The Dispatch: A New McCarthyism

wo years ago, I moved to the United States to found a think tank devoted to defending global free expression. What better place to launch than America, which is, according to the law professor and First Amendment expert Lee Bollinger, “the most speech protective of any nation on Earth, now or throughout history”?

Despite being Danish, I’ve always found America’s civil-libertarian free speech tradition more appealing than the Old World’s model, with its vague terms and conditions. For much of my career, I’ve been evangelizing a First Amendment approach to free speech to skeptical Europeans and doubtful Americans, who are often tempted by laws banning “hate speech,” “extremism,” and “disinformation.” That appreciation for the First Amendment is something I share with many foreigners—Germans, Iranians, Russians—who now call America home. For some of us, that tradition has become a kind of secular article of faith—the realization of which not only offers a sense of identity, but also a rite of passage into American ideals. Indeed, many of us noncitizens nodded in agreement in February when Vice President J.D. Vance said that European speech restrictions are “shocking to American ears.”

But the very ideal that so many of us noncitizens cherish as America’s “first freedom” is now being curtailed. The administration is invoking a clause of the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the secretary of state unfettered discretion to deport aliens, including anyone he believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This new scheme has begun with the detaining of foreign students—including visa and green card holders—for allegedly antisemitic speech.

Combating antisemitism is an important and legitimate government interest, and both Americans and noncitizens are safer when bigotry is confronted. But for six decades America has prohibited censorship and relied on counterspeech as the main bulwark against hatred, not least because leading Jewish and black civil rights groups have long recognized the danger of giving the government power over speech. Had the administration focused on noncitizens engaged in illegal or seriously disruptive conduct targeting Jewish students—which clearly occurred on some campuses after the October 7 terrorist Hamas attacks—few could have objected.

But it’s now clear that the government is targeting noncitizens for ideas and speech protected by the First Amendment.