Fix and Expand the Interpreter Visa Program – By Doug Livermore (Defense One) / Aug 29, 2022
The 2006 Special Immigrant Visa program, which helps Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and their families, desperately needs an overhaul and expansion to cover U.S. helpers elsewhere.
Back in 2006, Congress recognized that Iraqis and Afghan nationals who help U.S. forces in their countries deserve swift resettlement in the United States after they wind down their crucial and dangerous efforts. But resettlement has often been anything but swift—certainly not fast enough to help thousands of Afghans left behind when U.S. forces withdrew last year. Nor does the program help those who are helping U.S. forces fight terror groups in other countries. It is time for lawmakers to fix these problems.
Since the Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, program became law in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act, it has helped roughly 100,000 Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and members of their immediate families become lawful permanent residents of the United States. The law helps these people skip the years-long line for permission to enter our country and obtain the green card that allows them to stay and work here.
But the law, as the Congressional Research Service put it last year, has placed hard limits on the number of such visas and imposed deadlines for processing applications and doing security screening that the U.S. government has often been unable to meet.
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