Do Not Enter: Visa War Against Ideas (1986)
Do Not Enter: Visa War Against Ideas (1986) This insightful Richter Productions documentary is as timely today as when it was made twenty years ago. The issue turns on whether America is truly an open marketplace for conflicting ideas. According to the McCarran-Walter Act (the Immigration Act of 1952, passed over President Truman’s veto), the U. S. Government could deny visas based on political affiliation or to anyone who was determined to be prejudicial to U. S. interests. The State Department implemented this law. The courts, including the Supreme Court, affirmed visa denials, even when based on secret information available to neither the applicant nor the court.
Under this law three Latin American Nobel Prize winners were denied visas. The State Department, in pursuing U. S. policy, denied visas to a right-wing death squad leader in El Salvador as well as to leaders of Comadres, a group of women organized to protest the disappearance of thousands of Salvadorans and to feed their families. The denial of Nino Pasti’s visa application on ‘security grounds’ seemed particularly bizarre. Italian General Pasti had been a NATO deputy commander in the 1960s. In 1982 he was invited to speak as an authority on nuclear weapons to the largest peace demonstration ever organized in America. General Pasti reflected: “A democracy that denies visas with no other reasons than not to allow people to say what they think is not a democracy.”
In 1988, in the final months of the Cold War, the ideological clauses of the McCarran-Water Act that had been used to exclude numerous prominent individuals were repealed. Since 9/11, the ‘war on terrorism’ has triggered a renewed visa vigor to interrogate and exclude many foreigners who speak out against U. S. Government policies. This I would characterize as a new Visa War Against Ideas.
