Imagine a world where people can say whatever they want but are forced to wear earplugs at all times. What value would free speech have? The First Amendment does not just protect our right to express ideas; it protects our right to take them in. Its whole point is to ensure access to the thoughts of others, based on a belief that a successful democracy requires an informed citizenry and open debate.
Over the past eight years, several of the world’s most prominent thinkers have not been heard on U.S. soil. Federal authorities, given broad discretion to deny foreigners entry in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been denying them visas or, more awkwardly, stopping them at airports and placing them on return flights home, their visas revoked.
The USA Patriot Act, signed into law that fearful and angry autumn, said federal officials can deny a visa to anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” or “persuades others” to do so. That provision enabled the Bush administration to revive a cold-war practice known as ideological exclusion—the refusal of visas based not on actions, but on viewpoints or associations.
The question of whether to continue that practice—or drop or significantly alter it—is likely to be a tough call for the Obama administration, forcing it to strike a delicate balance between free-speech concerns and the moral and political imperative to keep Americans safe.
Many now look back at the list of foreign thinkers excluded from the United States during its fight against communism as a source of embarrassment. It includes such luminaries as the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Canadian novelist and conservationist Farley Mowat.
How will history judge the list of those kept out in the fight against terrorism? Hard to say, especially since the Bush administration generally did not make such exclusions public or offer much explanation for those that became known.
It is important to keep in mind that terrorists do not typically show up at the border announcing plans for murder and mayhem. The government, in trying to determine whether someone poses a threat, has to go by whatever information it has. We’ll never know what an abundance of caution saved us from, or what evil we kept away by locking doors.
Clearly, however, the government has made a few questionable calls. Newspapers in Greece expressed outrage and bewilderment over our nation’s 2006 decision to keep Yoannis (John) Milios, a prominent politician there, from entering the United States to attend an academic conference in New York. The government reversed its own unexplained 2005 decision to keep out Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, a Bolivian historian who had been offered a teaching job at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, after the university sued.
In a letter sent to top Obama administration officials this week, dozens of academic, free-speech, and civil-rights organizations argued that ideological exclusion hurts the nation’s own interests because it “impoverishes academic and political debate” on our soil, “sends the message to the world that our country is more interested in silencing than engaging its critics,” and “undermines our ability to support political dissidents in other countries.”
The letter, addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, urges an end to such exclusions and asks the administration to “immediately revisit” the cases of seven well-known scholars previously denied entry. Signatories include the American Association of University Professors, the Association of Research Libraries, and several groups representing academic disciplines.
Melissa A. Goodman, who helped put the letter together as a staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, says she hopes the administration will be receptive, especially given President Obama’s campaign pledges to make the federal government more transparent and to repair the nation’s image abroad. She acknowledges, however, that the administration has not sent any clear signals how it plans to deal with ideological exclusion. And, she says, she fully expects to be accused by conservative commentators of trying to put Americans at risk. “We are always braced for that,” she says.
