The Deportation of Dissent

Parrhesia or paranoia? From Aristotle to Hitchens, history sides with openness. Will America?

From left to right: Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Christopher Hitchens, and Thomas Paine. Graphic includes CC images by José Ramírez and Barbara Niggle Radloff.

The Department of Homeland Security recently announced that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would begin screening the social media posts of “aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status,” as well as foreign students and others affiliated with educational institutions deemed linked to antisemitic activity. In particular, USCIS will deny benefits to applicants whose posts indicate support for “antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic activity.”

This move follows several high-profile cases where foreign students — including visa and Green Card holders — were detained, seemingly for their speech or beliefs. This includes a Turkish student at Tufts University, who was seemingly targeted for co-authoring a student newspaper op-ed calling for a boycott of Israel, despite no evidence that she supported terrorism or expressed antisemitism.

The Trump administration is invoking a clause of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the Secretary of State broad discretion to deport anyone he believes “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” As such, a recently released memo detailing the government’s case against the most prominent of the activists, Mahmoud Khalil, refrains from charging him with any crime. On Friday, a Louisiana immigration judge upheld the Government’s decision to deport Khalil. Constitutional scholars debate whether and to what extent the First Amendment protects noncitizens in such cases, and the Supreme Court may eventually weigh in.

But the question is not only constitutional — it is foundational. Is deporting foreigners for expressing disfavored views compatible with a robust commitment to a culture of free speech?

As it turns out, history has a lot to tell us about states that exclude foreigners with controversial opinions and those that welcome non-native dissenters.

From Athenian Democracy to The Dutch Republic

The history of free speech starts in Athens. The ancient democracy of 5th- and 4th-century BCE Athens was home to an array of prominent philosophers. Aristotle, Epicurus, and Diogenes were all non-native Athenian residents, but they embraced Athens’s commitment to Parrhesia — fearless speech — which was essential to the Athenian conception of democracy.

Aristotle and Epicurus set up schools that taught strands of philosophy that often clashed with popular Athenian thought. Aristotle was openly critical of many of the aspects of the very democracy that allowed him to philosophize. In his famous “funeral oration” speech, Pericles, the 5th-century BCE general and politician, not only held up Athens as an example of democratic deliberation and free inquiry, but he also lauded the city’s openness to foreigners as a sign of its strength and vitality — a stark contrast to its closed and paranoid rivals in Sparta. Athenians, Pericles said:

“throw open [their] city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing [their customs].”

Athens’s openness encouraged the migration of talented scholars and intellectuals, like Herodotus and Protagoras, who championed the city’s values despite their foreign background. Without Athens’s openness to foreign philosophers, thinkers, and ideas, it is very likely that what we today view as the original epicenter of Western philosophy would have been greatly stunted. This Athenian spirit of openness — even to foreign critics of its democracy — would prove foundational not just to Western philosophy but to a broader tradition of societies that grew stronger by welcoming dissenting outsiders. That tradition did not end in antiquity.

As the era of Classical Antiquity that Athens helped bring about faded, the intellectual torch passed eastward. In the Islamic Golden Age, immigrant scholars and freethinkers advanced bold ideas. In the 9th century, the Abbasid Caliphs — headquartered in Baghdad — translated almost all ancient Greek writings into Arabic, leading to a rebirth of scientific and philosophical inquiry preceding and contributing to the 12th Century Renaissance in Western Christendom.

Jews, Nestorian Christians fleeing persecution, and non-Arabs were crucial to this achievement, which cultivated a pantheon of deeply influential polymaths advancing philosophy, science, astronomy, and medicine. A comparatively permissive intellectual climate also allowed heterodox thinkers like the Persians Ibn al-Rawandi and al-Razi to voice doubts about prophecy and miracles —the latter could even declare that reason is “the ultimate authority, which should govern and not be governed; should control and not be controlled, should lead and not be led.”

With time, Medieval Europe also developed its share of advocates for the freedom to teach philosophy. Roving bands of curious scholars, whose thirst for new knowledge and ideas could not be quenched by papal decrees, traversed Europe’s growing list of universities in search of free inquiry. When the University of Paris banned the works of Aristotle, rival universities like the University of Oxford and Cambridge welcomed dissident scholars, who flocked to institutions that allowed academic freedom. Soon, Aristotelianism was transformed from heresy to orthodoxy, greatly enriching European philosophy and scientific inquiry.

