For Afghan evacuees in Philly and elsewhere, a looming unemployment crisis

Cathryn Miller-Wilson has worked in immigration long enough to know when a crisis is walking toward her.

And right now the director of HIAS Pennsylvania hears the sound of moving feet — a slow-motion calamity that could dramatically affect the lives of some 76,000 Afghan evacuees who were brought to the United States when their country fell to the Taliban in August 2021.

Those newcomers — including about 800 who were resettled in the Philadelphia area — face the prospect of mass unemployment, with their work authorizations set to expire this summer. They have found work across industries, as cashiers, in warehouses, even helping fellow evacuees in immigration agencies.

“This is a huge, looming crisis,” said Miller-Wilson, whose agency supports low-income immigrants in building new lives. “Nobody seems to be doing anything about it.”

If August seems distant, six months away, she said, then consider the glacial pace of the nation’s immigration apparatus. For Afghan war allies, the problem lies in how the Biden administration brought them and their families into the country.

Politicians, government officials, and news reporters commonly describe the evacuees as “refugees.” While they fit the U.N. definition — someone who crossed an international border to escape violence or crisis in their homeland — almost none are legally designated as refugees.

That’s a specific immigration status, one that comes with benefits and privileges, including the ability to live here permanently and to seek U.S. citizenship.

Instead, almost all the Afghans were admitted under what’s called humanitarian parole, which is a permission to enter the country, not an immigration status. It’s temporary. It provides no automatic path to permanent residency or citizenship.

Instead, Congress tied Afghans’ permission to work to their humanitarian parole. The idea was that evacuees would apply for asylum, and that designation would confer the right to live and work in the United States and to seek citizenship.

But applications for asylum have exploded — a record 1.6 million cases as of December 2022, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The wait time for a typical asylum case to be heard is nearly five years.

Every Afghan client of HIAS Pennsylvania has filed for asylum, and none of the 26 has received a ruling, Miller-Wilson said.

Hili Chakhansuri knows what that’s like for fellow evacuees. The former Afghanistan government official and diplomat spent months living with thousands of other arrivals in South Jersey at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, one of the military bases where newcomers were temporarily housed.

She received asylum, she said, after being able to enlist the help of an immigration attorney. But she’s heard from more than a hundred Afghans around the country who have no asylum and now face the expiration of their parole and work permits.

“They are confused and concerned about what to do,” she said.

In Afghanistan, Chakhansuri worked as an officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, putting her at risk of harm from the Taliban. Last year she relocated to Los Angeles, married, and gave birth to a baby boy. She and her husband started the Salaam Family Foundation to teach English online to Afghan girls in Afghanistan, where they are barred from education.

She tries to help other Afghan evacuees, whose skills can vary widely. Many know little English and don’t have money to hire immigration lawyers. Even with money, figuring out the application system can be daunting.

“Most of these refugees are not familiar about how to file asylum or hire attorneys,” she said, “and the fees for attorneys are high.”

The Philadelphia region stood at the center of what was the largest evacuation since the Vietnam War, undertaken as Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Philadelphia International Airport served as the nation’s main arrival point, welcoming more than 30,000 Afghans. About 11,000 lived on the grounds of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

Resettlements roughly doubled the size of the local Afghan community to 1,500 people, many of whom live near family or friends in Northeast Philadelphia.

“We are so concerned that if their status expires, they’ll lose their jobs,” said Mustafa Babak, executive director of the Afghan American Foundation, a national advocacy-and-research organization. “It will undo so much work by the American people and the private sector in the past year and a half.”

The foundation is pushing for extensions on employment and immigration parole, to buy time to find permanent fixes, he said. It needs more help from the Biden administration for that to happen.

“Afghans were brought here,” Babak said. “There has to be clarity and intentional effort to show that the administration cares about them. That has been missing largely.”

It goes the other way too, he said. Keeping people employed means they contribute to their communities and to the economy.

The International Rescue Committee estimated that newly arrived Afghans paid more than $189 million in taxes in their first year of employment, working in industries that include retail trade, food services, manufacturing, and warehousing.

Their skills run the gamut. Some speak excellent English, having served as translators for U.S. forces.

Some hold multiple college degrees, while others never went to school. Many are traumatized, and nearly everyone left family members behind.

All were promised expedited asylum. And now they need help.

“The government thought everyone would have asylum by the time the two years is up,” and now that’s not happening, Miller-Wilson said. “It’s a real crisis.”