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September 16, 2021
Dear John xxxxxx,
By month’s end, the U.S. government anticipates that it will have evacuated about 65,000 Afghans to the United States, with about 30,000 more expected to arrive over the next 12 months. Yet not all of these arrivals will have the same legal status, with important implications for their access to benefits and services as well as permanent residency.
As analysts Mark Greenberg, Celia Reynolds, and Essey Workie note in a new commentary, “Understanding these different statuses and the consequences for eligibility for assistance will be useful as communities plan to support the resettlement of arriving Afghans.”
Afghan arrivals fall largely in one of the following groups: Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) recipients, refugees, SQ/SI parolees (SIV applicants who are pending approval), and humanitarian parolees.
Humanitarian parolees, who will likely be the largest group of Afghan arrivals, have more limited access to some benefits and services than these other groups, and do not have a direct path to a green card. The Biden administration is calling on Congress to make all arriving Afghan parolees eligible for benefits and services to the same extent as refugees. While doing so would significantly improve the situation for humanitarian parolees, the authors note that in any case it will be important for other actors also to get involved.
“Helping these families settle and become part of their new communities will call for partnerships across governments, non-governmental organizations, businesses, Afghan diaspora groups, faith-based groups, schools, health care providers, and community volunteers,” the authors write.
The commentary is available here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/afghan-evacuees-different-statuses-different-benefits.
Best regards,
Michelle Mittelstadt
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
Migration Policy Institute
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The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development, and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national, and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org.
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