COLLABORATION — On Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced an update to the application process: Immigrants applying for legal permanent residence, or green cards, will now be able to apply for their Social Security number at the same time to avoid a dual process, reports Daniel Shoer Roth of the Miami Herald. "Eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy and optimizing collaboration across public-serving agencies is a key priority for this agency and the Biden-Harris administration," said newly appointed USCIS director Ur M. Jaddou. 

SAVING AFGHANS — For The New Yorker, Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the story of two American Foreign Service officers who "risked their careers to save Vietnamese imperiled by a slow-moving bureaucracy" in 1975, and how the Biden administration could save tens of thousands of Afghan allies now facing a similar situation. Johnson points back to a recommendation from a 2010 testimony: "the Guam Option, using military planes to evacuate high-priority individuals, could save lives without jeopardizing security." The administration is still figuring out how to carry out Operation Allies Refuge — or better yet, how to vastly expand its operations to include more Afghans. The longer these logistical questions go unanswered, Johnson writes, the more the evacuation effort "veers into the terrain of a public-relations stunt: a few planes taxiing in front of cameras before taking off with a lucky few Afghans while the rest are left to fend for themselves." 

'PANDEMIC OF THE UNVACCINATED' — "Is this the pandemic of the migrants? No. This is the pandemic of the unvaccinated," said Dr. Ivan Melendez, chief medical advisor for the Hidalgo County Medical Authority in an Aug. 4 news conference, per Dianne Solis and Allie Morris at The Dallas Morning News. In an explainer debunking the myth that migration is fueling a COVID–19 surge, Solis and Morris point out that except for those expelled under Title 42 restrictions, all migrants get tested for COVID-19, and Border Patrol provides them with masks "the moment they are taken into custody," per an agency spokesperson. "It is professionally irresponsible to equate crossing the border with having disease," said John Mckiernan-González, a history professor at Texas State University. Regardless of its truthfulness, this myth is a powerful tool for anti-immigrant politicians — including the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, who has used Facebook ads to "raise money by associating migrants with the surge of coronavirus infections in the southern United States," as The Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker writes.