Last month, Australian writer Alistair Kitchen was detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) when he flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Agents interrogated him, intimidated him, and lied to try to get a confession out of him. Ultimately, they denied him entry to the United States. Why? Because he had written articles that the Trump administration didn’t like. As the officer who interrogated him told him, “Look, we both know why you are here…It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University.”
It’s not just Kitchen. Last month the State Department issued a statement that they would be vetting visa applicants’ online presence in order to determine whether applicants were fit to enter the United States. When applying for three common types of visa (F, M, and J), applicants are “instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to ‘public.’” Apparently, the Trump administration is now choosing to turn visitors away from the US due to social media posts.
To be clear, neither the administration’s actions towards Kitchen nor its new policy of vetting visa applicants based on their online presence is illegal. Non-citizens have fewer protections than citizens when it comes to free speech, and the administration is at perfect liberty to punish visa applicants who say things online that the administration doesn’t like.
But commentators’ focus on the legality of the Trump administration’s actions is missing the forest for the trees. Just because the government can do something doesn’t mean that it should.
As we consider how to treat visa applicants, we should consider what kind of example we wish to set for the world. Do we still wish to be the shining city on the hill, a beacon of freedom and liberty for other countries? Do we wish to stand tall in our principled defense of free speech, and to show other countries by our example just how well freedom can work? Do we wish to honor the legacy of our Founding Fathers, who created the first country in the world that stood for freedom of speech as a bedrock principle, and whose shining example convinced country after country to grant its citizens their own freedoms?
Or do we wish to be the country that intimidates peaceful visa applicants because they wrote articles with which the Trump administration disagrees?
I’m not sure that we can be both.
Some critics might argue that it doesn’t matter how we treat visa applicants; after all, they’re not Americans, and they shouldn’t reasonably expect to receive the same rights and protections as citizens. A shining city on a hill can still keep out undesirables.
But again, this misses the broader point. As Brad Polumbo points out, Jordan Peterson has been a vocal critic of the United States’ foreign policy with regard to Ukraine. Imagine if the Biden administration had arrested Peterson, detained him, and revoked his visa for his criticism. That would be an international scandal, and it would suggest to the world that the Biden administration didn’t support free speech as a matter of principle. Kitchen’s example is very similar.
Then there’s the chilling effect of the State Department’s new rules. In writing about his experience with CPB for The New Yorker, Kitchen says, “I fear that writing about this, and speaking to the media, as I have done, will trigger further reprisals from the U.S. government. I’m afraid that I will be banned for good, if I haven’t been already, or that the information on my phone, which I handed over to them, will be used against me.”
When anyone, citizen or not, justifiably worries that speaking up about their treatment will lead to further punishment at the hands of a government, then we can hardly say that said government is standing up for the principle of free speech.
All of this is especially salient because the world is at a crossroads. More and more countries, even countries that voice nominal support for the principle of free speech, are leaning into censorship. In England, feminists have been charged with hate speech for insisting that there are biological differences between men and women. In Germany, you can be prosecuted for calling someone a “jerk” online. In France, a woman was arrested and threatened with a fine of 12,000 euros for insulting French President Emmanuel Macron.
The United States has tried to use its bully pulpit to encourage the rest of the world to recommit itself to the principle of free speech. Speaking in Munich in February, J.D. Vance took European leaders to task for retreating from “some of its [Europe’s] most fundamental values,” including a robust commitment to freedom of speech. But it’s hard to urge global leaders to commit to a value that your own administration isn’t committed to.
If the United States wants to reverse the spread of censorious policies across the globe, then it needs to lead by example. We should absolutely vet visa applicants and turn away those who represent genuine national security concerns. But when the Trump administration conflates writing op-eds with endangering national security, it tells the world that free speech isn’t a principle worth defending. That’s a notion with which our Founding Fathers disagreed strongly: as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”