Foreign Scholars Encounter Visa Problems
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Nicaraguan history professor Dora Maria Tellez was forced to give up a spring teaching post at Harvard University's Divinity School after the U.S. government refused to grant her a visa. Tellez was a leader in the 1979 Sandinista movement that overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. She later held elected office in Nicaragua. The rejection of her visa application follows several other high-profile visa denials.
In fall 2004, Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar and Swiss citizen, had to withdraw from a position at the University of Notre Dame after his work visa was revoked two weeks prior to his planned arrival in the United States. (Ramadan made a video presentation about his experiences to the AAUP annual meeting in June.) In October, a group of sixty-one Cuban scholars was refused permission to enter the United States to participate in the Latin American Studies Association's international congress in Las Vegas. In each case, government officials suggested that national security was at issue, although they did not specify the threat allegedly posed by the scholars.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March asking for records of what it described as the federal government's practice of excluding scholars and other prominent individuals from the United States because of their political views. The request was made to the departments of State, Homeland Security, and Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency, and focused on Section 411 of the USA Patriot Act, a law granting broad powers to the federal government. Section 411 permits the exclusion of foreigners deemed to have "used positions of prominence to endorse or espouse terrorist activity." The ACLU said that while the law's provision ostensibly focuses on those who sanction terrorism, it seems that the government is using the provision more broadly to deny admission to those whose political views it disfavors.
"The government should not be barring scholars from the country simply because it disagrees with what they have to say," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer in an announcement of the information request. "Nor should immigration and State Department officials be in the business of determining which ideas Americans may hear and which they may not."
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