Send Hamas supporters back home
Washington Examiner
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Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) upset many on the Left this month when he promised that, as president, he would revoke the student visa of any foreign protester supporting Hamas and send them home.
“You don’t have a right to be here on a visa,” DeSantis explained. “You don’t have a right to be studying in the United States.”
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DeSantis is not only right. He’s expressing a centrist position. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to “immediately deport any foreign national — including and especially any alien on a student visa — that has expressed support for Hamas and its murderous attacks on Israel.”
While Cotton properly extends the revocation of visas to any foreign national, not just students, it is not even necessary that a noncitizen in the U.S. on a visa voice support for terrorism or violence at all. The law is clear. Visa holders are in our country as guests, and the DHS secretary “may, at any time, for what he deems to be good and sufficient cause, revoke the approval of any” visa. In other words, the DHS can revoke any noncitizen’s visa at any time for any reason. No threat of or support of violence is needed.
This does not mean noncitizens in the U.S. on visas have no First Amendment rights. Just as citizens can’t be prosecuted or punished for dissenting from government policy, so do noncitizens. But protection from criminal liability doesn’t mean anybody has a right to be in our country. Until you are a citizen, your presence within our borders is a privilege that can be revoked at any time.
The Supreme Court upheld the right of the federal government to revoke the visas of a Belgian socialist, an English anarchist, and a Mexican communist. If the federal government does not like your opinion on the pressing topic, or even your favorite flavor of ice cream, it has legal authority to send you home.
Our nation is polarized enough as it is, and we do not need foreign nationals making it more divisive. Since the murderous Hamas attack on Israel, we have seen the free speech rights of natives in other countries go unprotected explicitly because police did not have the manpower to control large mobs of mostly foreign anti-Israel protesters.
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In Canada, police told pro-Israel protesters, who had a permit, that they had to leave because the police could not guarantee their safety from a largely foreign anti-Israel mob. In England, veterans who wanted to carry the Union Jack were told to go home for their safety because of, again, a largely foreign anti-Israel mob.
If we do not want similar scenes in our country, we need to become much more serious about who we let in, and for those who have not yet been granted citizenship, we need to get much more serious about throwing out those who don’t share our values.