Afghanistan feeds U.S. immigration crisis

President Biden is struggling with a Gordian knot on immigration that there's little he can do to untangle: The nation's broken system is making it harder than it should be to manage the Afghan refugee crisis — and the Afghan refugee crisis is making it harder to fix the system.

By the numbers: If the military’s task of adding 50,000 spots to bases by mid-September to temporarily house Afghan refugees sounds like a lot, consider that there have been more than 1.2 million undocumented border crossings since last October.

Meanwhile, pandemic protocols and disruptions have fueled so many backlogs that officials estimate that in the fiscal year closing at the end of this month, 100,000 green cards allotments could go to waste.

The big picture: The crisis around the U.S. withdrawal, fall of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban is just the latest in a string of migration emergencies that have fallen on President Biden and brought into focus the shortfalls of the system.

COVID-19, poverty and violence in Central America, an earthquake that rocked Haiti, actions by the Trump administration and in federal courts, and agencies that are understaffed and underfunded have left the administration jumping from one fire to the next.