No Longer Morally Obligated: A Critical Overview of the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Program

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 06. Immigration bureaucracies

Abstract

Nearly 180,000 Afghan nationals have been admitted into the United States between 2009–2025 under the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program–a program designed to provide a legal immigration pathway into the US for the Afghan “allies” who put their lives at risk to work as military interpreters and other civilian workers for the US government. Drawing explicitly on moral frameworks and humanitarian logics, the US Department of State (DoS) extended preferential entry into the country to those whose “persecution could be traced directly to their association with the American forces or other allied organizations” (Haas and Shuman 2019:15) in Afghanistan. However, the US government’s acknowledgement of its obligation to these Afghan allies waned as frameworks of humanitarianism were replaced recently with ones of securitization, effectively leading to the end of the SIV program on December 31, 2025. The pathway that had once served to account for the significant risk that came with working as translators, interpreters, cooks, intermediaries, and security guards for the US forces in Afghanistan was closed. This article focuses on this shift in rhetoric, using comparative-historical methods to trace the legislative history of the Afghan SIV program. I aim to construct a causal graph and an event-history map to develop an explanatory hypothesis for how the program ended in the manner it did. In doing so, I make the case that the US government’s changing orientation towards its Afghan allies reflects the evolution of its immigration policies more broadly.

Author

• Durana Saydee, University of California-Los Angeles