President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan disaster has endangered the lives of thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. But his bungling of security at the southern border will make it much harder to help tens of thousands more Afghans.
At least eight Afghans have died at the Kabul airport this week, as tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and Afghans try to flee the victorious Taliban. Amid the chaos and violence, the Taliban have set up checkpoints looking for Americans and European allies, reportedly beating women and children who fail to comply.
There are an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens who are still stuck in Afghanistan, and another 20,000 Afghan interpreters and others who helped the war effort and will qualify for special immigrant visas already approved by Congress.
If Biden had not foolishly surrendered Bagram Airfield months ago, it would have been much easier to get these people to safety. And hopefully, each and every one of these people will escape Afghanistan alive. But they are not the only ones seeking to leave.
Between 2015 and 2020, almost 600,000 Afghans requested asylum in the European Union. Another 400,000 Afghans have been forced to leave their homes since fighting began this year. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that 30,000 refugees are leaving Afghanistan on a weekly basis.
Where will all these Afghans go?
After more than a million migrants fled to Europe from Syria in 2015, even formerly generous countries such as Germany became wary of taking in more refugees. “We cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in,” Angela Merkel said of Afghan refugees earlier this year.
Ideally, the United States would be a good destination for refugees fleeing a despotic and violent regime known for executing dissenters. But after years of Democrats encouraging abuse of our asylum system by those lacking any legitimate claim, the public feels taken advantage of.
Migrants wishing to qualify for asylum in the U.S. must show they are being persecuted in their home country based on five specific criteria: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Afghans fleeing Afghanistan because the Taliban will kill them for not following Sharia law would seem to fit easily into either the “religion” or “political opinion” category.
But since 2014, the U.S. southern border has been overrun with migrants making dubious asylum claims that do not fit any of these categories. Read any story about the new border crisis that Biden has caused, and you’ll hear that some combination of poverty, crime, violence, and even climate change are the reasons migrants are coming to the U.S. These may be good reasons for someone to try and leave their home country, but they are not legal grounds for asylum in the U.S.
And yet since 2014, hundreds of thousands of migrants have been allowed to enter and live in the U.S. while their clearly bogus asylum claims are litigated. Few of these migrants are ever granted asylum protection, but it is still a big win for them because fewer still are ever found and deported. Instead, the vast majority never finish their case in court and then live illegally in the U.S., waiting for the next amnesty from Democrats in Congress. No wonder the public has lost confidence in the asylum system.
If President Biden wants to help the Afghan people fleeing for their lives from the Taliban, his first order of business should be to restore order to Kabul airport and possibly even retake Bagram Airfield. But here at home, he could significantly improve support for taking in more Afghan refugees by ending the “catch and release” policies on the southern border that have created the current crisis.
