“America,” wrote novelist Thomas Wolfe, “is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”
We’re having more than our share of trouble doing the fundamentally right things, let alone achieving miracles. But a properly bipartisan bill pending before Congress would at least do the fundamentally right thing for tens of thousands of Afghans, most of them women and children, whose families risked their lives helping us confront al-Qaida and the Taliban, and who now depend on us to offer them the permanent safety they deserve.
In the 20 years following Sept. 11, 2001, untold numbers of Afghans chose to help American forces attempt to ensure that the kind of mass murder visited upon us when planes smashed into lower Manhattan never happened again. They were drivers, interpreters, soldiers, nurses, social workers, cooks, construction workers and more, and they enlisted alongside our own men and women serving us in far-off Afghanistan as we tried to rid that country of a brutally repressive regime, one that threatened our own security. They wanted to believe in America, and they did believe in it, and they trusted that in return for having America’s back, America would have theirs.
When the U.S. military hastily departed Afghanistan in 2021, these families faced deadly retribution by the Taliban. About 80,000 Afghans who had risked their lives on our behalf were urgently evacuated, transferred first to other countries where American military personnel screened and vetted them. They were then flown to the United States for further screening and then resettled in communities across the country.
But with a big and painful catch. Under current law, they are only permitted to stay here temporarily. Whether and when they will be forced to leave America and are left to their own meager devices is entirely up in the air, which means that they live not only in legal limbo, but under a very frightening cloud.
In a rare display of bipartisan problem-solving, congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle came to the following sensible conclusion: No. 1, this can’t be right. No. 2, this has to be fixed. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, along with colleagues from both houses of Congress, have fashioned the Afghan Adjustment Act as a means of providing permanent status here for eligible Afghans who have passed screening measures and who pass additional ones. Backed by a long list of veterans organizations with particular sensitivity to what Afghans temporarily resettled or still living in Afghanistan have given to our country, the Act ensures that everyone permitted to stay here first undergoes multiple levels of rigorous scrutiny and then streamlines a path for them to start new lives in the country for which they risked their old ones.
The one impediment to the bill’s passage is the effort by some to link relief to the Afghans — whose right to it merits little disagreement — to a comprehensive solution to our immigration problems — about which there is nothing but disagreement. At best, holding the Afghans hostage to the illusory hope for broad agreement on immigration anytime soon makes the perfect the enemy of the good. At worst it is cruel to those who we know deserve better.
Klobuchar, who has spearheaded the Act, has been particularly dogged about it. “It’s about a covenant,” she said on the Senate floor in late July. “A covenant that we have made and we must keep to those who stand with us on the battlefield. This bill does right by Afghans who worked alongside our troops, and shows the world that the United States of America, when we make a promise, we keep it.”
As with virtually all of Americans’ forebears, the Afghans no doubt regard it as miraculous that they have made it to this fabulous country. Now it is up to us to do the right thing by them.