Moving to the Early Modern period, the Mughal ruler Akbar the Great abandoned Islamic dogmatism and governed India under the ideology of “Sulh-i Kul,” a Persian expression meaning “universal peace.” In the words of Akbar’s chief historian, Sulh-i Kul replaced “the darkness of the age by the light of universal toleration.” Akbar’s court gathered Iranian Sufis and philosophers fleeing the Safavids while sponsoring debates between Hindus, Catholic Jesuits, Zoroastrians, Jains, Shi’a, and Sunni Muslims in the “House of Worship,” a kind of proto-theological think-tank.

Thomas Coryat, a bigoted 17th-century English captain, pushed the boundaries of Mughal tolerance when he openly vilified first Muhammad and then the Qur’an during the Muslim call to prayer. Remarkably, Mughal authorities took no action, and he later admitted that “in the Mogols dominions a Christian may speake much more freely then hee can in any other Mahometan country in the world.”

During the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a cosmopolitan culture with a comparatively high degree of tolerance and free speech—and became an early modern epicenter of art, learning, publishing, philosophy, and science. Dutch liberty eventually transformed the Republic into a foundation for Enlightenment liberalism — in no small part by embracing migrants whose ideas were too dangerous for their homelands.

Among those welcomed by the Dutch were Jews and Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in Portugal and France, respectively. So it’s not a coincidence that two of the Dutch Republic’s most prominent champions of free speech were descendants of these very persecuted groups.

In 1670, the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza published his (in)famous Theological-Political Treatise, which firmly asserted “in a free state everyone is at liberty to think as he pleases, and to say what he thinks.” He held up seventeenth-century Amsterdam as a model to follow, stating that in “this most flourishing republic and noble city, men of every nation, and creed, and sect live together in the utmost harmony.”

In the 18th century Elie Luzac, a descendant of French Huguenots refugees, became the most prominent printer of Enlightenment texts, and, despite being a pious Calvinist, vigorously defended the free speech of atheists: “we cannot take pride in the power of persuasion of the most important truths, as long as we prevent atheists, freethinkers, and others of that ilk from brandishing their pen.”

Other prominent figures who sought refuge in the Dutch Republic include the famous English proto-liberal John Locke — who fittingly wrote his defense of religious tolerance, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in his Dutch exile — and the famous French philosopher Rene Descartes. The French philosopher and refugee Pierre Bayle extolled the Republic as having “an advantage found in no other country: there is such liberty of printing that writers from all Europe turn to Holland when they have difficulty in obtaining a license for their publications.”

To be sure, both Spinoza and Bayle severely tested the limits of Dutch tolerance and free speech. Yet, the comparative openness of the Dutch Republic resulted in a population that read more books and had higher degrees of literacy than anywhere else in Europe. The Dutch also launched the first weekly newspapers in Europe, creating “a culture of all-pervasive and unremitting debate in which all segments of society took part.”

What Athens was for Western philosophy, the Dutch Republic was for the early Enlightenment, and the contributions of foreigners and their ideas cannot be overlooked.

America: Immigrants Test and Shape A Robust Commitment to Free Speech

Early Enlightenment ideals were slow to make their way across the Atlantic, but once Americans caught on, free speech reached a fever pitch in the New World. And immigrants would play a key role in erecting the “Bulwark of Liberty”.

A key moment occurred in 1735 with the trial for seditious libel against John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant and the printer of America’s first opposition newspaper that repeatedly called out the corruption of New York’s governor. Formally, the case was very simple: criticizing and mocking government officials was a crime, and truth was not a defense. But the Scottish lawyer Andrew Hamilton persuaded a jury of New Yorkers to find in favour of Zenger. Hamilton’s closing remarks emphasized that:

“Nature and the Laws of our Country have given us a Right—the Liberty—both of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power . . . by speaking and writing Truth.”

The jury agreed and extended that right beyond its accepted legal application, even to an immigrant like Zenger. The Zenger case all but ended seditious libel prosecutions in colonial courts. The case was publicized all over America and cited with every new free press controversy, and in its wake, popular opinion swung so far in favor of an expanded right to freedom of speech that colonial governors could no longer rely on juries to punish dissent. The freeing of the American press had enormous consequences for the waves of revolutionary dissent that would wash across colonial America in the coming decades.

