I protest.: Welcome to the USA ... but not if you're a journalist.

May 21, 2003

Law

Welcome to the USA ... but not if you're a journalist.

Matt Welch has an article up at Reason, Keeping Journalists Out, about the barring and forcible repatriation of six French journalists who wanted to cover the E3 conference here in Los Angeles. They were entering the United States under the Visa Waiver Program, under which they are not supposed to need a special business or journalist visa. The very fact that they tried to enter under this program means that they can't appeal the decision to deport them but an appeal wouldn't succeed anyway, since journalists don't qualify for the VWP. Journalists apparently need

a special "I-visa," which costs $100 to apply for, and requires a "comprehensive letter from the journalist's employer on the employer's letterhead identifying the journalist and describing in detail the nature and function of the journalist's position."

Of course, if you're an independent journalist, you may not have an employer. This would summarily exclude people like Chris Albritton or Matt himself, among many others. As he says,

Scores of countries may have specific visa policies covering journalists, but open democracies rarely enforce them (the only other country I've seen approach America's new enthusiasm was Cuba). If the rest of the world were to suddenly create CLASS databases of their own, I'd be banned from most of Central Europe.

It looks to me like this is a way to keep "undesirable" journalists out of the United States. Matt notes that this visa has been required for some time, but while previously a violation was just a minor infraction, now it is being strongly (and heavy-handedly) enforced, using, as one might expect, a new "comprehensive immigration database," the so-called "Consular Lookout and Support System. As I've mentioned before, the potential for problems with such a database is great. False positives and negatives are virtually guaranteed and the potential for abuse of the system is essentially unmeasurable, particularly when one considers that the "Department of Homeland Security" (a name I loathe) has very little, if any, oversight. Why do I feel very, very nervous about this new development? Why would the United States possibly want to exclude foreign journalists? All the possible answers I can come up with chill me to the bone. As Matt concluded,

"The chilling effect this could have, depending on how it is implemented, feels un-American," [former Newsweek correspondent Joel] Brand said. "We're used to regimes like North Korea and Saudi Arabia denying legitimate journalists entry to their countries because they have something to hide. Why would we want to keep legitimate journalists away from the story?"

That, indeed, is the $64,000 question.

Posted by Frank at May 21, 2003 7:46 PM