The Register-Mail · Galesburg, Illinois · 18 December 1982

CP-1982-028

‘Ideological exclusion’ has always been un-American

Shearer and Glen, Washington

Transcribed from the clipping

“WASHINGTON — Mahmoud Darwish, 40, a Palestinian poet now living in Paris, received an invitation to read from his work at a Nov. 28 New York City benefit for UNICEF. Despite his three-week visit to America last year, however, he was unable to obtain a three-day visa because of ‘28.’ ANGEL RAMA, 56, a renowned Latin American literature specialist who has lived and taught in the U.S. for large parts of the last 13 years, won a tenured professorship from the University of Maryland in 1980. But when he sought permanent residency here at the university’s insistence, Uruguayan-born Rama found ‘28’ in his way. South African Dennis Brutus, 58, is a tenured professor at Northwestern University who, after a decade of annually renewing his visitor’s visa, also sought permanent residency recently. But the State Department denied his request. This time, too, ‘28’ was the reason… Subsection 28 is an obscure provision of U.S. immigration law which permits the State Department to withhold entry or permanent residency from any alien alleged to hold beliefs considered contrary to the American political system. Arbitrary in practice and anti-democratic in purpose, it’s not an issue in landmark immigration law reforms facing the House this week. But it deserves to be. Passed during the heyday of Wisconsin’s Sen. Joseph McCarthy as part of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, Subsection 28 has enabled anonymous bureaucrats to classify thousands of left-wing writers, artists and others as ‘pro-communist’ or ‘subversive’ on the basis of weak allegations or associations.… In fact, of approximately 140,000 requests to have the provision waived over the last five years, only 136 have been denied, according to an INS official. Yet these seemingly benign statistics belie the extent to which U.S. authorities successfully employ the rule for political ends. Simple delay tactics can often prevent an appointed visit without delaying a visa per se. Darwish, who might have received clearance after a 21-day review by the INS, is one exemplary victim of this practice… THIS PROBABILITY has prompted reform efforts in the past and underpins an attack on Subsection 28 planned by Rep. Ted Weiss, Democrat of New York. But if not now, when? The blackballing and punishment of individuals for their thoughts remains an affront to American ideals and is clearly hypocritical in the context of our democratic proselytizing. At some point, we owe ourselves and the world an admission that ‘ideological exclusion’ is as un-American today as it was 30 years ago.”

Context added by this archive

A poet refused three days in New York to read at a children’s charity benefit, under a clause of the McCarran-Walter Act written at the height of McCarthyism. The archive now holds seven moments of Mahmoud Darwish’s life taken from American newspapers across forty-one years: arrested in Israel in 1967 among fourteen named men, refused a visa here in 1982, his portrait illustrating a review of Edward Said in 1986, his poem printed as a threat in 1988, his own question about what a poet does on an executive council, his resignation from the PLO reported inside an arts dispatch in 1994, and his death in a Houston hospital in 2008 in six printings.

Cite this item

"‘Ideological exclusion’ has always been un-American," The Register-Mail, 18 December 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-028. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-028

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