Thursday, October 26, 2006

Deny Iranian Visas?

Over at Deja Vu, Judith Klinghoffer has a provocative but ultimately shortsighted, solution to our Iran problem: "Stop Issuing Visas to Iranians."
Here is the lede:
I know of no sanction which would work as well. The Iranian regime survives because Iranians can escape them whenever they wish. Close the loophole and the pressure cooker would explode. Do remember 150,000-200,000 educated Iranians leave the their country every year. It is the largest brain drain in the world and, under normal circumstances, American benefits. But at this point the price is too high.

My problems with this solution are threefold:


1) Given that we have already declared Iran to be part of the "Axis of Evil," don't we then have a moral, and perhaps even a legal, responsibility to offer asylum from people who demonstrate that they want to escape what we apparently believe to be an apodictically evil regime? In other words, do we have the right to proclaim a regime not only evil, but among the most evil nations in the world, and then at the same time demand that people remain there and deny asylum to those who want to leave? Do we then say that ordinary folks who want to leave must instead wage revolution that will almost assuredly guarantee their deaths?
2) Klinghoffer presents the foundation of another problem: Educated Iranians want to leave, and their arrival in the United States is surely more of a boon than a bane to us. Isn't it cutting off our nose to spite our face to deny them entry into the United States?
3) If we do not help these people to leave, aren't we just fueling anti-American resentment among educated Iranians who, while they might not want to leave Iran, may also still be susceptible to movements that will fuel anti-Americanism of one stripe or another? And what of their children?


Denying people the option to leave a tyrannical state while at the same time expecting that they can simply forge a revolution is morally dubious, intellectually shortsighted, and potentially detrimental to US interests.

2 comments:

Thunderstick said...

Remember when they had the Evergreen Terrace garage sale and Homer sold that shirt that said "Ayatollah A**ahollah". That was a great episode.

dcat said...

When I was a kid at the time of the hostage crisis my Mom had a t-shirt that had Mickey Mouse giving the finger, under which were the words "Hey Iran!"