Foreign nationals have no inherent right to study at American universities while promoting terrorist ideology.
President Trump’s new executive order activating “additional measures to combat anti-semitism” is mostly “encouragement.” It encourages federal agencies to think about and eventually use the tools at hand to combat discrimination against Jews, which has become a rampant problem on college campuses. It suggests that the Department of Education should confront its failed policy of settling complaints against those universities for peanuts rather than pushing universities to change course. But its most significant provision requires the State, Education, and Homeland Security secretaries to develop a process that would lead “as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove” non-citizens who support terrorism in various ways.
The broadest and most controversial provision of the statute cited in the order, the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows for the deportation of any “alien who…endorses or espouses terrorist activity.” While terrorism is used colloquially to mean many different things, “terrorist activity” would at least cover organizations designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) like Hamas, Hezbollah, and (after President Biden un-designated and President Trump re-designated them) the Houthis. The relevance of this provision to the broader aims of stamping out antisemitism is clear: College students, many of whom are foreigners on student visas, have been parading around campus endorsing in various ways precisely those groups aiming to intimidate Jews (and non-Jewish Zionists) out of the public discourse to make support for Israel look like a fringe position. Deporting them would get these rule-breakers away from their targets and liberate the academy to talk about complex issues without students telling Jews to “go back to Europe.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Civitas Institute
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
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