-fast advance through Afghanistan’s major cities, and many US personnel charged with authorising applications within the country itself either have been evacuated or are trying to get out as soon as possible.

The pressure on the Biden administration to improve this situation is mounting, particularly among Democrats. Axios reports that discussions are beginning about whether and how to allocate additional funding for Afghan resettlement efforts within the $3.5 trillion budget plan Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress.

In the interim, progressives including Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar are making the case for a “moral obligation” to help those who need to flee Afghanistan find both safe passage out of the country and a place to settle.

However, the resistance to refugee resettlement is already rising on the hardline right. Anti-immigration pundits such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson are invoking the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory to appeal to racist fears about what the arrival of large numbers of refugees might entail. Mr Carlson’s colleague Laura Ingraham simply asked: “Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially un-vetted refugees from Afghanistan? All day we heard phrases like ‘we promised them.’ Well, who did? Did you?”