Power, Visas, and the Politics of Exclusion: How Borders Are Being Used to Silence Dissent

Around the world, a troubling pattern seems to be emerging: governments are increasingly using immigration controls not simply to manage borders, but to suppress political dissent and freedom of expression. 

From the United States to Israel, Hong Kong to Nicaragua, the use of visa denials based on political beliefs is fast becoming the favoured tool of exclusion. Politicians, journalists, and students who speak out – particularly in support of Palestinian rights — are facing revocations of status, refusals of entry, and, in some cases, deportation.

In the US, over 300 international students have reportedly had their visas revoked, many from well-known universities such as Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford. These removals are often justified under vague claims of posing a “threat to US foreign policy,” a classification that increasingly appears to mean “pro-Palestinian speech”. 

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate, had his visa revoked after joining pro-Gaza protests. The revocation, and that of others, draws upon a Cold War-era statute allowing visa cancellations on foreign policy grounds, even in the absence of any criminal wrongdoing.

Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-born co-president of Columbia’s Palestinian Students Union, was arrested by ICE agents during what should have been his US citizenship interview. And then there is the case of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor deported from the US (despite a federal judge’s ruling to halt it) for attending the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, progressive Jewish groups and synagogues across the United States have rallied in support of students like Mahdawi, Khalil, and Rumeysa Ozturk — a Tufts University graduate detained after co-authoring an essay critical of Israel. They have condemned the government’s actions as both unconstitutional and antithetical to Jewish values, warning of a creeping authoritarianism masked as national security.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, America’s actions seemed to have emboldened others. Israel, on April 6, denied British MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang entry while they were attempting to visit the occupied West Bank. The MPs stood accused of planning to spread “hate speech”. 

In Hong Kong, a similar story unfolds. On 13 April 2025, Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse was detained for several hours at Hong Kong airport before being deported. Hobhouse, a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), has been an outspoken critic of China’s human rights record. 

These actions, occurring across various nations and to those from the so-called ‘Global North’ is not — as in the past — against dispossessed and ‘unwelcome poor’ migrants.

This new turn represents not just the closing of borders but the deliberate exclusion of dissenting voices of power. It’s a shift fuelled by counter-narratives that delegitimise truth itself (“journalists/academics can’t be trusted”) and signals a broader cultural and political move away from a rules-based order and open debate.

In an age where there is a veneered truth that freedom of speech is ubiquitous and ever-present on social media, the state is no longer merely regulating the behaviour of its citizens but asserting control over who may speak, who may enter, and who may challenge its narrative. 

In recent years, this author has been refused a Rwandan journalist visa to report on the killings of refugees by their police there. And in 2024, I was refused entry to Nicaragua amid a crackdown of over 1,600 journalists and civil society organisations.

My attempts to visit Gaza to report on human rights abuses there have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been unsuccessful. My open letter — published in Byline Times — asking if I was also at risk of being arrested by the United States for working with Julian Assange as part of my investigative journalism collaborations with WikiLeaks, went unanswered.

And an academic conference I was meant to attend in Washington next month on the issue of gun violence has been turned into a virtual meeting after participants refused to travel to the US, fearing complications at border control.

In a telling echo of these dynamics, Byline Times has learned that a leading Australian scholar was not only pressured to change the title of a conference session on digital equity, but was later reported to US authorities by a fellow academic for allegedly violating federal guidance.

Professor Israr Qureshi of the Australian National University had proposed a mini-track (sub-sessional) panel at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) titled, From Digital Divide to Digital Literacy, Equity and Inclusion.

The session aimed to explore how artificial intelligence, intersectionality, and digital policy affect access to technology for marginalised communities. However, following recent US government guidance discouraging the use of terms such as “diversity”, “equity”, and “inclusion” (DEI) in federally funded events, Qureshi and his fellow convenors were asked to reword the session title.

When Qureshi voiced his concerns about this on LinkedIn, he was publicly challenged by Dr Michael Lissack, a former president of the American Society for Cybernetics. Lissack accused Qureshi of showing “a lack of respect for the US” and went so far as to report him to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“Visiting the US is a privilege,” Lissack told Qureshi. “Perhaps one that some of you should no longer enjoy.”

In a separate message to Byline Times, Lissack said: “Foreigners who want to come to the US to promote DEI should be denied admission, as their intention is to spread what many of us regard as hate.”

Qureshi, in protest at the requested rewording and the backlash that followed, has withdrawn from the HICSS session altogether. He confirmed to Byline Times: “I have respectfully withdrawn my name from the mini-track in protest, and will no longer be involved in it moving forward.”

This is not merely a foreboding of things to come; we are already witnessing a significant erosion of academic freedom. When universities begin to placate political forces out of fear of retaliation, they cross a dangerous threshold

Professor Israr Qureshi, Australian National University

Lissack, for his part, defended his actions as a defence of US law, dismissing this publication’s coverage as “political activism, not journalism.” He insisted that using DEI language in connection with federally funded academic events was “illegal” and claimed that Qureshi’s insistence on such terminology endangered the University of Hawaii’s public funding. However, it is understood that the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is funded through participant fees rather than federal grants. While some participants may receive financial support from their home institutions — many of which are based outside the United States — the conference itself is not directly federally funded.

This clash seems a small example of how “states of exception” — a concept coined by philosopher Giorgio Agamben and, in this case, the subtle limiting of academic speech — are no longer the domain of authoritarian overreach but are fast becoming embedded in the cultural fabric of democratic societies.

These are new conditions under which normal legal protections are quietly suspended in favour of political expediency: the censoring of speech, the targeting of foreigners, and the slow closure of intellectual spaces.

So what began as an academic discussion about digital inclusion might also be seen as an international warning sign — where scholarly inquiry is no longer merely discouraged but may soon come with the risk of reprisal at the border. And today this seems more part of a deliberate strategy to maintain control over discourse. Because, in an era where media saturation and digital interconnectedness have often seemingly blurred borders, the greatest power now lies in the refusal to allow access to real spaces of influence.

In this way, the greatest shift has been to the politics of exclusion. Borders are becoming rigid, tariffs are being laid down and words are being policed: not just in geographical terms but in terms of ideology. The architecture of globalisation is being replaced by the walls of control. Power no longer is emboldened by its self-confident ability to assimilate diverse ideas, but is rather defined by its capacity to keep out those who threaten the dominant narrative. 

Borders, once the spaces between nations, are now the frontlines of silencing.