In the summer of 2021, amid the Biden administration’s shameful and bloody withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section— through a series of opinion pieces and editorials—strongly pushed for the resettlement of Afghan interpreters, cooperating personnel, and their family members to the United States. The editorial board correctly and passionately reminded its readers that many Afghans, who were profoundly helpful to American forces, risked imminent death upon American withdrawal. The Taliban was apparently eager to exact revenge on those who had collaborated with its enemy. As such, it was not difficult to empathize with the desire to prioritize rescuing these allies, particularly when reading Special Forces veteran Matt Watters’s June 2021 piece and its vivid descriptions of how Shafo, his team’s interpreter, saved American lives by alerting them to a bomb concealed under bricks on an Afghan street.
In an August 19, 2021 editorial aimed at conservatives and published four days after the Fall of Kabul, the Wall Street Journal editorial board accused many on the Right of being indifferent to the plight of Afghans seeking evacuation to the United States. In addition to arguing that the Republican Party ought to continue to take “pride in welcoming exiles from authoritarian lands,” the editorial predicted that resettled Afghans would readily assimilate and become productive Americans, like many Vietnamese refugees who fled after the Fall of Saigon. The editorial did offer lip service to the possible downsides of the mass resettlement of Afghan allies and their family members, including when it comes to terrorism, but largely dismissed the validity of such concerns: “They aren’t Muslim extremists; they are fleeing Muslim extremists. The thousands of Afghans who already made it to the U.S. through the SIV (Special Immigrant Visa) program haven’t always had an easy time, but they haven’t caused havoc.” Finally, the editorial also asserted that since Europe took in millions of unvetted foreigners during the 2014-15 migrant surge, why would Americans worry about fewer than 100,000 new arrivals?
This was the righthink position at the time, of course, and the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans joined unanimous Democratic support for the ALLIES Act, a House bill that sought to expand the number of SIVs available to Afghan interpreters and supporters of the American war effort there, as well as simplify the application process. (The 16 House Republicans who opposed the bill were called out one by one for public shaming by the Wall Street Journal.) Unsurprisingly, the editorial boards of left-leaning publications such as the New York Times and theWashington Post similarly urged the resettlement of Afghan interpreters.
The then White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, assured us “that no one is coming into the United States of America who has not been through a thorough screening and background check process.” In total, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, would oversee the paroling of 73,566 Afghans into the United States between July of 2021 and March of the following year through what was called Operation Allies Welcome. Only five evacuees had their parole terminated during that period. Later, in conjunction with the subsequent Operation Enduring Welcome, a total of nearly 200,000 Afghans were resettled in the United States.
I recall being in Margate, New Jersey enjoying a restful August holiday by the ocean as this debate was unfolding, and I shuddered, recalling how much Europe has suffered from its noble intentions to help Muslims fleeing violence or persecution in the Middle East. And already, in 2021, reports were emerging of the failure of many Muslim immigrants to assimilate to the United States, particularly in Michigan and Minnesota. This would become glaringly obvious in the years that followed, particularly when seeing the appalling reactions to the October 7th attacks in places like Dearborn, Michigan, as well as the further recent anti-Americanism emanating from that same Michigan town.
Then, this year, on the day before Thanksgiving, the day so many Americans consider their favourite holiday of the year, a 29-year-old man rounded a Washington, D.C. corner, allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and opened fire with his revolver on two members of the West Virginia National Guard patrolling the nation’s capital. According to reports, the attacker, later identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, drove 3,000 miles from the West Coast, leaving behind his wife and five children to commit this despicable act of terrorism. One guardsman, Andrew Wolfe, is still fighting for his life, and the other, 20-year-old Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, passed away on Thanksgiving Day.
As confirmed by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Lakanwal was paroled into the United States in September of 2021 via President Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome program, an effort that was criticized by those involved for its abject failure properly to vet those being brought to the United States. He was also crucially granted his asylum status in April of this year, after President Donald Trump had taken office, underscoring the long-standing frustration that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been culpable in the influx of far, far too many foreigners into the United States. (President Trump has countered that the Biden administration’s fast-tracking of Lakanwal’s asylum application would have been difficult to halt.)
In remarks delivered the evening of the attack, President Donald Trump decried the shooting as “an act of evil, an act of hatred, and an act of terror” before committing to “re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden.” Like everything else under the Biden administration, the twin elements of incompetence and a desire to bring as many foreigners into the United States as voters could possibly stomach were present. And what many Republicans and ordinary Americans initially considered a well-intentioned effort to spare the lives of those in immediate danger due to having helped American soldiers became a bureaucratic disaster, with tens of thousands of improperly vetted Afghans pouring into the United States. Then, it bears mentioning: Even those that might have been vetted perfectly may still hold or develop views that are hostile to the United States or Western culture more broadly.
Now, to be sure, the vast majority of violent crimes in the United States are committed by perpetrators who are not from Afghanistan. With that said, however, on November 29th, the Department of Homeland Security released a chilling list of crimes committed by Afghans allowed into the United States in the aftermath of the 2021 withdrawal, from a pair of Afghan nationals who planned an Election Day 2024 Oklahoma City terrorist attack to an Afghan man placed in Montana who “was charged with the rape of a teenage girl in a Missoula motel room.” This is paired with other allegations of the underreporting of crimes, particularly of a sexual nature, allegedly committed by resettled Afghans, and then it was announced that another Afghan brought to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome was arrested in Thanksgiving week for threatening to carry out a bombing in Texas. Despite all of this, less than 48 hours after the Washington D.C. shooting and less than 24 hours after Beckstrom’s death, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board was back at it: continuing to defend the resettlement of Afghans in the United States.
While I also eschew the idea of collective punishment and favour a solution that spares Afghan allies from violence at the hands of the Taliban, the United States must recall the danger that Islamic extremism poses. I was growing up in metro New York on September 11th and though I was too young to attend, I can recall my father coming home from a funeral for a friend of a friend who died in the towers; how Bruce Springsteen had addressed the congregation by video message because the deceased had been among his most dedicated fans; but then how broken the family remained once the ceremonies ceased and the casket was closed. Every time I see Atocha Train Station in Madrid and its striking glass-and-iron facade, I think of the mangled train cars and the nearly 200 people left dead in the 2004 bombings. Before Atocha, there was Lockerbie, where a high school teacher of mine lost his brother; the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; and the 2005 London transit bombings. And now as Christmastime approaches, one braces oneself to hear about the next Christmas market attack in Germany or France. This is why a country must not throw open its borders as has happened time and again – yes, during the Biden administration, but also under Republican presidents.
Late Thanksgiving night, after it had been announced that Beckstrom succumbed to her wounds, President Trump took to Truth Social for among the most strongly worded of his posts to date. Before declaring that “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” the President indicated that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquillity, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.” The courts will no doubt intervene; bureaucratic inertia will surely continue; and, given the last few decades of American history and the fulfilment of future President Joe Biden’s 2015 promise of “an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop,” colour me sceptical of any substantive changes to the United States’ legal immigration problem. But, in the wake of Beckstrom’s death, this is the most emphatic that either an American president or much of the American public has been in calling for an end to an immigration policy that has so consistently deprioritized Americans.
