How animal shelters are coping with a crisis of abandoned cats and dogs.
Lonely and stuck at home, millions of Americans turned to animals for comfort in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, adopting and fostering cats and dogs from shelters at record rates. Videos of empty animal shelters went viral; Wired called it “the feel-good pandemic story you need right now.”
“It was a really fun time to be in animal welfare,” said Bobby Mann, chief programs officer of the Humane Rescue Alliance, the largest animal shelter in the Washington, DC, metro area. “We did absolutely see an uptick in adoptions.”
But starting in 2021, shelters began filling back up as there were more animals entering than leaving, and now many are packed to the brim. From Rhode Island to Seattle and everywhere in between, shelters are reporting they’re at capacity, forcing an increase in the number of dogs killed due to space constraints. Earlier this year, almost half of shelters surveyed reported an increase in euthanized dogs, while only 10 percent reported a decrease.
“Perfectly adoptable dogs are losing their lives and it is a crisis,” said one municipal shelter that was surveyed. “We need volunteers, fosters, and adopters.”
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“By and large, shelters are screaming from the rooftops that they’ve been in crisis for a while, and it’s not letting up,” said Stephanie Filer, executive director of Shelter Animals Count, an organization that collects and publishes data from thousands of animal shelters and conducted the euthanasia survey. The group predicts the situation will continue to worsen this year.
The trend threatens the immense progress that animal shelters have made to reduce the number of animals put down since the 1970s, when 13.5 million of the 65 million dogs and cats in the US — more than one-fifth — were euthanized. In 2019, less than a million dogs and cats, about 0.7 percent of the country’s 135 million, were put down.
It’s one thing for, say, Peloton bikes to pile up in some warehouse as Americans return to normalcy and consumer demand rebalances in response. But when the product is an animal — and make no mistake, we treat animals as products — the rebalance of demand and supply can result in mass suffering, as shelters are forced to make the hard choice between packing more and more animals together in crowded, noisy environments, euthanizing them, or turning them away.
What’s driving America’s animal shelter crisis?
The state of animal shelters can largely be tracked by a simple metric: how many animals are entering shelters versus how many are leaving, known as the population gap. An animal can be taken into a shelter because they were picked up as a stray (the most common reason), surrendered by their owner, or rescued from a cruelty case or puppy mill. Animals leave shelters when they’re found by their owners, adopted, transferred to another shelter, or euthanized (almost 15 percent of cases in 2019).
In 2020, when people were adopting shelter animals at record rates, 2 percent more animals left shelters than came in over the course of the year, according to Shelter Animals Count. But in 2021, that figure reversed — 2 percent more animals entered shelters than left, either as strays or surrendered by their owners. In 2022, the trend worsened: 4 percent more animals entered shelters than left. That may not seem like much, but each percentage point amounts to tens of thousands of animals.
Shelter Animals Count projects that by the end of 2023, the population gap will tick up to 5 percent.
Many of the animals currently entering shelters are strays. While owner surrender rates have fallen in recent years, there’s been an 8 percent increase in stray intakes from January to June 2023 compared to the same time period in 2022, and a 26 percent increase compared to the same period in 2021. But why so many are coming in off the streets is a bit of a mystery.
One theory is that some of these strays are just owner surrenders in disguise. In 2020, due to Covid-19 precautions, many animal shelters stopped allowing people to walk in and surrender their animals, instead requiring them to make an appointment — a practice many shelters have kept in place. The demand for surrender appointments is now so high that many shelters have long waitlists. So the uptick in strays could simply represent people trying to jump the surrender line by claiming they found a stray animal (which doesn’t require an appointment). Or they could be simply abandoning them on the street.
It’s tempting to judge people who surrender their animals, and some surely do so for shallow reasons, like deciding a pet is too much of an inconvenience or failing to properly train them. But the main reason so many people are giving up their pets — especially dogs — is because they simply can’t afford to keep them.
For low-income families, it’s hard enough to find affordable housing, and affordable pet-friendly housing is even harder to secure. Many apartment buildings ban certain breeds or dogs over a certain weight. Shelters are taking in especially high numbers of large dogs over 40–50 pounds, Mann of the Humane Rescue Alliance said.
