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During the campaign, newly elected President Donald Trump once again floated his idea to introduce “extreme screening” of new immigrants. Now that he has been re-elected, he can try to make his idea a reality.
The Republican Party platform states that Trump wants to ‘keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America’. Although the newly elected president has not yet announced a practical procedure for how he intends to achieve this, he and his advisers would be wise to abandon the project altogether.
I myself am against communists, Marxists, and socialists, but I also know that “extreme” ideological vetting of immigrants is a fundamentally authoritarian practice, one that promotes the very ideas the policy claims to oppose. Rather than monitoring newcomers for ideas the administration may not like, the new Trump administration should continue the current system’s focus on vetting actual threats to national security.
Ideological screening is not merely an immigration policy that would influence newcomers. It is a concession of sweeping government power that would also affect American citizens by authorizing the government to control thought and decide which ideologies are correct, thereby abandoning core American values.
Vetting actual criminals and terrorists who engage in violent acts is legitimate and appropriate, and current federal law addresses that problem by filtering out members of authoritarian parties and terrorists, among other things, whose goal is to harm Americans.
But Trump’s policies go much further than that. It is partly to protect America from the places some immigrants come from: generally authoritarian, left-wing regimes that practice censorship and despise democracy. The belief is that immigrants will turn America into the places from which they escaped.
But foreign-born citizens typically come to America to enjoy its freedoms, not to recreate the regimes they fled. And people aren’t hardwired to think one way or another based on where they come from or their race, like Trump’s recent success with Latino voter shows.
New immigrants, despite what Trump and others do have claimeddo not have the power to vote, run for office, or effect concrete political change unless they are naturalized (a process that takes many years and is not mandatory). This fact makes ideological screening all the more relevant to American citizens who can already vote, get elected, and make real change. If the government becomes the thought police, it will ultimately be interested in rooting out supposedly evil ideas from the people who can actually bring about change – using tools like censorship and control of the press.
Freedom of speech and thought are fundamental American values, as evidenced by their protection in the Constitution. By denying them to immigrants, we betray our core principles. If we allowed the government to police these matters for immigrants, we would be giving up the universality of those rights, putting them at risk for Americans as well.
Many governments have claimed the authority to decide what the “right” ideas are, and to root out the “wrong” ideas. Some current examples are Venezuela, Cuba and China. All these regimes are based on mind control: they control the press and have destroyed dissent; she control what people can see and share online; and they have one monopoly about education to indoctrinate students. All this is in the name of protecting the government’s chosen ideology.
It is no coincidence that immigrants escape these regimes to live freely in America. But implementing ideological control would bring America much closer to the authoritarianism of those regimes.
There are people (both foreign and native) who hate America, and many aspire and try to hurt Americans, including by trying to interfere in elections or overthrow the government. The government has a duty to protect the rights of Americans by screening for foreign agents, terrorists, spies, and others who actively seek to harm America and its institutions.
But seeking to violate the rights of Americans through action and violence and to impose an idea is different from believing and expressing that idea, no matter how morally abhorrent or distorted we find such thoughts. The government must prevent people from attacking others or their property and violating their rights. In this way we can uphold and protect the freedom of individuals. That’s also part of what current law already does by turning away those who want to harm America.
Ideas have power, and bad ideas can be dangerous. But it is not the role of the government to eradicate them – it is the role of the citizens. It is the responsibility of every American to advocate against ideas they consider evil and to exclude those they consider immoral, to counter bad ideas with better ones, using the tools that a free society and the Constitution provide .
Americans must reject thought control and oppose on principle the extreme ideological vetting of immigrants if they want to preserve core American values.
Agustina Vergara Cid is an employee of Young Voices.
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