U.S. Air Force via Creative Commons
Afghans wait to board an aircraft at the Kabul airport on August 21, 2021.
In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Fort McCoy, an Army base in rural Monroe County, Wisconsin, has been in the process of receiving up to 13,000 Afghans who are fleeing the Taliban, which has taken control of their country. Many of these people directly aided the United States during the twenty-year war, making them targets at home and desperate to escape. And yet, some U.S. politicians, including Congressmember Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, say the United States has been too quick to take them in.
The Biden Administration has not sufficiently vetted Afghans as they flee, Tiffany claims, adding that “we cannot have terror imported into the United States.” Tiffany wrote a letter to social service agencies that are helping resettle Afghan refugees, insisting they make sure Afghans have proper background checks before they are “released into American neighborhoods.”
All of us, including rural white people, Mexican farmworkers, and Hmong and Afghan refugees, are tossed around by global forces beyond our control. The fact is, we are all in the same boat.
“It appears the Biden Administration is doubling down by bringing people who are unvetted into our country,” Tiffany told Tucker Carlson of Fox News. He was particularly outraged that none of the Afghan people he saw when he visited Fort McCoy came here on a Special Immigrant Visa, which requires an exhaustive vetting process that can take years.
“They were all there on parole,” Tiffany said, making it sound as though a wave of convicted criminals was arriving in Wisconsin directly from the prisons of Kabul. In fact, the United States’ “humanitarian parole” process allows refugees fleeing disasters, including earthquakes, famine, and the collapse of their governments, to come here on an accelerated basis, under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security.
When Tiffany and other Republican members of Congress took a tour of Fort McCoy, trailed by the press, the Air Force general in charge, Glen D. VanHerck, explained that the Department of Homeland Security does counter-terrorism screening and biometric testing before people enter the United States.
“There are six different federal agencies that screen these folks—a lot of that processing happened before they even got on an airplane,” adds Dawn Berney, executive director of Jewish Social Services of Madison. The group, she explains, is involved in resettling three categories of people from Afghanistan: refugees, people holding Special Immigrant Visas (many of whom provided support to the U.S. military effort), and the “humanitarian parolees” that Tiffany is so worried about.
This last group—people the United States allows to migrate here on a short-term visa on humanitarian grounds but who are not eligible for any benefits other than work authorization—faces particular difficulties.
“If you are accepted as a refugee, you do get all these benefits, including cash assistance, for eight or nine months,” says Berney. But, while her group will help resettle humanitarian parolees (“That’s a horrible term—I keep having to explain it has nothing to do with prison,” Berney adds), connecting them with jobs and English classes and enrolling their children in schools, they will have to work to support themselves almost immediately.
“It’s a catch-22,” says Berney. “If you have to go to work full time, you can’t take ESL [English as a Second Language] during the day, and then you are stuck in an entry-level job.”
As for Tiffany’s warnings that Afghans coming here could pose a threat to Americans, Berney notes, “These were people who were protecting our military and our contractors for the last twenty years. It would be a travesty for us not to be allowing them into the country at the point where we pulled out of Afghanistan.”
Not everyone is recoiling at the idea of the United States taking in Afghan allies. Various groups are collecting donations of clean, new clothing and footwear for the people arriving at Fort McCoy. Many of the donors, touchingly, are recent immigrants themselves.
As the eyes of the world were focused on the unfolding tragedy in Afghanistan, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, D.C., sent out a press release that had nothing to do with the U.S. withdrawal or Muslim refugees desperately trying to flee.
Instead, CAIR’s message expressed solidarity with another group of recent immigrants concentrated in the Midwest, not far from Fort McCoy: Wisconsin’s Hmong community. CAIR was responding to a letter disparaging Hmong people that was sent to the Hmong American Center in Wausau.
The anonymous letter said that Hmong Americans should “try to accept our ways and learn English.” It also expressed annoyance at “parties of twenty to forty people several times a year” hosted by some Hmong Americans in the area, and it criticized the letter writer’s Hmong neighbors who don’t say hello.
The executive director of the Hmong American Center, Yee Leng Xiong, posted the letter to his Facebook page, and wrote, “I ask that you reach out to me, and let’s have a discussion. I hope that after our discussion, you will learn about our cultural practices and our experiences, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll gain a little insight into the challenges that many of the Hmong community members still face.”
Ironically, he said, the letter arrived the same evening Marathon County (where Wausau is located) passed its “A Community for All” resolution, which declared that the county welcomes members of minority groups, embraces diversity, and condemns racism. The resolution divided the community, arousing considerable controversy and making national news.
There was something particularly striking about the nation’s largest American Muslim civil liberties organization reaching out to Wisconsin’s Hmong community in this moment. Like the Muslim refugees from Afghanistan arriving at Fort McCoy, the Hmong were also U.S. allies in a war the United States lost.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, could have been talking about the Hmong in Wisconsin, and the traumatized Vietnam veterans they accompanied home, when he welcomed the Afghan allies of the United States.
“We also know some Wisconsinites who served in Afghanistan alongside these allies—as well as some of those who have sought safety in our state previously—may be experiencing trauma and anxiety as they watch these events unfold,” Evers said in a statement. “We are thinking of them and are reminded today and in the days ahead to offer each other support, patience, and kindness and treat one another with empathy, respect, and compassion.”
That attitude was a breath of fresh air, especially after the divisive, xenophobic rhetoric adopted by Republicans like Tiffany.
Today, Wausau’s 4,700 Hmong residents make up about 12 percent of the city, the highest per capita Hmong population in the United States. These are the families of people who fled here after being hunted down by the communist governments of Laos and Vietnam for their role supporting the United States.
It is both generous and wise of Xiong, of Wausau’s Hmong American Center, to offer to meet with the anonymous letter writer and try to build understanding. In fact, it is a good suggestion for us all, in a nation where every area, including all of the rural counties in Wisconsin, is becoming more diverse. As Mexican grocery stores and taquerias pop up on Main Street in countless small towns, the children of immigrants revitalize schools on the brink of closure in rural areas that have suffered from depopulation, and our new Afghan residents bring their own rich cultural traditions with them as they resettle here, demanding that everyone learn “our ways” is not going to cut it.
And what are “our ways,” anyway?
In Wisconsin, which bills itself on state license plates as America’s Dairyland, up to 80 percent of the labor involved in producing milk and cheese is performed by undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Still, we have trouble acknowledging how dependent we are on people from other parts of the world. In fact, we seem to have trouble acknowledging that white people, including those with “Make America Great Again” banners waving over their yards, are the descendants of immigrants who came here hoping for a better life.
The resentment and suspicion of immigrants cynically cultivated by politicians like Tom Tiffany are misdirection. All of us, including rural white people, Mexican farmworkers, and Hmong and Afghan refugees, are tossed around by global forces beyond our control. The fact is, we are all in the same boat.
It’s easier to scapegoat immigrants than it is to address huge, scary problems in a region that is losing one to two family farms each day, where an encroaching climate catastrophe is filling the skies with smoke, and a global pandemic is spiking again.
The truth is that global catastrophe touches us all, sooner or later. We can’t wall ourselves off and pretend we are safe, that bad things happen only to other people who are different from us and live in faraway lands. The sooner we see how much we have in common, the better our chances of rescuing ourselves and each other.