“The same [economic] trends that affect people always affect animals,” said Filer with Shelter Animals Count, referring to high inflation and the national housing crisis that’s led to a rise in eviction rates and homelessness in recent years. Housing insecurity is the top reason people are surrendering their animals, according to Mann and Filer. If someone gets to the point where they’re surrendering their animal out of financial hardship, they’ve generally tried everything else and they have no other option, she added.
The high stray rates, Mann speculates, could also be a consequence of high pet acquisition rates early in the pandemic: There are now simply more animals out in the world who can become strays by, for example, slipping out of their homes and getting lost.
Veterinary costs have also heavily outpaced inflation from July 2022 to July 2023, because of increases in the cost of medical supplies and rising wages due in part to a veterinarian shortage. Some veterinarians partly blame the corporate and private equity takeover of clinics and hospitals for rising vet care costs. There’s also a shelter worker shortage, which is part of an economy-wide labor market shortage.
Some people may be surrendering their pets because pet ownership is just difficult, especially with animals who are having a hard time adjusting to post-pandemic life after years cooped up with their owners. Many dog owners report behavioral issues as they head back to the office or bring their poorly socialized animals into public spaces.
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“We’re just overstimulating these animals that have never had this level of stimulation,” said Mann.
It may just be too much for some pet owners to handle; training can require a lot of time and effort that some people aren’t willing to spend.
“I encourage people not to take on more than they can handle,” said Crystal Heath, a veterinarian who works with shelters and veterinary clinics in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. “And I don’t think that dog ownership or cat ownership or pet ownership in any way is a right that people should have. But I also am not going to be judgmental about somebody who brings an animal in or takes care of an animal who would be killed otherwise and provides them with the best care that they can.”
Heath suspects part of the stray problem could also be due to reduced spay and neuter access in the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, as veterinary offices suspended nonessential services.
Spay and neuter surgeries were down 13 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, according to a paper by veterinary researchers at the University of Florida. By the end of 2021, spays and neuters had bounced back close to 2019 levels, but a year of reduced access, according to the researchers, “may have the potential to undermine progress made in controlling pet populations and euthanasia in shelters.”
Spaying and neutering pets is key to keeping shelter populations down and reducing the number of euthanized animals because it prevents them from having babies who may just wind up in a shelter. Intact animals — those who haven’t been spayed or neutered — also tend to have higher rates of certain behavioral issues, like increased aggression and escape attempts (in the effort to find a mate), which could result in more strays and surrenders.
Amid all this bad news, there’s one silver lining: Cats are having a moment. Cat adoption rates are much higher than those for dogs, which makes sense in the context of the housing crisis and inflation, as cats are more affordable and have fewer housing restrictions.
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“Cats were previously our challenge … now cat adoption rates are in the 60 [percent range],” Filer said. “Dog adoption rates are in the 50s.”
What your local animal shelter needs
Adopt, foster, volunteer, and donate: Those four actions, Filer said, are needed to help shelters climb out of the hole they’re in.
The first one is obvious: Every animal adopted (instead of purchased from a store or breeder) means one fewer animal suffering and potentially euthanized in a shelter. If everyone who buys an animal chose to adopt instead, the need for euthanasia in shelters would drastically fall, because there are far more dogs purchased every year than euthanized. The hard part is persuading the many people who only want to buy a dog with a particular look or size (even if how they’ve been bred can increase their risk for serious health issues).
“I wish they had to look into the eyes of who we have to kill before bringing more lives into this world,” said Heath, who sometimes performs euthanasia, about dog and cat breeders. She wishes there were more public funding to care for animals — and argues some of it should come from puppy mills and dog breeders who are driving pet overpopulation.
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To help with the staff shortage at shelters, try volunteering at a shelter or even fostering animals. I know some people who don’t feel they have the time, money, or lifestyle to properly care for a cat or dog long-term, so they foster regularly instead. It’s also a great way to test out adoption if you’re unsure it’s for you.
Shelters really need money, too. Donations to shelters are down, Filer said, while the amount of work is up. And more and more shelters are implementing critical but costly programs that make pet adoption, and pet keeping, more affordable.
