Sixty-six progressive Democrats are telling President Joe Biden to open the nation’s border to Afghan migrants because the U.S. bears moral responsibility for the wars in Afghanistan.
“After decades of disastrous U.S. intervention, one thing is clear: We have a moral responsibility to provide safe harbor and refuge for the Afghan people,” the August 26 letter, which does not set an upper limit on the inflow of Afghan migrants, states.
“The U.S. war in Afghanistan has caused irreparable harm to Afghans,” the letter claims, without mentioning the many hard-fought humanitarian gains Americans delivered or mentioning the almost 2,400 dead Americans — in the two decades since 2001.
The letter is from the House’s progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), and Rep. James McGovern (D-MA). It reflects their view that foreigners are entitled to easy access to the United States because “white supremacy” in the U.S. is responsible for the many ills in the world.
The U.S. must provide Special Immigrant Visas to many Afghans who fought alongside the U.S. military and must invite many more into the P-2 refugee program, the progressives say:
US Marines and Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers carry flags during a handover ceremony at Leatherneck Camp in Lashkar Gah in the Afghan province of Helmand on April 29, 2017. US Marines returned to Afghanistan’s volatile Helmand April 29, where American troops faced heated fighting until NATO’s combat mission ended in 2014, as embattled Afghan security forces struggle to beat back the resurgent Taliban. The deployment of some 300 Marines to the poppy-growing southern province came one day after the militants announced the launch of their ‘spring offensive’, and as the Trump administration seeks to craft a new strategy in Afghanistan (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images).
Also, “Humanitarian parole must … be extended to other vulnerable groups in Afghanistan, including women’s rights activists, human rights defenders, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and journalists,” the letter, again, which does not set an upper limit on the inflow of Afghan migrants, states.
The letter also urges Biden to triple the inflow of refugees in 2022, long after the U.S. will have left Afghanistan: “We urge you to increase the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program cap to no less than 200,000 when you issue your Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 before October 1st.”
The legislators also say Biden must import more migrants to counter the public’s opposition to migration:
The urgent need to double down on our efforts to welcome and protect refugees is evidenced by the racist, virulent anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment that exploded over the last decade — often as a result of U.S.-fueled wars — and was further heightened under the last administration and now with the evacuations occurring in Afghanistan.
Biden recognizes the unpopularity of the mass migration that his pro-migration deputies, such as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, are executing. “The estimate we’re giving is somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 folks total, counting their families,” Biden told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos on August 19.
The public’s opposition to reckless migration is rational because migration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents, It also curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture:
Job seekers fill out paperwork during the HireLive Career Fair on November 12, 2015 in San Francisco, California. The national unemployment rate stands at 5 percent (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images).
Americans in Ocasio-Cortez’s New York district already pay a high price because of immigration. For example, roughly 45 percent of the residents are immigrants, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates they must earn almost $44 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the district:
The progressive push for more Afghan migrants is happening even as Biden’s Department of Homeland Security continues to extract migrants across the Mexican border for use in the U.S. economy as consumers, workers, and renters. The border inflow will likely exceed 800,000 in 2021, including illegals who sneak across the border and, perhaps, 500,000 job-seeking migrants.
This southern inflow is in addition to the inflow of legal immigrants — about 730,000 — and also the inflow of visa workers, such as H-1B foreign graduates who are imported to exclude American graduates from many white-collar jobs.
The total 2021 inflow of migrants and legal immigrants is on track to deliver almost 1.6 million people into American society — or roughly one migrant for every two American births in 2020 — even though many Americans are poor, unemployed, out of the workforce, or are sidelined by poverty, drugs, and degraded K-12 education programs.
Yet Biden’s progressive deputies are rushing to import Afghans, usually before they have been vetted, and often, when they do not meet the criteria for a “Special Immigrant Visa.”
For example, Biden’s deputies are also rubber-stamping migrants for “humanitarian parole,” even though the provision was intended for use “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to federal law.
AFP reported August 27 from Germany about one Afghan who was allowed into the U.S. because his brother lives in California:
At an improvised departure lounge set up in a hangar, other families are waiting their turn for the planes that will take them to Dulles airport near Washington DC.
Mohammed Kassim says he had to flee because “the Taliban told me ‘I will kill you’.”
“Why? Why because my brother is in USA,” says Kassim, whose brother lives in San Diego.
Another Afghan, Rasool, 27, says he feels “excellent” because he was going to the United States where he could have a “good education and a safe life”.
Yahoo.com reported August 27 about a woman who got a visa within one day:
Aina hasn’t slept in weeks, staring at her WhatsApp messages every night waiting to hear from her family members who are hiding in Kabul, Afghanistan.
A 19-year-old Afghan student studying in Canada, Aina is particularly worried about her mother, a women’s rights activist who has worked with an American nongovernmental organization teaching Afghan women literacy. Her mother has been harassed and beaten in the past because of her work advocating for women, and the family has received death threats. The family fears for their lives if they stay under Taliban rule.
…
Aina shared her fears with a teaching assistant, an American who reached out to her after closely following the developments in Afghanistan. The teaching assistant discovered Aina’s family might be eligible for a visa to come to the U.S. because of her mother’s employment with an American nongovernmental organization and work as an advocate for women’s rights. They filled out the paperwork and were awarded visas just 24 hours later.
The progressives’ planned mass migration is unpopular. For example, 52 percent of Americans oppose the resettlement of more than 50,000 Afghans in the United States, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey. Only 26 percent favor an inflow of more than 50,000, according to the August 18-19 survey of 1,000 likely voters.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This public opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and it recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to one another.