Visas for Afghani Interpreters Continue

WaPo reports that Congress struck a deal this week to “authorize an additional 1,500 special immigrant visas (SIV) for Afghans who helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and extend the program through 2017” despite “objections of lawmakers skeptical of the program.”

Right now I’m actually working on a new paper exploring why it is that the United States is not an intelligence superpower. Here we are, with an incredibly diverse immigrant population coming from more than 200 countries around the world. And yet our intelligence services consistently fail in their objective to understand the world as it is. That failure, more often than not, stems from our inability to understand the language and culture of foreign nations whose interests are inimical to our own.

We should we using immigration law to further national security interests. And the Afghani interpreter program is precisely the type of finely-tuned effort to use immigration law we need to strengthen intelligence gathering and analysis. The fact that it is opposed by legislators is appalingly short-sighted.

And that’s not even taking into consideration the human costs of failing to care for our interpreters. I’ll let John Oliver bring that second point home.

-KitJ