For example, Humane Rescue Alliance in Washington, DC, runs a pet food bank and a low-cost vaccine clinic (and vaccines reduce additional vet bills down the road). It also has a veterinarian who travels to people’s homes to help in emergency situations.
“That has been a big shift in our strategy over the last probably three or four years,” Mann said. “I believe if we did not have these comprehensive programs in place, we would see a significant increase in owner surrender.”
If you’re not in a position to adopt a pet anytime soon, giving money might help someone else hold onto theirs.
The animal shelter crisis is a window into the national housing crisis and its ripple effects. It’s also a telling example of our twisted relationship to animals: We consider dogs to be man’s best friend, yet we breed so many to suffer while millions languish in shelters, many of whom are ultimately killed to make room for ever more strays and surrenders.
Declining euthanasia rates in shelters has been one of the few success stories in the animal welfare movement over the last several decades. But that progress is at risk if we don’t do more to change how pets are acquired — and if more of us don’t open our homes, or at least our wallets, if we can afford it, to shelter animals.
Michael Oher now says the story of his adoption by a white family was never true and that they exploited him.
The 2009 film The Blind Side tells the story of a white family on a heartfelt mission: to save the life of “Big Mike,” an unhoused Black 17-year-old who attends the local school with their son in Memphis, Tennessee.
As many critics would later note, the tale was a classic “white savior” story that served to praise the goodness of white people and erase the nuances of a Black kid’s story of resilience. But audiences at the time heralded The Blind Side, which was based on a book of the same name, as a tearjerker and the blueprint for a feel-good classic. Plus, it was all a true story, based on the real events in the life of Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy and Michael Oher, who went on to play eight seasons in the NFL.
The film earned more than $300 million at the box office and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, while Sandra Bullock took home the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of family matriarch Leigh Anne Tuohy.
Now, however, Oher, a former NFL player, has alleged that the crux of the story — that a white family adopted him out of homelessness — is a lie and that the family exploited his name and story for years to enrich themselves. Oher says that he believed he was a legal member of the Tuohy family for nearly two decades, only to learn this year that he was not.
According to ESPN, Oher filed a 14-page petition in Tennessee’s Shelby County on Monday, alleging that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy never actually adopted him. Instead, the petition alleges, they tricked him into a conservatorship, a legal agreement that gave them legal authority to use his name in business deals, less than three months after he turned 18. The petition claims that the family used Oher, now 37, to make millions of dollars from the popular book and 2009 blockbuster film. He’s now asking that the probate court end the conservatorship and bar the family from using Oher’s name and likeness. The petition also requests that the court seek an accounting of all the money the Tuohys have made since starting the conservatorship in 2004 and to pay Oher his share of the earnings, in addition to damages.
The news has proven shocking to those who continued to hold the movie in high regard. Sean Tuohy told the Daily Memphian that he was “devastated” to hear about Oher’s lawsuit and that it was “upsetting to think we would make money off any of our children.” Sean “SJ” Tuohy, the Tuohys’ biological son, meanwhile, said that Oher was aware of the conservatorship before this year. He also denied making millions off the film, telling the hosts of Barstool Radio that he’s received an additional $60,000 to $70,000 “over the course of the last few years.” He added, “You will never hear me say anything bad about Michael Oher in any capacity other than I’m upset that he feels the way that he does.”
For many others, the case is resurfacing many existing controversies around The Blind Side, particularly how it portrayed Oher as unintelligent and completely reliant on the Tuohys, and how it capitalized on viewers’ comfort with white charity and Black suffering. Now, many are pointing out how this new twist has validated longtime uneasiness with the film, showing that the white savior trope remains pervasive and obscures truths about exploitation.
The “chagrin and embarrassment” of Michael Oher’s conservatorship
As the film depicts it, Michael was homeless, ripped away from his drug-addicted mother when he was 7, and navigating the grueling foster system. The Tuohys, to the shock of Leigh Anne’s elite circle of friends, take Michael in and ultimately adopt him. But most of all, they encourage him to play football, setting him up for a career in the NFL.
