New York Times (Op-Ed)
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
February 7, 2016
If
you’re an American citizen who has vacationed in Paris or Rome, your
trip was probably significantly simplified by the Visa Waiver Program,
an agreement between the
United States and 38 mostly European countries that lets millions of
travelers visit one another’s countries without a visa.
In
December, Congress amended this program by passing the Visa Waiver
Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act, or H.R. 158.
The amendment prevents citizens
of these 38 countries who are also citizens of Iran, Syria, Sudan and
Iraq from entering the United States without a visa, and also requires
visas for citizens who have visited Iran, Sudan, Iraq or Syria since
March 2011, whether they went for tourism, business,
humanitarian work or to see family.
It
was initially unclear what enforcement would look like. Not anymore.
While no one is being banned from entering the United States, the new
law is making travel much
more complicated for many people. In January, the Iranian-British BBC
journalist Rana Rahimpour and her young daughter found themselves barred
from a New Jersey-bound flight from London. Dozens of Iranian dual
nationals have since reported similar problems,
from a German-Iranian engineer headed to a conference in San Francisco
to a British citizen who complained about having to cancel travel plans
because he’d visited his sick grandmother in Iran. Even The Times’s
Tehran bureau chief, Thomas Erdbrink, is among
H.R. 158’s casualties. “I’m no longer allowed to travel to the @nytimes
headquarters without a visa. America, it was fun while it lasted,” the
Dutch citizen tweeted.
Given
the surge in Islamophobic rhetoric in the United States over the past
six months, it isn’t surprising that Congress singled out citizens of
(and even visitors to)
predominantly Muslim countries for extra scrutiny. Americans are
rattled by recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. The
Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at one point even
proposed a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims’ entering
the United States. It’s a shameful response, but a predictable one.
The
surprising thing about H.R. 158 is the way it treats some dual
nationals as second-class citizens, ignoring their mixed heritage or
their decision to build lives abroad
while denying them rights and privileges their compatriots can enjoy.
This is un-American.
In
asserting that a foreigner with even a tenuous connection to four
blacklisted countries is automatically not trustworthy enough to set
foot on American soil without
extra vetting, Congress makes a set of faulty assumptions: that having
ties to these four countries makes any individual automatically suspect;
that the four targeted countries pose more of a risk than, say,
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, which have exported extremists
and radical ideology yet remain conspicuously absent from the list;
and, crucially, that no matter what choices a person has made, they
should remain bound to their or their parents’ birthplace forever.
Indeed,
the ability to start over is one of the principles on which America was
founded — but apparently, that’s a worldview that Iranian, Syrian,
Iraqi and Sudanese citizens
aren’t entitled to.
The
politicians behind this bill ignore the fact that naturalization is
typically tied to a conscious desire to live in, contribute to and
become part of a new community.
They don’t consider that many dual nationals of Syria, Iran, Sudan and
Iraq may have fled political or military violence, studied abroad or
simply chose to start anew.
In
fact, dual citizenship has long been an aspiration for many ambitious
and wealthy Middle Easterners who feel — understandably, it turns out —
that without a Western
passport, they cannot work and travel freely and without
discrimination. Before changes to the visa waiver program, an Italian
daughter of Syrian nationals, or a French Iranian in exile, could
present their European papers at any American port of entry and
be treated as what they are: Europeans. Now a completely innocent
person with a parent born in one of the designated countries can be
branded guilty by association. H.R. 158 erases distinctions between
foreigners who have perhaps never have left their country
of origin and dual nationals who might never have set foot in it at
all.
Of
course, citizenship is not always a choice. Some dual citizens of Iran,
Sudan, Syria or Iraq have parents from two different countries. Others
are automatically considered
citizens by virtue of their heritage. H.R. 158 ignores the practical
difficulty of renouncing one’s citizenship: You can’t just burn your
passport and be automatically rid of your national associations, whether
you’re Iranian, Israeli or American.
A
group of Democratic members of Congress have suggested softening H.R.
158, eliminating the restrictions based on ancestry and creating
provisions to exempt traveling
humanitarian workers, journalists, researchers and medics.
“Fundamentally, people seeking entry into our country should be
evaluated based on the specific security risk that they themselves pose —
not where their parents are from,” reads their proposal. That’s
a good start. The Obama administration later said that such exemptions
may be granted, but only on a case-by-case basis — a statement to which
some Republican politicians immediately objected.
All
countries should do their best to stop people who pose a genuine
security threat, regardless of what papers they may carry. But ascribing
guilt by association isn’t
the way to do it. Our world may not be borderless, but it is full of
dual and triple citizens whose numbers are likely to grow. The
assumption that every human life can be reduced to an allegiance to one
country is old-fashioned; it’s also painfully provincial.
Basing a security policy on an outdated philosophy is unlikely to make
us safer. It will have the unfortunate effect of making everyone’s world
smaller.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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