One of the most consequential texts was written by a British corset maker who had only arrived in America in 1774. Yet Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” may have sold up to 75,000 copies and helped push indecisive Americans toward independence. John Adams, no fan of Paine, later lamented that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.”

Despite the adoption of the First Amendment, free speech was contested in the early Republic. In 1798 Congress adopted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious writings” against the U.S. government and empowered the President to order the deportation of non-citizens from friendly countries whom he deemed to be “dangerous to the peace and safety” of the U.S. or had “reasonable grounds to suspect are concerned in any treasonable or secret machinations against the government.”

As war with France loomed, the Federalist Party, led by President John Adams, specifically targeted noncitizens due to their involvement in the Democratic-Republican opposition press and their French sympathies. Only three formal deportation orders were signed, but, in conjunction with the Sedition Act, it constituted a formidable instrument of intimidation that led several foreigners to self-deport, go into hiding, or self-censor. Even so, Alexander Hamilton, also a Federalist, fumed that the Act was not more vigorously enforced:

“Renegade Aliens conduct more than one of the most incendiary presses in the States—and yet in open contempt and defiance of the laws they are permitted to continue their destructive labours. Why are they not sent away?”

The Alien and Sedition Acts were not defeated in court but by the American people, who handed Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans a resounding victory in the elections of 1800. The opposition centered on criticism of the Alien and Sedition Acts, with the Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison offering some of the most biting criticism. Jefferson called the Alien Act “a most detestable thing…worthy of the 8th or 9th century” and warned that targeting “the friendless alien” was merely the government’s first step and that inevitably — “the citizen will soon follow.”

Madison wrote a comprehensive report arguing that both the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional, raising a number of objections that are highly relevant to the wave of deportations launched by the Trump administration more than two centuries later. Madison objected to the sweeping executive powers embedded in the Alien Act, pointing out that its vague provisions “can never be mistaken for legal rules or certain definitions” and that “they leave everything to the President. His will is the law.”

To Madison, the Act vested executive, legislative, and judicial power in the President, and therefore “subvert[ed] the general principles of free government.” Madison was equally scathing of the argument that the Alien Act was a preventative measure, not a penal sanction:

“If the banishment of an alien from a country into which he has been invited, as the asylum most auspicious to his happiness; a country, where he may have formed the most tender of connections, where he may have vested his entire property …where he enjoys under the laws, a greater share of the blessings of personal security and personal liberty, than he can elsewhere hope for; if a banishment of this sort be not a punishment, and among the severest of punishments, it will be difficult to imagine a doom to which the name can be applied.”

Madison then gave short shrift to the argument that just “because the admission of an alien is a favor, the favor may be revoked at pleasure.” To Madison, once admitted to the U.S., an alien from a friendly nation had obtained a right to stay. Most crucially, Madison challenged the contention that the constitution did not protect the rights of aliens.

History vindicated Madison and Jefferson’s belief in protecting immigrants’ rights to free speech: so long as the nation remained open, free speech flourished. In fact, immigrants had a strong role in cementing foundational free speech protections in the 20th century. While the First Amendment should have established strong free speech protections at the nation’s founding, the Alien and Sedition Acts highlight the difficulty of living up to that promise.

History would repeat itself. As late as World War I, communists were sentenced to years in prison for distributing anti-draft pamphlets, while alien radicals were deported for their political activity. It was only Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis’s famous dissent in Abrams v United States that inspired later jurisprudence to move past restrictive readings of the First Amendment to allow speech, even if the majority considers it objectionable.

In fact, Abrams is a powerful example of the connection between immigration and free speech. The defendants were Russian-born Socialist Jews who had distributed pamphlets arguing against American involvement against the Bolshevik side in the Russian civil war. One of the people who influenced Wendell Holmes to change his mind was British Jewish intellectual Harold Laski, who was an instructor at Harvard University. However, Laski ultimately left Harvard after a campaign from faculty, administrators, and alumni to have him fired for his pro-union views. Much of the outrage levelled at Laski was more than tinged with anti-semitism. Laski’s plight played a significant role in convincing Holmes that laws targeting “sedition” could just as easily scapegoat any kind of opinion unpopular by intolerant majorities, such as democratic socialism espoused by a foreign Jew like Laski.

