Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States.... Ms. Ghuman, an assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, Calif ... is British and ... had lived, studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt exclusion....I don't know why either, but here are a few guesses.
Ms. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as “Hispanic.”
Held incommunicado in a room in the airport, she was groped during a body search, she said, and was warned that if she moved, she would be considered to be attacking her armed female searcher....
Ms. Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed.
“They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights,” she said. “For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means.”
As Ms. Ghuman tells it, the officers said they did not know why she was being excluded.
Maybe it's because she looks like this:
She is a person with brown skin, after all.
Maybe it's because her father is from India, and someone at the State Department doesn't know their geography too well.
Maybe it's because somebody didn't know what Welsh is, or didn't believe that someone with an Indian last name spoke that language.
Or maybe the U.S. government, and some others, are just kicking academics around because that's what right-wing authoritarian states do.
Cross-posted at The Vanity Press.
Update: My old friend Katrina passes on a personal story:
The U.S. has always been like this to some degree. I will never forget that even though I had all my paperwork, I was denied entry to the states for a job, because the customs official decided that I could just be "pretending" to be an archaeological technician and really be going in to do something else.
I was seated in a room for hours before anyone spoke to me, and I was ignored whenever I spoke to an official to ask what was going on. I watched them bully many, MANY people of different languages and skin colours.
When I finally got out, 5 hours later, I tried to complain and was told that at the border, the guards were allowed to do anything they wanted in order to "protect the liberty of the United States."
