Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

It seems worthwhile pointing out the comment at the bottom:

-----

I’d like to point out that a lot of our young men are currently attempting to do the exact same thing as was described above for the Afghani translators who served with the US Army even at tremendous risk to their lives. They have sponsored them for visas since their lives, and those of their families, are increasingly at risk back in Afghanistan because of their work with the US. Many of these Afghani and Iraqi translators saved US American soldier lives, and made it possible for the our soldiers to work with the local populations when this was critical.

Unfortunately, even as American soldiers are working hard to bring their translators they worked with, along with their families, to the US, they’re running into a lot of red tape back in the US, even though we’ve only filled a fraction of the visas that Congress allotted for Iraqis and Afghans who served with the US Army and other branches.

See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/10/afghan-tra...

View on HN

I’ve had some personal experience with this.
Having worked in Afghanistan in 2012-2014 and employing interpreters daily that we shifted between government and military programs, a few of our interpreters got caught outside of parameters for visas because we shifted them between programs.
We’ve managed to get all of our long-term male interpreters out of the country legally.
The biggest problem was getting our female interpreters out of the country legally.
Our female interpreters were, on average, far better than the male interpreters.
Further hindered by cultural differences making it exceptionally difficult to get family permission to allow female interpreters to move overseas without male family leadership, as well as a continuing paycheck to the family that was all that prevented them from getting involuntarily married off.
We managed to get 2 of 3 female interpreters legally overseas, the 3rd is still employed in various NGO programs providing good income for the family, stalling on getting married off.

I know it's not your comment but for others benefit who might not know - people of Afghanistan are Afghan, not Afghani. One afghani, or af, is the unit of currency there. The confusion may come because people of stan-suffix countries do use the stani, like Pakistani. Anyway it's pervasive mistake in us media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com