For nine months, Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi professor of medicine, tried to get a visa to visit the University of Washington, where he had been invited to share his research on the unusually high rates of cancer among children in southern Iraq.
But by last March, with no visa forthcoming, the American institution came up with an alternative plan. Mr. Lafta would deliver his lecture at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and it would be broadcast by video to a public meeting long planned for the purpose at Washington.
The day before his mid-April flight, however, the British consulate in Amman, Jordan, turned down his request for a transit visa to change planes at London’s Heathrow Airport. So Mr. Lafta, a faculty member at Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University, had to make the long and dangerous trip back to the Iraqi capital.
His American research partners say they think they know why he never received a U.S. visa: The Iraqi was one of the principal authors of an October 2006 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet that controversially estimated that more than 650,000 Iraqis — far more than officially reported — had died as a result of the American-led invasion.
Academic and civil-liberties groups say Mr. Lafta’s case is troubling, but not unique. They assert that during the last year or so the Bush administration has increased its use of heightened security measures, introduced after the 2001 terrorist attacks, to keep out foreign scholars whose politics or ideas it does not like. In such cases the government does not give reasons for denying a visa, making it nearly impossible to challenge the decision, academic advocates say.
“Each new case seems to underscore the doubts that the administration has any justifiable security basis” to exclude the scholars, says Jonathan Knight, director of the program on academic freedom and tenure at the American Association of University Professors.
The pattern not only hurts the scholars in question, but also damages America’s reputation for academic freedom, those groups say. Some academic associations have felt forced to move their meetings to Canada to ensure that members from other countries can attend. They also report that the United States has become a less appealing destination for foreign scholars.
“There are many people who simply don’t think of teaching or attending a conference in the United States because they don’t want to put up with the humiliation of the visa process,” says Barbara Weinstein, president of the 14,000-member American Historical Association.
Official Denial
When U.S. State Department officials were asked about Mr. Lafta’s case, they denied that the government had intentionally kept the Iraqi professor out, saying they had simply been unable to reach him when his visa was ready last fall. His American colleagues find that explanation implausible, saying they contacted U.S. visa officials several times on Mr. Lafta’s behalf without success.
The State Department, which is responsible for issuing visas, declined requests for an interview for this article. But in an e-mail message, a department official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about this issue said that while the government considers such factors as national security and foreign policy, no one had been denied a visa “due to any expression of the applicant’s views.”
Scholars who may have been barred recently because of their politics include Adam Habib, a prominent South African political scientist, and Yoannis Milios, a left-wing Greek political economist. Both had their visas revoked when they arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York for academic meetings, and both say they were questioned about their political views before being put on flights back to their own countries.
Other scientists and social-science professors from a variety of countries, including Bolivia, Canada, and Switzerland, have been barred from attending academic conferences or taking teaching positions in the United States. Many of the scholars were frequent visitors to the United States before suddenly being declared undesirable. There appears to have been a de facto ban on most scholars from Cuba for the last three years.
Academic associations have issued protests in about a dozen cases. The groups say that since the government does not release figures, it is hard to know the true number of scholars who have been kept out.
Challenging the Government
In two or three cases, U.S. officials made vague references to a security threat. But to the frustration of the scholars’ supporters, the government has typically not provided any reasons for keeping the scholars out. Critics, however, believe the issue is politics, not security.
“Because it is draped in secrecy,” says Melissa Goodman, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, “they get to keep out people whose views they don’t want [American] people to hear.”
The secrecy also makes it all but impossible to challenge exclusions that appear to be simple mistakes, say academic advocates. For example, Nalini Ghuman, a British citizen who has lived for the last 10 years in the United States and is an assistant professor of music at Mills College, was sent back to Britain last August, eight hours after she returned from a research visit there. She and her college are convinced that her visa was canceled mistakenly, but they have been unable to get any explanation from U.S. authorities.
“We’re sort of flummoxed,” says Robert F. Judd, executive director of the American Musicological Society, which recently issued a public appeal on Ms. Ghuman’s behalf. “We don’t know how to deal with this.”
Opponents of the government’s policy have forced small concessions from the authorities through lawsuits brought in two of the best-publicized cases. One suit, filed by the ACLU on behalf of several academic groups, challenged the government’s use of the so-called ideological exclusion clause of the USA Patriot Act to keep out Tariq Ramadan. The prominent Swiss scholar of Islam had his visa revoked in 2004, preventing him from taking up a teaching job at the University of Notre Dame. At the time, U.S. officials referred to a provision of the act that allow them to deny a visa to anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” or “persuades others” to do so.
But after a federal judge ruled last summer that the government had to provide an explanation, the authorities presented a new reason: donations totaling about $800 that he had made to two European groups providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. The two groups were later blacklisted by the Bush administration for allegedly providing “material support” to Hamas, the senior partner in the Palestinian Authority.
In the other case, in May, the Department of Homeland Security finally approved an employment-visa petition submitted almost two years ago by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln for a Bolivian historian, Waskar T. Ari Chachaki. The move came shortly after the university sued to force the government to respond to the application.
The approval simply means that Mr. Ari, an expert on the indigenous Indians of the Andes, and an Aymara Indian, can request a visa to take up a job as an assistant professor of history and ethnic studies at Nebraska. The government never gave a reason for not responding earlier. But some academics speculate it may have been to show displeasure with Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, who is also an Aymara and has been critical of U.S. policy toward his country’s coca cultivation.
Striking a Balance?
When asked about the case of Mr. Ramadan last December, Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, said the administration’s goal was “balancing our current security regulations with our desire to remain a welcoming country.”
Critics say the government has not found that balance. Ms. Weinstein, of the American Historical Association, says that by keeping out foreign scholars who could help Americans understand the sources of international tensions, the policy “makes us less safe.”
In the first years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, scholars in scientific and technical fields especially faced long delays and interminable security checks. Problems for them have lessened considerably during the last two years, say academic officials. But scholarly associations in the social sciences say problems persist for their foreign members.
Carol L. Martin, executive director of the 2,200-member African Studies Association, says at least 12 African members were unable to get visas to attend the group’s most recent annual meeting, in San Francisco last November. The policy “deprives everyone else of their unique perspective. It hinders policy making in the United States,” she says.
Several academic associations have responded by moving their meetings to Canada. In the largest move to date, the Latin American Studies Association has decided to hold its next congress, in September, which 6,000 people are expected to attend, in Montreal. The group made the decision after its congress last year became the second in a row for which all of the more than 50 Cuban scholars who had registered were denied visas. Under the circumstances, said the group in a written statement, “we can no longer, in good conscience, hold our congress inside the United States.”
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one-third of whose 370,000 members live outside the United States, now regularly holds some committee meetings in Canada to ensure that all members can attend. Chris J. Brantley, managing director of the group’s American branch, says this step is still needed even though fewer of his members have been denied visas in the last two years.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 41, Page A1
