By PHK
It must be tough being an immigration officer these days. I wouldn’t want the job. But wouldn’t you think an I-20 from Claremont Graduate University, one of America’s most prestigious, issued to Saif Al Sha’ali, a returning doctoral student in Information Technology traveling back to Claremont, California with his wife and three kids would count for something? Or that this graduate student with only three semesters left to complete his degree was returning to campus from a three month vacation home in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)? It’s not like he was planning to attend flight school to learn to take-off, but not land.
If the English language UAE newspaper Gulf News has it right, our illustrious homeland security department detained this family of five at Los Angeles International Airport on August 21 until the UAE Embassy intervened on their behalf and enlisted the State Department to help spring them the following day.
Or if the Gulf News story is wrong, the US Embassy should ask that the record be corrected immediately. But doesn’t look that way. Not a word. In fact the American Embassy webpage in Dubai highlights aid to Lebanon, its upcoming Empost Express Visa Passback Service and Orientation for UAE Ministry of Higher Education-funded students leaving to study in the U.S. suggesting that all is well in the student and nonimmigrant visa issuance categories. The latest U.S. Embassy Dubai press release was issued June 12 and relates to breast cancer awareness. Nothing is included in the State Department's only press briefing posted after August 21. Clearly the Department has no interest in making the Al Sha’ali issue public – and none of the media present raised it themselves.
State’s help in springing the Al Sha’alis from the clutches of DHS, however, didn’t mean the family could enter the U.S. and proceed to campus for fall semester. Their choice was to board a plane for home or remain in detention for two weeks at LAX for whatever unspecified reason. The DHS concession to State seems to be that the family was told that if they did go home they could apply for a new visa at the U.S. Embassy in Dubai as opposed to being banned from the US for life (or who knows what).
Huh? Even so, isn’t that just a little off-putting? To be subjected to the same treatment - or worse – at the airport again after a long expensive flight with three kids? After all, the Al Sha’ali family would already have had valid visas issued by the Embassy before the airline would have ever let them board the plane to fly to the U.S. on August 21. What’s to guarantee that Customs and Border Protection would receive them anymore more hospitably in the future?
An Arab media field day
So what you would do if you were in their shoes? I’d return home too as they did. But then they, as well as Sha’ali’s father, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Ajman University, told the story to the UAE media which, not surprisingly has run it day after day in Arabic and English since their return. This makes for great public diplomacy. Not.
I realize it can be difficult distinguishing between Arabs and Arabs or among members of any ethnic group who tend to resemble one another and speak the same language, and I don’t expect U.S. immigration officials to speak Arabic to make the challenge any easier. After all, far too few State Department officials even know the difficult language at a reasonably fluent level.
But wouldn’t a phone call in English to the university have sufficed to authenticate the family’s bona fides if the immigration officer had qualms over identity or intent? It’s not as if this graduate student and his family would have been unknown at Claremont – or given Al Sha’ali’s father’s eminent position in the UAE - at the U.S. Embassy in Dubai either.
This is not the first time I’ve heard that DHS has over-zealously detained, harassed or embarrassed apparently innocent foreigners traveling to or in these fine post-9/11 United States. Remember the eminent Indian scientist who was refused a visa to attend a scientific conference in Florida last winter? DHS over-reaction also – by the way – has "embraced" even a few visitors invited here as a guests of the U.S. government as recently as this past spring.
It’s just surprising to me that such stories have remained out of the media’s eye. Or maybe the stories were published overseas, but like Al Sha’alis ignored by the US media which prefers to expend space on “fun” stories – like some latest film star’s antics – or Cheney’s defense of W’s record on the “war on terror” to pump up the faithful in this election year before one of his few remaining natural audiences – the VFW.
Years ago I remember the Soviets creating similar problems for a few American scholars on the official US-USSR exchange programs but I don’t recall any American exchange student, researcher or lecturer being denied entry at the airport. In one instance, it was clear that the only “crime” an American researcher had committed was his name – which because of its proximity to that of a Bible belt university - must have set off all sorts of alarm bells for all the wrong reasons at KGB headquarters. But the Soviet approach was to refuse to issue the visa - not wait until the person was literally on their doorstep to slam the door.
Even a "bad hair" day is no excuse
It’s not exactly as if the U.S. hasn’t gone down this route before – and with the large number of arrivals at our international airports – it’s understandable that officials must have "bad hair" days and particularly one only eleven days after the Pakistani terrorist plot was unveiled in London. But I thought the post-9/11 inter-agency coordinated data tracking systems were supposed to reduce such problems substantially - or why was so much money invested in them? Maybe, however, that’s asking too much. Nevertheless, bureaucracy doesn’t have to operate this way.
Yet why has the U.S. media – including the home town Los Angeles Times, the home state San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times and the Washington Post – failed to report this story? I would think it would have rated at least a mention in the LA Times but if so, I couldn’t find it. Did the paper investigate it – and turn up short? Was the Times news staff satisfied with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Los Angeles Field Office’s clamshell statement that was released to and printed in the Gulf News? And why has Claremont remained silent? Is it trying to work something out behind the scenes? Or what?
The American media can spend column yards on stories like the nut case who claimed to be connected to the JonBennet Ramsey murder only to be released a couple of days later because his story did not compute. But how often are Americans informed by their press that DHS may have made mistakes that will exacerbate our image problem abroad even further?
Isn’t something wrong with this picture?
Oh, in case you're wondering, the terrorist suspect detained by UAE security last winter at the Dubai airport before boarding a plane was Algerian.