In the 20th century, America served as a refuge for persecuted European luminaries fleeing the Third Reich. Many of these individuals would go on to contribute significantly to science, culture, politics, and literature. But they also had critical perspectives and controversial ideas.

Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933. In the U.S., he contributed to the Allied victory and condemned the McCarthy hearings as an affront to civil liberties. He also held views on the future of the Middle East that might well be considered highly controversial today. In 1938, two years before he had received American citizenship, he stated his belief that the “essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.”

Another German Jew, Hannah Arendt, made seminal contributions to America’s self-understanding as a free country in On Revolution. In 1944, seven years before she became a U.S. citizen, she had criticized the Atlantic City Resolution of the Annual Convention of the Zionist Organization of America, objecting that “the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-class citizenship.”

While these statements were made prior to the establishment of Israel, had Einstein and Arendt expressed such opinions in the context of modern-day America or Europe, they could arguably have been targeted by laws and policies that include very vague and broad definitions of anti-semitism, including criticism of Israel.

There’s always the temptation to treat current controversies as unique and, therefore, necessitating actions that were not justified under normal circumstances. Understandably, American Jews are horrified by the reactions on college campuses after October 7th, which have sometimes delved into antisemitism and glorification of mass killings of civilians. There have also been instances of vandalism, harassment, and violence that do, in fact, warrant legal consequences and quite possibly deportation.

However, as Madison and Jefferson rightly warned, deporting aliens for mere speech based on unfettered executive discretion is incompatible with a country based on free expression and the rule of law. To quote Jefferson, deportations based on speech is an invitation for the government to selectively target dissenters who for “causes, good or bad, may be obnoxious to the views, or marked by the suspicions of the President, or be thought dangerous to his or their election, or other interests, public or personal.”

Christopher Hitchens spent decades in the US before becoming a citizen in 2007. This modern-day Tom Paine was a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy who, during the Iran-Contra affair, called President Reagan “a liar and trickster” and accused Israel of being America’s “chosen surrogate” to carry out “dirty work” and “terrorism.”

Hitchens was critical of Israel and Zionism: “I am an anti-Zionist. I’m one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians.” He was unforgiving towards Islam: “every Allahu Akbar reminds people that we’re in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion.” He also loathed Bill Clinton, whom he called “corrupt and selfish” and “almost psychopathically deceitful,” with a “creepily sadistic attitude and a willingness to bid for the racist subconscious” not to mention “complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.” While a supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, Hitchens accused the Bush administration of committing torture and signed on to a lawsuit against the administration’s surveillance of U.S. citizens.

If a student can be deported for writing an op-ed calling for the boycott of Israel in a student newspaper, any of Hitchens’ positions quoted above (and many others) could have been justified to deport him by at least four U.S. presidents. Yet, until recently, it was near unimaginable that visa-holders and permanent residents already admitted to the country would be targeted for constitutionally protected speech, however critical of the U.S. government or its policies.

Some may cheer the current targets, but when the political winds change, who will be next? Might not a U.S. administration committed to fighting “islamophobia” instead of anti-semitism have deported Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdie before they became citizens? Might not a future one deport Douglas Murray?

History teaches a simple lesson: societies that welcome dissenting outsiders tend to flourish — intellectually, culturally, and politically. Those that silence them in the name of vague security grounds or ideological purity often decay.

America now faces that same choice. Will it channel the spirit of Spinoza’s Amsterdam — open and pluralistic — or will it drift toward the brittle paranoia of Ancien Régime France, where orthodoxy crushed inquiry and fear trumped freedom?

From Zenger to Hitchens, from Abrams to Arendt, it has often been immigrants who tested the boundaries of the First Amendment — and in doing so, helped define its meaning. To now deport people for unpopular opinions is not merely a constitutional gray zone. It is a betrayal of the very idea that truth and progress emerge from argument, not conformity.

Silencing foreign voices won’t make America safer. It will make it smaller and less resilient. A confident, free nation doesn’t banish speech — it engages it.

---

Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also a senior fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media.

Hirad Mirami is a research assistant at The Future of Free Speech and a student at the University of Chicago studying economics and history.