Chaos replaces honor in visa system

A system designed to honor America’s debt to Iraqis and Afghans who risk their lives to support us has evolved into a mess of contradictory policies imperiling American honor. 

The Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program was initially designed to give interpreters and a few other American employees special status as U.S. immigrants.  I have enormous sympathy for these  beneficiaries of the SIV program.  I have known some who have been wounded serving alongside soldiers and Marines in the field in Afghanistan and embassy employees in Iraq whose families were threatened because the employee worked with us.  In Afghanistan, many interpreters have been identified by terrorists and dare not return to their families.  We have a responsibility to help such people to safety in the United States.  Despite improvements, however, authorizing such visas remains shamefully behind demand.  As the program, now actually three separate laws, has been reauthorized over the years it has been expanded to include those in Iraq and Afghanistan who have served one year with the U.S. government, mostly in our embassies and with our military in office functions. This program expansion is a badly mistaken policy.

{mosads}As the laws are applied, there is a genuine issue of American security that has to be considered, and which adds considerably to the delay in processing applications.  The SIV program is well known in Afghanistan and Iraq and could be a way for terrorists to gain entry to the United States.  Preventing that requires a high level of security checking.  Even our debt of honor does not require risks to the homeland. 

But this has been an excuse for a lamentably slow process. The State Department has fulfilled its commitment to accelerate processing.  Up until 2013 thousands of visas went unused because of slow processing.  Speed has picked up.  According to embassy Kabul the average waiting time has been cut considerably, but much of the eight-month existing delay is spent waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to do its job.  Proper security checks are needed but this has become an excuse for a constipated bureaucratic process.  Much of the delay is simply waiting for agencies to respond to routine information requests that are not given priority, something that should not be the case when lives are at risk.

There is another concern:  the number of visas authorized will, according to the embassy’s fact sheet, ”likely be exhausted well ahead of the current program deadline of March 31, 2017.”  Congress has only authorized 4,000 a year and that is about what current embassy staffing can handle.

The problem is made worse by the decision to make everyone who has served for a year in any capacity eligible for a visa.  This is a pernicious decision.  First, employees of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, a post I once led and have visited numerous times since my retirement, are not in particularly greater danger than the rest of their countrymen as a result of their employment.  Second, allowing departure after one year magnifies the problem of the short tour we already have for American employees.  Thirdly, the embassy is now afflicted with some local staff whose sole reason for working is to gain a visa.  Many of them receive their SIVs then seek to return to Afghanistan as contractors.  Having much of the embassy’s local staff leave every year to the U.S. deprives the embassy of its last repository of longer term institutional knowledge or memory; the equivalent to a yearly institutional frontal lobotomy. 

Furthermore, it contradicts our interest in stabilizing Afghanistan.  That is still possible.  There is a new government.  Afghan security forces that are holding their own despite heavy fighting and serious casualties.  America is still putting American civilian and military personnel at risk to achieve an Afghanistan that will not again become a base for terrorism.  But to succeed Afghanistan desperately needs its educated man-power to run a more efficient government.  The U.S. has spent large amounts educating such personnel only to offer them now a fast track out of the country.  This directly contradicts our larger strategic purposes.

Those serving in combat or under real threat have a claim in honor to early U.S. visas.  The bulk of U.S. government’s Afghan employees should have their eligibility for a U.S. immigrant visa extended to a significantly longer time: five years or more.  This would rationalize the policy and reduce the numbers having to be processed.  At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security needs to improve its performance; providing proper security checks and safety to those who have fought with us should not be beyond its capacity and should be a top priority now.

Neumann served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (2005-2007), Bahrain (2001-2004) and Algeria (1994-1997). He is currently president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.