Oher became an all-American left tackle and, later, a first-round draft pick by the Baltimore Ravens. He helped the Ravens win the Super Bowl in 2013, with Leigh Anne and her daughter Collins typically watching from the sidelines, then signed a $20 million, multi-year deal with the Tennessee Titans in 2014. He was released due to a toe injury before playing for the Carolina Panthers until 2017. Oher’s career ultimately earned him $34 million.
According to Oher’s petition, the star football player only learned the truth of his relationship with the Tuohys this year.
“Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys,” the petition states. The petition also revealed that the conservatorship continues to this day, and among Oher’s requests is that the Tennessee court terminates it.
Meanwhile, over the decades, the Tuohys have continued to call Oher their adopted son, using the alleged lie to boost their foundation and other promotional work.
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A conservatorship is a legal arrangement that cedes a person’s personal, financial, and legal decision-making powers to other people. It is intended to help individuals who cannot care for themselves due to health concerns, such as a brain injury or mental health conditions; the arrangements have been in the cultural conversation with high-profile cases like those of Britney Spears and Amanda Bynes.
Conservatorships can get ugly, particularly when they’re unwanted and when someone isn’t even aware that they’re part of such an agreement. They can be used to disenfranchise and abuse people with disabilities, allowing conservators to take near-full control of life decisions, from where the individual lives to what they spend money on.
“You are entitled as an adult to make decisions about your finances and your property and your medical care. But all states have laws that recognize that some people have diminished decision-making capacity,” Josephine Gittler, a law professor and the author of Reforming the Guardianship and Conservatorship System: An Introduction, told Vox’s Constance Grady. In Tennessee, where the Tuohy conservatorship was arranged, courts may transfer “duties” from “a person with a disability” who doesn’t have the ability to make certain decisions to a conservator.
Oher, however, alleges that the Tuohys had him sign papers to enter into a conservatorship despite him having no physical or mental disabilities rendering him incapable of taking care of his own matters. While he believed the papers made him a legal member of the Tuohy family, under the Tuohy conservatorship, he does not have the power to manage his financial affairs.
Sean Tuohy has said that everyone in his family earned about $14,000 each from the movie, while ESPN has reported that the Tuohys and their two birth children each made $225,000, in addition to 2.5 percent of the film’s “defined net proceeds.” Tuohy also said the conservatorship was originally created to allow Oher to play football at the University of Mississippi, and that he would be willing to end the conservatorship once and for all.
The legal filing also states that Oher unknowingly signed away the rights to his life story to 20th Century Fox in 2007 when he was 16, according to the New York Times. In the petition, Oher stated that he doesn’t remember signing the contract and that if he did sign it, no one explained it to him.
The many controversies around The Blind Side
The book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game was written by journalist Michael Lewis and published in 2006. According to the petition, the Tuohys negotiated a movie deal for the story chronicled in the book shortly after the book’s release. It is unclear whether Oher ever negotiated a life rights agreement with the Tuohys ahead of the publication of the book or film.
The Blind Side film received mixed reviews and also soon found itself at the center of controversy. Critics argued that the portrayal of Oher played into Uncle Tom stereotypes about Black people as submissive to white authority. Many also took issue with the film’s portrayal of the Tuohys as white saviors whose personal charity helped an impoverished Black youth overcome challenges and find his footing and potential.
Meanwhile, Oher wrote in his memoir, I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond, the film portrayed him as “dumb” instead of as a kid “who had never had consistent academic instruction.”
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Oher has publicly said that the film negatively impacted his career. In 2015, he told ESPN that people make assumptions about him based on how he was poorly portrayed in the film. “People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie,” Oher said. “They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am. That’s why I get downgraded so much, because of something off the field … That’s why I don’t like that movie.’’
He also said the film brought him too much attention when he just wanted to fly under the radar as an offensive lineman and that it incorrectly portrayed him as a kid who didn’t understand football. Oher wrote in his memoir, “Whether it was S.J. moving around ketchup bottles or Leigh Anne explaining to me what blocking is about, I watched those scenes thinking, ‘No, that’s not me at all! I’ve been studying — really studying — the game since I was a kid!’”
