News

The New McCarthyism

A Case professor is caught in the feds' weird web of paranoia and incompetence.

By Lisa Rab 

Marixa Lasso and Jim Raden took their wedding vows in March, beneath the arched ceilings and candlelit chandeliers of the Rockefeller building in Cleveland Heights. A fire crackled in the hearth, warming the beige shawl that hugged Lasso's bare shoulders. Her dark hair shimmered under a wreath of white roses.

The family Lasso had adopted for herself here, thousands of miles from her native Panama, encircled her that day. Fellow Case history professor Renée Sentilles provided the flowers and decorated the cake; a grad student's husband played DJ.

At 38, Lasso had waited long for this moment. Her youth was dedicated to building the perfect résumé — winning prestigious fellowships, gaining two coveted posts as a professor of Latin American history, writing a book. By the time she met the sandy-haired software engineer who would become her husband, she had already moved across the continent from California, bought a house, and planted a rose garden.

She and Raden were planning an all-American life. They would turn their sun room into a porch, spend their mornings listening to public radio, and look forward to little feet running on their hardwood floors.

Just two months after the wedding, the newlyweds steeled themselves for a brief separation. Lasso needed to spend the summer doing research in Panama. Raden flew down for a visit in June, urging her to hurry back. She planned to join him in August for a surprise birthday party for his mother. Then she'd return to Cleveland to teach her fall classes.

But when Lasso went to the U.S. consulate in Panama for a routine visa renewal, she hit a strange roadblock. After living, studying, and working in the United States for 13 years, she was suddenly barred from re-entering the country. Her visa could not be issued. She had to wait for additional "procedures."

No one could tell her why or how long it would take. All she knew is that she must wait, thousands of miles away from her husband and her life.

The irony of her predicament was not lost on Lasso. When she first came to the U.S. in 1994, she was invited by the American government. She won a coveted Fulbright fellowship — a program that, in addition to sending Americans abroad, funds academics wanting to do research in the United States. The program's quaint goal is to promote "mutual understanding" between America and other countries, and it worked well in Lasso's case.

She used the funding to earn a master's degree in history from Pitt, then got a doctorate at the University of Florida. A tiny woman with dark, sparkling eyes who quotes the Statue of Liberty's "huddled masses" inscription in her e-mails, she wrote about hot topics such as race and revolution in Colombia 200 years ago. Viewed as a rising star in her field, she had no trouble snagging a job at Cal State Los Angeles in 2002. It was a tenure-track position, offering the gold medal of academia — lifetime job security — if she did well.

Meanwhile, the world outside the ivory tower was changing. After 9/11, academics with names like Habib and Ramadan began to arouse suspicion. Even Asians, Latinos, and certain Europeans suddenly became a threat to unseen bureaucratic eyes within the U.S. government. Foreign scholars were being shut out of the country due to rarely explained visa problems.

Take Haluk Gerger, a Turkish political scientist and journalist who has criticized the presence of American nuclear weapons in Turkey. He was frequently jailed in his own country for protesting his government's treatment of Kurds. When he and his wife tried to visit America in October 2002, he experienced a strange moment of déjà vu. They landed at Newark airport and were informed that his 10-year visa had been revoked. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and forced to return to Europe.

A few months later, Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a Cuban scholar and former ambassador to the European Union, applied for a visa to speak in Dallas at the Latin American Studies Association's International Congress. He had no reason to expect trouble. He'd been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and had recently finished a research fellowship at Harvard.

But after State Department officials in Havana discovered that he planned to lecture about the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, his visa was denied. No reason was given, but Treto was certain it wasn't a bureaucratic glitch. "Obviously they are trying to punish me for being so critical of U.S. policy toward Cuba," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The same thing has happened to thousands of foreign scholars since the Twin Towers fell. While academics always had their fair share of immigration problems, Bush's war on terror provided a convenient excuse to bar critics — whether real or imagined — from entering the U.S.

Many who got stuck had nothing in their background that could even remotely be linked to terrorism. They merely studied subjects — or expressed views — considered sensitive by the Bush administration. In fact, their most common crime seemed to be harboring left-leaning sympathies for the underdog.

As the feds tightened visa checks, consular officials were warned that if they had doubts about an application, they should send it on to the bureaucratic jungle in Washington, D.C. Academics weren't told why their visas had been flagged or how long the reviews would take. People were delayed for months or forced to cancel their trips altogether. Most never received an explanation.

"After September 11 this became a very great concern," says Penny Rosser, director of the International Scholars Office at MIT. "The number of delays and denials skyrocketed for students and scholars."

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
Next Page »