It was heartening when the Biden administration announced a month ago that it would admit up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s blood-drenched assault on Ukraine. Unfortunately, U.S officials had no plan in place to make good on that promise, certainly not in a timely way. The galling disconnect between President Biden’s ringing words and the reality facing desperate Ukrainians trying to make their way here is an embarrassment to this country.
So far, Biden’s action on Ukrainian refugees hasn’t matched his words
Even as the White House pledges to formulate an “expedited process” by which Ukrainians fleeing the war may seek to enter the United States, in real life there are no processes or procedures that would permit them to do so. Refugees who have sought visas at U.S. consulates in Europe have been refused. And under normal refugee protocols, it would take years to enter the country.
Ukrainians don’t have years to wait. They are streaming out of their country in staggering numbers in the face of Russia’s assault. Roughly 3 million refugees had fled Ukraine by March 24, when Mr. Biden said we would welcome as many as 100,000. Today there are nearly 5 million. Most are women, children and the elderly. And, as Moscow’s forces launch a new offensive in eastern Ukraine, that is surely not the end of what has become one of the world’s biggest and fastest refugee outflows since World War II.
The upshot of Washington’s foot-dragging is desperation and massive confusion. Ukrainians are allowed to enter Mexico without visas, and a few thousand who have done so managed to make their way to the U.S. border, where many were granted admission with humanitarian “parole.” Typically, that may give them renewable permission to stay and work in this country for a year or two.
But a willy-nilly approach to waving in Ukrainians who somehow presented themselves at the border is no substitute for a systematic procedure to resettle refugees already uprooted and, in many cases, traumatized by war.
In fact, the decision to admit Ukrainian refugees, and the refugees themselves, are running headlong into U.S. immigration dysfunction. Those refugees who do eventually make it here and want to apply for asylum will face a backlog of 1.7 million cases in the immigration courts, where cases now face an average wait time of more than five years. And the nation’s infrastructure for resettling refugees was gutted by the Trump administration, whose distaste for immigrants generally was manifest. That means many Ukrainians who make it here will grapple with a chaotic non-system for finding a job, learning English and navigating a new life in an unfamiliar community.
In announcing that the United States would accept Ukrainian refugees, Mr. Biden correctly presented the decision as reflecting Washington’s commitment to leadership in concert with Western European countries that have borne the brunt of the refugee explosion. “This is not something that Poland or Romania or Germany should carry on their own,” he said. The president’s framing was correct, but the follow-through so far has been woefully lacking.
Source: WP