Oher did, however, see some positives in the film, particularly its message about perseverance and in how it portrayed the Tuohy family. “They’re my family and without them I wouldn’t be here,” he said in 2016. “They taught me a lot of things, showed me a lot of different things. It shows that if you help somebody and give somebody a chance and don’t judge people, look where they can get to.”
It’s that trust and respect that he held for the Tuohys that has made the news of the ongoing conservatorship all the more shocking and painful. And it’s the white savior trope that may have allowed the Tuohys to use their assumed benevolence to move through the world unchecked.
As sociologist Matthew Hughey recounts in his book The White Savior Film, the white savior trope derives from old ideas such as “manifest destiny” (the idea that white settlers in America were destined and ordained to expand westward and cultivate America), and the “White man’s burden” (the duty of white colonizers to manage the affairs of those whom they colonize) — beliefs that motivated white people to save the “dysfunctional and dark ‘other.’”
In Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness, Hernán Vera and Andrew Gordon explain that white savior narratives often feature a white figure who “saves blacks from slavery or oppression, rescues people of color from poverty or disease, or leads Indians in battle for their dignity and survival.”
Examples abound, from the 1990 western Dances With Wolves to the 2000 urban-set film Finding Forrester to 2011’s The Help. In these movies, white paternalism is portrayed as necessary to better American society and save people of color from themselves. The trope erases and romanticizes racism, and raises questions about the dangerous power white people are able to wield when they’re viewed as saviors. Many of these films, like The Blind Side, have faced their own reckonings.
The tropes don’t just exist on the page or on the big screen. They happen in real life; as NPR noted in 2011, with the film’s success, the Tuohy family was “elevated to near sainthood.” Oher’s petition and the public outcry over his conservatorship are challenging that image.
For his part, Oher has tried to make peace with the Hollywood storyline of The Blind Side by recognizing the film’s positive impact and his role in the narrative. In 2015, he told the AP, “You’d be surprised how many letters I’ve gotten, people have adopted kids or how many lives have changed. I’m definitely excited about that because coming from poverty in the inner city where I come from, so many people look up to me. They say ‘if I can do it, they can do it.’”
Two years after Kabul fell, tens of thousands of Afghans are still stuck in limbo in the US.
Two years ago, the Taliban marched into Kabul, the Afghan government collapsed, and the United States, already scheduled to depart on August 31, rushed to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Not everyone who should have gotten on those planes did, but the US airlifted some 120,000 people in two chaotic weeks.
About 78,000 were Afghans, who arrived in the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome. They were vetted, screened, and stayed for weeks, sometimes months, at US military bases, before they were resettled in communities around the country. Most of these arrivals were granted humanitarian parole, a two-year temporary status.
Two years later, the majority of these Afghan arrivals are still on parole, their statuses stuck in limbo. That includes thousands of Afghans who supported US troops, or embassies.
There is a pretty simple fix to all this: the Afghan Adjustment Act (AAA).
The legislation would give Afghan allies in the US a clear pathway to legal permanent residency. The US used to pass this kind of legislation with some regularity, and most notably did so in the 1970s for tens of thousands of South Asians after the Vietnam War. The Afghan Adjustment Act has strong bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, and a diverse coalition of backers, from Afghan groups to immigration advocates to veterans groups to former top national security and military officials. The issue has traditionally had broad public support, too.
And yet, the Afghan Adjustment Act is stuck in Congress. It has been that way for more than a year, leaving Afghans in a constant state of uncertainty.
“It’s a microcosm. It’s a very straightforward thing that the US can do to follow through on a promise it made to Afghans,” said Joseph Azam, board chair of the Afghan-American Foundation. “And so far, the government’s demonstrated a manifest inability to deliver on that promise. Which is kind of the story of Afghanistan for the US.”
Why are so many Afghans still in limbo?
Parwana Amiri evacuated from Afghanistan in August 2021, with her husband and three kids. Her husband worked as a interpreter for the United States military. In 2014, he applied for a Special Immigration Visa (SIV), available to those who directly assisted the US military or government. They are still waiting.
She and her family are currently in Maryland, where Amiri has started a catering service. But there is a kind of strangeness in trying to build a business, in trying to put down roots, when you don’t know how long it will last. “We don’t know our future after these two years,” Amiri said. “I know we have two more years in [the] US, but I don’t know after the two years what happens.”
