Endangered Wartime Interpreters: The U.S. Should Protect Those Who Protect Us | Cato Institute

Endangered Wartime Interpreters: The U.S. Should Protect Those Who Protect Us | Cato Institute: "Those aiding American forces share combat dangers but also are targeted off of the battlefield for their work. By one estimate roughly 1000 interpreters so far have been killed in Iraq. Some 80 interpreters have died in battle in Afghanistan since 2007. To return home would be a death sentence for others.

Yet the U.S. government has refused to welcome those who have done so much to help America. "

“Of the more than 5,700 Afghans who have applied for U.S. visas under a special program tailored for those who have supported the American war effort, just 32 have been approved, the State Department says, leaving the rest in limbo as foreign forces begin their withdrawal.”

"Contact with armed groups, including those fighting against governments viewed as enemies of America years or even decades ago—the Karen, Hmong, and Montagnards in Burma, Laos, and Vietnam, for instance—has been deemed as providing “material support” for terrorists.  Refugees similarly barred from entering America include a woman forced to cook for the Liberian rebels who raped her and a Colombian teenager forced by his paramilitary captors to bury his murdered parents.

Afghans who fought against the Soviets have been blacklisted by the same rules. Jamshid, who fled Afghanistan in 1988, and then served the U.S. as an interpreter after returning home, was denied refugee status in 2008. The State Department decided that he had aided terrorists because decades before he helped the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, part of the U.S.-supported Mujahideen which battled Moscow."