Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Last year, Australian Sue Smethurst was stopped by immigration officers at LAX, questioned, handcuffed, body-searched, held in a detention center for 15 hours, and then sent back on a long flight home. Was she plotting a terrorist attack? Now, she was coming to interview Olivia Newton-John. But she lacked what is known as the Information Visa or I-Visa. The law requiring I-Visas, which applies to journalists only, has long been on the books, but rarely enforced. The Committee to Protect Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors -- ASNE, for short -- say the detention and expulsion of some 20 journalists so far sends the wrong message to the world, and they've asked Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to reconsider the policy. Kevin Goldberg, ASNE's legal counsel, says the I-Visa is an outdated relic of the Cold War.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Well, it has its origins in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which in turn was part of the McCarran-Walter Act -- something that a lot of people actually have called the precursor to the USA Patriot Act. Its purpose was basically to allow for greater surveillance of subversives entering the United States. The Department of Homeland Security only began enforcing the requirement for an I-Visa in the past 18 months, and it did not exactly trumpet the fact that it was going to start requiring these visas again. So nobody really knew what was going on.
BOB GARFIELD: There's also the practical matter of covering the news. It's virtually impossible to deploy journalists to the United States in a timely fashion when you're, you know, waiting X number of months for your I-Visa to be approved.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Those journalists have to first make an interview with the U.S. Consulate overseas, attend that interview with a consular officer, and be approved. If the visa officer is having a bad day, he or she can simply deny your application, and you do not get to appeal that process. As I understand it right now, it is about a four week waiting process from the time you ask for your interview until you get your documents to enter the United States.
BOB GARFIELD: Let's go right to a second horror story --that of Elena Lappin, a reporter from The Guardian in United Kingdom.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Ms. Lappin committed the crime, basically, of being honest and admitting she was a journalist who was coming here to do some work, and for her effort she was handcuffed, detained for about 48 hours, and then summarily deported without any hearing.
BOB GARFIELD: Are we just whining about this? Is this a relatively small matter of complying with the immigration law, and you know, why should anyone make a special exception for journalists just because they're journalists?
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Well, I think the point is that the journalists are being specially excepted just because they're journalists. Any other citizen of one of the countries with whom the United States participates in the Visa Waiver Program -- 27 countries, to be exact -- is allowed to enter the United States for up to 90 days without obtaining a visa. So the point is that journalists are actually forced to do this.
BOB GARFIELD: It's also, I guess, worth observing that the journalists who have been denied admission are not coming in from North Korea and Cuba and Iran but the friendliest countries.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Exactly. These are the countries that we expect to be able to travel to freely, and we expect their citizens to travel to the United States freely. What's really interesting is that the citizens of the countries participating in the Visa Waiver Program that have otherwise been excluded from the use of the visa waiver are very defined classes, such as people with highly-communicable diseases or criminals, and essentially what we're doing is lumping journalists into that same category.
BOB GARFIELD: Well if this is just a case, then, of enforcing a long on the books but long since outdated law because we happen to be tightening security at all points of entry, isn't it a simple matter of changing the policy?
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Well, that would be the easiest way to do it, and in fact a bill has been introduced in Congress to do that - HR 4823, which was introduced by Representative Zoe Lofgren of California. It seems the most direct route to change this. But the problem also is a greater mindset in which we've seen discrimination against journalists in many areas.
BOB GARFIELD: What about the Bush administration? It could fix the problem pretty quickly too by simply having the Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, issue a memo to border agents saying, you know, back off.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: In fact, the Department of Homeland Security did state a few weeks ago that journalists who were ignorant of the I-Visa requirement would be allowed one free entry into the United States. But the second time, that person would be arrested, cuffed, detained, deported. It's just an embarrassing situation for the United States government to see journalists treated as criminals when the only weapon they're wielding is a pen is quite scary.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay. Well, Kevin, thanks very much.
KEVIN GOLDBERG: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Kevin Goldberg is legal counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He spoke to us from NPR studios in Washington. [MUSIC]