Those two extra years are a result of the Biden administration’s decision to renew parole for Afghans in the US for another two years, until 2025, which otherwise would have expired this month. It is a reprieve, but an impermanent one. Afghans have work authorization and protection from deportation, but only for now. It depends on — or can be ended — by presidential action. Even with this, Afghans cannot travel, and they cannot bring over their family members, some still at risk in a country in complete crisis.
This is the limbo that many Afghans are trapped in. In the aftermath of the Kabul evacuation, the US government estimated about 40 percent of those Afghan arrivals were eligible, or in process, for Special Immigration Visas (SIVs). That program provides a pathway to permanent residency, but it is lengthy and slow-moving. Through 2022, the average SIV processing time was 628 days, though the State Department says it is now at about 314, according to a June report by Voice of America.
The Afghans evacuated in 2021 also include journalists, aid workers, human rights activists, and their families, along with others whose lives were endangered in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. Many do not meet the narrow criteria for SIVs. They must instead navigate the even more slow-moving, massively backlogged asylum system.
As of May 2023, across all categories of Afghan evacuees, about 2,500 Afghans received asylum, and about 5,600 were approved for green cards — some 8,000 out of around 78,000, according to data from United States Citizen and Immigration Services.
The Afghan Adjustment Act is the solution, and it’s not exactly a novel one. “We have examples of it being done in the past, and we really just need to lean into what we already know needs to happen for this Afghan population,” said Srdan Sadikovic, director of US federal advocacy at the International Rescue Committee.
The US has passed immigration adjustments periodically throughout history, offering protection to people — Cubans in 1966, Nicaraguans and other Central Americans in the 1990s — who would face great risk if they returned to their homelands. The Indo-Chinese Refugee Status Adjustment Act, passed in 1977, granted legal status to Vietnamese and other South Asian refugees evacuated to the US after the fall of Saigon.
The current version of the Afghan Adjustment Act would allow Afghans in the US to become legal permanent residents here, after additional vetting. This had sidelined the legislation in the past, with some Republican lawmakers expressing concerns about the vetting of Afghan evacuees because the Kabul exit was so messy and haphazard. To be clear: All Afghan arrivals went through thorough vetting and screening before arriving in the US, then waited weeks on US military bases.
The current version of the AAA would also expand the eligibility for SIV recipients, to include members of the Afghan Air Force and the Female Tactical Platoon, among others. The legislation would also establish a State Department-led interagency task force to continue the relocation and resettlement of Afghans over the next 10 years — that is, set up potential processes to keep helping the tens of thousands of people left behind in Afghanistan, or who are currently in third countries.
These additional pieces may have less of an immediate impact than, say, giving green cards to the thousands of Afghans here, but as Azam says, it at least draws some parameters on the US’s responsibility. “It puts markers down to say, look, it might be really, really, really, really hard to get here. But at least we’re acknowledging that there’s a pathway and there is some process that people can try to go through to get here.”
Still, the AAA has stalled in Congress. The bill was introduced in August 2022, although advocates had been proposing such a plan since the evacuation. A group of Democratic and Republican co-sponsors in both the House and the Senate reintroduced the bill this July, though lawmakers failed to bring it for a vote as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the must-pass defense funding bill. There is still a slim chance it could make its way back into the NDAA when Congress returns from recess — but those odds are really, really slim. That leaves an otherwise broadly bipartisan bill still stalled.
A thing the US used to do with some regularity isn’t happening anymore
These adjustment acts are sort of win-win. The AAA would settle immigration status and bring stability to people already in the US. But it would also swiftly clear a backlog in the immigration system.
Which is why versions of adjustment acts have been used as a tool by Congress before, with support from both parties. They make practical and logistical sense — and that is before getting into the moral, political, national security, and humanitarian imperatives.
After the war in Vietnam, both Republicans and Democrats found the political will to grant status to those who had been US allies in Vietnam, in part because of a sense of responsibility. Those, alongside additional efforts to try to bring over US allies were seen as a kind of “moral repair,” said Yael Schacher, director for Americas and Europe at Refugees International. It became a way to mitigate some of the failures in Vietnam.
