An invitation to study at one of the world’s most prestigious universities should have been enough to secure safe passage into the United States. Yet 17 year-old Palestinian Ismail Ajjawi was barred entry to the US for ten days after Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents detained him for questioning upon arrival at Boston Airport. The problem?Social media posts written by Ismail’s friends that were critical of the United States.
“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell them about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all….. After the five hours ended, she called me into a room, and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the U.S. on my friend[s] list.
I responded that I have no business with such posts and that I didn’t, like, [s]hare or comment on them and told her that I shouldn’t be held responsible for what others post….. I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics.”
In June, the US Department of State began requesting that most visa applicants submit the names associated with their social media accounts and five years’ worth of email addresses and phone numbers. This includes an individual’s accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Myspace, and 14 other social-media platforms that you probably forgot you even had. While the new requirements do not solely target Arab or Muslim applicants, it is hard to believe that they were not designed with the Middle East in mind. After all, the State Department has requested social media handles as a tactic since the 2015 San Bernardino shootings. The skilled use of social media by terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State would only surely serve as an impetus for such enhanced screening.
While a social media check seems like it could certainly weed out a possible anti-US terrorist/wannabe terrorist, in reality the process will prove to be a discriminatory practice towards Arab and Muslim immigrants. As a recent Atlantic article stated, “social-media data could be used to discriminate on a large scale against particular political or religious views disfavored by Donald Trump’s administration and its successors.” Those discriminated will of course be Muslim immigrants, who have found their chances of traveling to the US hampered ever since the Trump administration took over in 2016.
The Department of State requires “most” visa applicants to provide their social media details. Who is “most”? Shouldn’t it be an all or nothing approach? What are the exemption criteria? It is hard to believe that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) or the CBP will go over Jean-Paul French or Johnny English’s latest Tweets with a fine-tooth comb, or spend hours clicking through Gunter German’s old Myspace photos (providing, of course, they can still even find or access them). No, it seems likely that applicants with Arab-sounding names, no matter what country they originate from, will be targeted, as they already are profiled to be pulled aside during customs security checks.
What are the chances that these new rules will be applied fairly, regardless of one’s country of origin or financial background? It’s hard to imagine consular officers scouring the social media accounts of Saudi or Emirati princes; I find it difficult to imagine them scrolling through a Kuwaiti’s Twitter or Instagram. It is more reasonable to believe that they will target poorer people who don’t own palaces or multi-million-dollar business conglomerates; that they will target people from more volatile countries such as Egypt or Iraq, or places of discontent such as Palestine.
Furthermore, what exactly is the criteria here for social media posts? And is one random comment from five years ago, perhaps posted when the applicant was a young teen, really enough to condemn a person? In the case of Ismail Ajjawi, it wasn’t even his own social media content that was called into question: it was his friend’s posts. Are applicants now responsible for their family and friend’s posts, too? While it may seem suspicious if an applicant has numerous friends who use the Islamic State banner as their profile picture, more context needs to be considered for the Palestinian student whose friends repost Hamas-issued statements, or the Lebanese holiday-goer whose extended family waves Hezbollah flags on Pinterest.
So what is the sliding scale for anti-US rhetoric? Does one have to post pro-ISIS and Al-Qaeda propaganda or pictures of burning American flags, or is the cutoff much more subtle? (Also: knowing that this law is in effect, why wouldn’t applicants attempt to scrub their social media accounts? Or better yet, why wouldn’t they “conveniently” leave out burner phone numbers, or dodgy email addresses?) Does critiquing US domestic policies (like saying US gun laws are stupid and incomprehensible) count? In short, what type of content would get one banned from entering the US?
I would hazard a guess that an overwhelming majority of people living in an Arab country living anywhere, at any time, have posted something negative about the United States. It is true that some people do not care about politics and have never once posted on the subject. But for those with even a shred of political/global interest, it is likely that they have posted something negative about the US somewhere on the depths of the web. Should we keep out the Arab political science students because they may have critiqued US foreign policy? They’d be damn well justified to critique the US: after all, we’ve bombed many Arab countries to smithereens; redrawn their boundaries; stolen their resources and played the upper hand for access to oil; and, of course, accused the whole Muslim population of terrorism and general backwardness.
In short, negative is a broad concept here: saying the US “sucks” and critiquing a President whom you’ll never meet as an “imbecile who should fall off a cliff” are very different from, say, reposting a pro-ISIS link or saying that you belief all kaffars should die. There’s a difference between healthy discourse and a pattern of blatant and dangerous anti-US rhetoric. The problem will be, of course, immigration agents who have neither the time or perhaps the ability (also: the indiscrimination) to recognize and apply such differences. The problem will be that, in the “interest of national security,” innocent Arabs and Muslims like Ismail Ajjawi will once again be discriminated against. And the US will be showing the world that freedom of speech is not universally applied to all who dare enter its borders.
Ismail Ajjawi’s story does have a happy ending: after ten days of waiting (in which Ajjawi was subsequently deported back to Lebanon), the young man was finally allowed to return and was quickly welcomed on Harvard’s storied campus. But the number of other Arabs who will be detained and denied in pursuit of life, liberty or simply a happy American vacation, remains to be seen.
S-L-M
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