100,000 Ukrainians are now welcome to the U.S.—but without benefits or a path to citizenship
, senior vice president for global public affairs at HIAS, a refugee resettlement organization, cheered the new program, but warned of trouble to come. “Uniting for Ukraine will be an important mechanism to allow Ukrainians to reunite with their loved ones in the United States, but it is not a panacea,” she said in an April 21 public statement. “Humanitarian parole creates yet another group of people who are forced to live in limbo, without any sense of permanency.
Nezer tells TIME that the Uniting for Ukraine program may not work for those who don’t already know a sponsor in the U.S. “People who have contacts in the U.S., people who have family members here, or colleagues, or friends, or an employer may quickly get some relief,” Nezer says, “but people who don’t have those contacts, but who may be the most vulnerable, may have to wait longer.”
DHS adds that Uniting for Ukraine is intended to complement refugee processing and other channels to the U.S., but Nezer questions why the U.S. once again opted to process a displaced group of people through humanitarian parole over USRAP. It also typically takes an act of Congress to remedy the shortfalls of humanitarian parole.
“The plan can’t be to admit people on a temporary status and then just wait for them to become undocumented and hope that Congress acts,” Nezer says, noting that Congress has yet to act on a bill that would create a pathway to citizenship for the 76,000 Afghans who have also arrived in the U.S. under humanitarian parole.
Now that Uniting for Ukraine has launched, DHS says, Ukrainians should not continue to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border. From March 11, Ukrainians arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border have been exempted from a policy that keeps most other nationalities from requesting asylum in the U.S. known as Title 42. Now Ukrainians will be denied that exemption and will instead be referred to the Uniting for Ukraine program.
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