What's in the Defense Authorization Act? All sorts of things you don't want to know about. Like this.
The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee approved 4,000 more visas for Afghans who worked for U.S. forces as interpreters or support staff on Wednesday, an effort to preserve a program that had been at risk of shutting down.
The committee included the additional visas in its version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a must-pass piece of legislation that sets priorities for the Department of Defense budget for fiscal 2018, which will be about $650 billion.
Bipartisan pushes by U.S. lawmakers this year for more SIV visas have come against the backdrop of efforts by the Trump administration to clamp down on immigration from majority-Muslim countries.
In March, the U.S. embassy in Kabul said it had stopped scheduling interviews for SIV applicants because it had nearly run out of visas, but lawmakers included 2,500 more in a spending bill in April to preserve the program.
You can think McCain for this one.
The real arguments for this one (not the usual "they're heroes who risked their lives for us" routine) amount to paying them for their services in rather expensive coin. The actual payments will be made by the taxpayers of wherever they end up. And those payments will go on for decades in the form of all sorts of social services. And that's the best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that we've had serious crimes committed by SIV visa recipients already. And Afghanistan has normalized attacks by our "allies" on US personnel.
The boilerplate language about "rigorous vetting process" is a farce. And this addition to the NDAA undermines our national security.
