The way the Congress throws our money around and given that an unbelievable $3.5 trillion is on the table with the infrastructure bill, it would be easy to overlook the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act passed yesterday in the House and Senate and signed into law by Biden. Yet that bill contains $6.4 billion in extended funding for the resettlement in the United States of at least 95,000 Afghans, including funding to cover benefits for Afghans not eligible for refugee status but merely brought here under what’s called “humanitarian parole.”
Humanitarian Parole is the scheme the administration opted to employ when it realized back in August that all those Afghanis they wanted to import couldn’t qualify under the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program or for Priority-2 (P2) refugee status. The program is essentially a detour around the law requiring visas for foreign nationals. So when is an undocumented alien not illegal? When he’s an humanitarian parolee.
Since the law does not provide benefits for such people, Congress needed to up and give them some. Which it did yesterday, although Pew Research is showing that most Americans are already uncomfortable with the Afghan flood. What’s more, Pew says 63 percent of Republicans oppose the Afghan resettlement outright.
That didn’t stop 34 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans from voting with the Democrats on the giveaway, however. (For a complete list, see Breitbart News.)
The benefits thus provided for will include welfare, housing assistance, medical coverage, and state-issued driver’s licenses. That last provision in particular aroused the attention of Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, who wrote on CIS.org:
Section 202(b)(2)(C) of the REAL ID Act requires states to ensure that applicants for driver’s licenses have lawful status in the United States (including citizenship or a green card). Section 2502 in the CR would explicitly waive that requirement — not for you, or for those green card holders — but rather exclusively for paroled Afghan nationals. [Emphasis added.]
Yet again, we find this administration–and the Congress–favoring the non-citizen over the citizen.
And finally, that 95,000 figure mentioned above is almost surely not the final number of Afghan importees, as the new bill extends Afghan resettlement to September 2022 and beyond for relatives of those currently being resettled. The ultimate number brought in could dwarf 100K.
As Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who opposed the bill, said yesterday:
I have no choice but to oppose this hazardous bill from the Democrats. It opens the U.S. to illimitable refugee resettlement from Afghanistan with zero vetting, putting our security at even more preponderant peril. [Emphasis added.]
For more, see Breitbart News.