That sense of responsibility after Vietnam also aligned with the US’s national interests during the Cold War. “The United States wanted to continue representing itself as a country that people fleeing communism wanted to resettle in. This created bipartisan support,” said Jana Lipman, a history professor at Tulane University.
The geopolitics of 2023 are not the same, of course. The Taliban is making itself persona non grata on the world stage all on its own, but the US’s treatment of its Afghan allies still undermines the country’s credibility, and could undermine its ability to operate in future conflicts.
The list of the US’s failures in Afghanistan, under multiple Republican and Democratic administration is a very, very long one. But, at the most basic level, the United States waged a 20-year war, and enlisted many, many local Afghans in that effort. The US also made promises, especially on things like women’s rights. Once the Taliban took over, those who fought alongside the US, and who promoted US policy priorities, were left exposed. The Afghan Adjustment Act is a down payment on some of what America owes Afghanistan.
“It’s not only a humanitarian issue, which it certainly is, but it’s a matter of national security,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum.
These pretty straightforward arguments haven’t yet translated into policy. Some advocates and experts suggested that is because there has been so little bipartisan accountability on the war in Afghanistan as a whole. “It’s a reminder of America’s failings,” said Arash Azizzada, co-founder and co-director of Afghans For a Better Tomorrow.
“I think many are eager to just never talk about this population ever again,” he added, of Afghans. “And it’s easy to ignore as an underresourced and underrepresented and marginalized population.”
Afghan evacuees have been caught up in America’s larger political debates. No party owns the failures in Afghanistan; but the botched exit happened under President Joe Biden, and Democrats may not necessarily be eager to push that back into the news. The AAA is still an immigration bill, and anti-immigration sentiment within parts of the Republican Party is going to make any such legislation difficult to pass.
Case in point: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) also recently introduced legislation that would grant Afghan allies a pathway to permanent status. But it also included what some advocates called a “poison pill”: a provision that would limit the president’s authority to grant humanitarian parole. That would make something like the emergency evacuations from Kabul harder to replicate ever again.
The AAA is the bare minimum the US owes to Afghanistan
The AAA would streamline the legal status for the thousands of evacuees in America right now. But it also begins to remedy the other uncomfortable reality of the US occupation of Afghanistan: all of the thousands left behind.
The State Department estimated this spring that about 150,000 SIV applicants are still in Afghanistan. The AAA would expand eligibility for SIVs, but there are thousands of other Afghans at risk who don’t meet the SIV definition. That includes some former Afghan government officials, aid workers, activists, women leaders, journalists, and all the people tied to them. Afghanistan’s economy is also in freefall, a humanitarian catastrophe spurred, in part, by the US’s withdrawal.
Granting permanent status to Afghans through AAA would allow them to potentially bring family members to the US. Evacuations from Afghanistan have still happened, but at a trickle. Tens of thousands of people have fled to other countries — like Pakistan, or Iran — where they are also stuck in limbo. A recent report from Refugees International found some 600,000 Afghans have fled to Pakistan since the Taliban takeover. About 20,000 of them are likely eligible for US programs, but they can’t move forward with their applications because the US and Pakistan are at odds on how to process these applications.
After Vietnam, and the initial adjustment act, the US adopted programs to try to bring over more South Asian allies, including 1979’s Orderly Departure Program. It required diplomacy and political will. (Vietnam, too, wanted international legitimacy, something the Taliban seems unmotivated by so far.) These programs stopped and stalled at some points in the 1980s, but lasted well into the mid-1990s, and the Orderly Departure Program ultimately admitted more than 500,000 Vietnamese to the United States.
Afghanistan is also going to require investment. “There’s just a lot to be done,” said Schacher, of Refugees International. “Unless we just say, ‘We’re abandoning all these people, and we’re not going to do what we did after Vietnam.’”
The US needs to grapple with these difficult questions. That is also what makes the Afghan Adjustment Act so frustrating to its backers. It should be the easy part.
“Our nation’s moral obligations to Afghans didn’t end when the last plane took off from Kabul,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. “It’s how we act now that will define our legacy for generations to come. This is a can that Congress can’t kick down the road again.”