Stopping ideas at the border.

The University of Notre Dame invited the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in January 2004 to leave his home in Switzerland and become a tenured professor in South Bend. In Europe, Ramadan enjoys a reputation as a leading Muslim scholar, with such works as Western Muslims and the Future of Islam and Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.

He was no stranger to the United States. He'd given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. And he'd spoken at the Clinton Presidential Foundation.

He was excited about the opportunity Notre Dame offered, and so he got a visa on May 5, 2004. He and his family rented an apartment in South Bend. He shipped his belongings there, and he enrolled his children in school.

But they never attended school in Indiana, and the family never lived in the South Bend apartment.

"On July 28, 2004, a little over a week before my family and I were to move to Indiana so that I could begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame, the United States embassy in Bern informed me by telephone that my visa had been revoked," Ramadan declared in a lawsuit filed against Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I was astonished by the government's decision to revoke my visa. While I have sometimes criticized specific United States policies, I am not anti-American, and I have certainly never endorsed or espoused terrorism."

The ACLU, the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center filed the lawsuit on the grounds that the denial of Ramadan's visa was preventing their members from meeting with him and hearing his views, "in violation of their First Amendment rights."

Ramadan is an unlikely threat.

Just two days after 9/11, he wrote an open letter to Muslims. "You know as I know that some Muslims can use Islam to justify the killing of an American, a Jew, or a Christian only because he/she is an American, Jew, or a Christian; you have to condemn them and condemn these attacks." One month later, at a meeting sponsored by a Muslim magazine in Paris, he said, "You're unjustified if you use the Koran to justify murder." And on the first anniversary of 9/11, he was one of 199 Muslim signatories to the "Statement Rejecting Terrorism."

In September 2005, Ramadan reapplied for a visa at the urging, he says, of academic groups that wanted to meet with him. The government sat on his application. The U.S. embassy in Switzerland usually gives an answer "within thirty days of application," according to the State Department website. But Ramadan was told on December 2 that he might not find out for close to two years.

On April 13, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Jones told Federal Judge Paul Crotty that the government could not give a specific timetable for deciding on Ramadan's visa application. While denying that Ramadan was excluded on ideological grounds, Jones said, "Professor Ramadan, tomorrow, could endorse or espouse terrorism."

Judge Crotty, who noted that Ramadan has "consistently spoken out against terrorism and radical Islamists," was not impressed with that argument.

"Allowing the government to wait for 'possible future discovery of statements' would mean that the government could delay final adjudication indefinitely, evading constitutional review by its own failure to render a decision on Ramadan's application," he ruled on June 23. He called into question the legality of excluding people on the basis of their speech.

"While the Executive may exclude an alien for almost any reason," Judge Crotty ruled, "it cannot do so solely because the Executive disagrees with the content of the alien's speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience." Crotty told the government to make a decision on Ramadan's visa application in a timely fashion.

On September 21, Ramadan received a letter from the U.S. government denying him the visa. "The State Department cites my having donated about 600 Euros to two humanitarian organizations (in fact, a French organization and its Swiss chapter) serving the Palestinian people," Ramadan said in a statement. "I donated to these organizations for the same reason that countless Europeans--and Americans, for that matter--donate to Palestinian causes: not to provide funding for terrorism, but because I wanted to provide humanitarian aid to people who are desperately in need of it."

Ramadan, who notified the State Department of his donations, believes they are a pretext. "The U.S. government's real fear is of my ideas," he wrote, citing his criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East, the Iraq War, and Bush's hostility to civil liberties. "I am saddened to be excluded from the United States. I am saddened, too, however, that the United States government has become afraid of ideas and that it reacts to its critics not by engaging them but by suppressing, stigmatizing, and excluding them."

Ramadan is currently a research fellow at Oxford.

Greece may be the birthplace of democracy, but a Marxist Greek professor was prohibited from entering our own democracy earlier this year.

John Milios teaches political economy and the history of economic thought at the National Technical University in Athens. He was invited to present a paper at a conference at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He accepted the invitation to address the June 8-10 conference, "How Class Works."

Though he had a valid visa, and though he had used it five times before to enter the United States, most recently in 2003, Milios didn't get in this time.

When he arrived at JFK on June 8, he knew something was up "from the first moment that the Border Police officer checked my passport and visa and told me that there must be some 'technical problems' with my papers," he tells me by e-mail. "After five hours of waiting, I was informed by the Border Police officer that two federal agents had come to question me. They asked me two kinds of questions: First, rather typical questions related to who I am (name, age, profession, marital status, reason for traveling to the USA, etc). Second, questions about my political ideas and affiliations."

Eventually, one of the federal agents told him "he does not have any problem with me," Milios recalls. But at that point, a Homeland Security officer told him that "due to technical discrepancies, my visa should be cancelled."

They put him on the next flight back.

"Before sending me home, they photocopied everything that I had in my wallet (including credit cards), and they took my fingerprints from all ten fingers," he says.

Milios is outraged at his treatment.

"I find the whole incident ridiculous," he says. "Who is afraid of my research work and ideas? Why should overseas Marxist research not be discussed with American citizens in the USA? I am startled and astonished!"

Lucille Cirillo is a spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection. "Based on information provided by the State Department, Milios was determined not to be admissible into the United States," she says.

"This seems to be another instance of ideological exclusion," says Jameel Jaffer, who was lead counsel for the ACLU in the Ramadan case. Jaffer notes that Section 411 of the USA Patriot Act allows the government to bar from this country those "who endorse or espouse terrorist activity." Jaffer cites a State Department manual that interprets this to mean that people can be excluded for "irresponsible expressions of opinion."

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive. For a compendium of McCarthyism Watch stories, go to www.progressive.org.