Many European countries are already accepting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the country. But so far, the Biden administration has not made it any easier for them to travel to the United States. Even if President Biden decides he should provide an alternative to their European displacement, the details will matter. As the world saw for Afghans fleeing the Taliban to the United States, an overly bureaucratic process can doom even the most well-intended immigration efforts.

Anyone boarding a U.S.-bound plane must have authorization to travel—a restriction mainly enforced by the airlines under the threat of fines. The easiest way to obtain travel authorization is through Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). ESTA is one of the few online immigration processes. It’s almost completely automated, so it takes the basic information provided, queries databases, and issues an approval within just 72 hours at a cost of just $14.

Virtually any other process simply won’t work. They will take too long or admit so few people, rendering them irrelevant.

The problem is that CBP reserves ESTA only for nationals of Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries, and Ukraine is not on that list and cannot be added because the statute authorizing the VWP requires each participating nationality to have a tourist (B) visa denial rate of less than 3 percent. Ukraine’s most recent rate was 43 percent. The denial rate is so high because Ukrainians struggle to prove that they have no intent to immigrate to the United States, as the law requires for B visas.

But in this situation, CBP does not need to add Ukrainians to the VWP or require them to prove no intent to immigrate. Instead, it can use VWP’s ESTA component just to screen them and authorize travel for the purpose of granting them “parole,” a discretionary legal status, at airports (rather than VWP’s nonimmigrant status). ESTA would get the Ukrainians onto planes, and then CBP could finish vetting at the U.S. airport upon arrival (mainly, by taking fingerprints). At that point, CBP could use the parole law to waive entry restrictions on a case-by-case basis “for urgent humanitarian reasons.”

The parole statute specifically authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to decide what situations constitute “urgent humanitarian reasons,” and a war would certainly qualify. Last year, for instance, CBP granted parole to tens of thousands of Afghans following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. For Ukrainians, the security concerns of admitting Ukrainians should be significantly less, which should facilitate faster processing than the Afghans saw at airports.

The Biden administration could invent a new process modeled on ESTA for Ukrainians, but ESTA’s virtue is that it already exists. It would require basically a 1‑word edit to let Ukrainians use it (like what recently happened for the Polish when it was admitted to the Visa Waiver Program in November 2019). ESTA processes tens of millions of travelers each year to the United States, so tens of thousands of Ukrainians would not increase the burden significantly.

If the Biden administration fails to use ESTA, the alternatives are not good.

For example, after CBP paroled 70,000 evacuated Afghans into the United States in a couple of months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—its sister agency within the Department of Homeland Security—has processed 1,090 of more than 40,000 applications that it has received in 7 months, and it denied 85 percent of them. At that rate, it may take several decades to merely process all the applications through USCIS’s paper-based parole process. CBP is just vastly more efficient at processing parole requests with the applicant there at a port of entry. 

The official refugee program—run jointly by USCIS and the State Department—is nearly as bad as USCIS’s parole program. Ukrainian refugee applications were taking two to three years to process before the invasion. The Biden administration has a stated goal of admitting 125,000 refugees worldwide for fiscal year 2022, and as of January 30, 2022, it had only managed to admit 4,362. Sadly, the refugee program suffers from massive bureaucratic obstacles, and it is far more costly to ramp up.

It’s one thing for the Biden administration to express its support for the Ukrainian people, but it’s another to prove it by helping those in harm’s way. Opening up ESTA to Ukrainians would be a bureaucratically simple and elegant solution to assure that Ukrainians can escape to the United States if they choose.