By David Haldane
AS AN undergraduate at UCLA in the late 1960s, I spent a fair amount of time jumping up and down in picket lines and unruly mobs for this cause or that. And a few years later, at New York’s Columbia University, did much the same though never enrolled as a student.
There are several important distinctions, however, between what I did then and what’s happening on American campuses now. First, I was a US citizen rather than a foreign guest in the country courtesy of the immigration department. Second, I never organized campus disruptions, offered violence as “the only path forward,” or openly endorsed a designated terrorist organization. And, finally, I never applauded the massacre of innocent civilians, urged the “total eradication of Western civilization,” or supported calls for the genocidal elimination of an entire nation.
All of which are allegations recently hurled at a growing number of visiting US students now in a wide world of woe.
By far the best known is Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Algerian national who entered the US on a student visa in 2023, completed his graduate studies, got a green card, and has been described by the New York Times as “the public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia.
Recently federal agents arrested the Syrian immigrant, detained him in Louisiana, and say they intend to deport him for violating the conditions of his stay. The radical activist’s arrest, President Trump declared, was “the first of many to come.”
Predictably, the reaction among adherents of the so-called “Free Palestine” movement and self-proclaimed civil libertarians was immediate and vociferous. “Trump’s latest coercion campaign,” the American Civil Liberties Union intoned, “is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities.”
To which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a ready reply. “This is not about free speech,” he told reporters. “This is about people who don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card…”
For me, that strikes a chord. I’m old enough to remember when the most infamous question asked of would-be immigrants was “are you now or have you ever” been a member of the Communist party? An affirmative answer, of course, meant an immediate denial.
These days, the question has been augmented by one pertaining to terrorism. “We can deny you,” Rubio asserts, “if you tell us when you apply, ‘Hi…I’m a big supporter of Hamas.’”
Khalil, the government contends, was the chief spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, an organization openly supportive of that US-designated terrorist organization. It also, according to numerous sources, proclaims “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” calls for “liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” and endorses the “total eradication” of Western society.
Additionally, the foreign student allegedly distributed literature stamped with the “Hamas Media Office” logo and helped organize Columbia building takeovers and encampments barring Jewish students and disrupting campus life.
Being an immigrant myself-namely a permanent resident of the Philippines-I can’t help but compare his situation to my own. As a newspaper columnist, I sometimes express opinions at odds with government positions. That’s not a problem, my lawyer assures me, because free speech is protected. But God help me, he adds, should I ever take part in-or even attend-a public protest or campaign rally, because that could prompt my immediate deportation.
“By any metric,” one Newsweek column declared, “Khalil is a wildly unsympathetic figure…It’s quite simple, really: if someone in the US on a tourist visa or in possession of a green card violates the terms of his admission, he can be removed…The day the United States loses the ability to deport noncitizens who espouse such toxic beliefs is the day the United States ceases to be a sovereign nation-state.”
To which I can only add a heartfelt amen.
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