What Fear (or not) of Crossing Borders Says About the United States Today

Not long ago, traveling to the United States for business or academic purposes was a relatively simple matter for non-US citizens.  Perhaps more accurately, despite all of the complexities involved in obtaining the relevant documents, bookings, funding, and so on, there was at least one question that was so basic and obvious that it simply never came up: Will I be turned away at the border, or even detained for days, weeks, or months?

Those days are long gone, ending on January 20, 2025.  And although most of the Trump regime's activities are aimed at poor people and people who are not White Christians, there have been notable examples of people who do not fit the profile, including a 35-year-old Canadian actress who was held in detention for twelve days after applying for a temporary visa to work in the US.  She had no criminal record.

Similarly, a British couple in their sixties were both held in detention for 42 days, with the wife held even though only her husband's visa had expired.  The article linked in the previous sentence includes other examples, focusing on people who not only are not criminals but who might have had very good reason to think that their being fluent in English, White, and not poor would have kept them out of the dragnet set up by Trump upon reoccupying the White House.  (The British woman said: "Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that."  ICE denies that assertion, of course.)

Even short of being imprisoned, the stories of not-the-usual-suspects types of people being hassled (at best) started to make the rounds.  For example, "[a] French scientist was denied entry to the US this month [March 2025] after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister."  The scientist had flown here to attend an academic conference.

All of this set the background for a two-part column that I wrote last Fall here on Dorf on Law.  There, I described how the academic organization with which I am most familiar (the Law & Society Association, or LSA) had reacted to inquiries from scholars who are based outside of the United States, asking to be able to attend LSA's annual conference virtually.  Without repeating the details here, it is sufficient to say that the decision-makers at LSA handled the situation in both 2025 and 2026 very poorly, in the latter case refusing to provide even the wholly inadequate virtual option that it had thrown together the year before.

All of which communicated a clear message, in essence: If you want to attend the huge annual conference sponsored by an academic organization -- one that loudly and proudly bills itself as dedicated to "connecting sociolegal scholars from around the world" -- then you have to get on a plane and take your chances crossing the US border, because we are not going to give you an alternative. 

In Part 1 of my column discussing all of this, I added pointedly that

LSA is not an organization that makes merely pro forma claims about wanting to become a more international body.  It has, in fact, as a matter of policy held its conferences every few years in non-US cities.  True, those cities are not part of the Global South (with the lone exception of Mexico City in 2017), but the non-US conferences are explicitly part of the association's stated efforts to expand its conversation beyond only US-based scholars.

As it happens, LSA's next annual conference has now been announced, and it will be held in Hong Kong in June 2027.  I organize slates of tax-related, interdisciplinary sessions at the conference every year, so I sent out my annual email calling for submissions yesterday.  Here is what I wrote to my list of several hundred potential attendees:

For those of you who have been waiting for an opportunity to join us at a Law & Society Conference outside of the United States, I have good news for you!

The Law & Society Association (LSA) will host its next Global Meeting from June 22 to 26, 2027, in Hong Kong. ...

The good news that I mentioned above is that the conference will be in-person in Hong Kong from June 22-25, 2027. This means that those of you (actually "us," because this has affected me as well) who have quite reasonably worried about entering the US under the current policy situation will be able to attend the conference without having to worry about any of that.

For the record, LSA has added a unique virtual option for 2027, sticking with an in-person-only requirement for all but the final day of the conference, but then making that last day all virtual.  That, however, is not my focus here.

Instead, I want to share an emailed response that I received from a senior tax scholar in the UK, who articulated a point that I had thought about mentioning but chose not to include in my invitation email:

I can't help musing on how Hong Kong has apparently become more acceptable than the USA. I totally get your concerns about the USA, but last time I was in HK there were students and others on the streets protesting the lack of democracy and there are still people in prison who I don't think should be, plus many have fled to the UK amongst other places as a result of the politics in HK. But I know views differ.  

It does not affect me as I shall not be submitting anything or attending, but I did think it was worth mentioning this as I found it somewhat ironic.

Although I have no doubt that views differ, I am in complete agreement with what my colleague wrote.  It is indeed ironic that people have enough concerns about traveling to the United States with Trump in charge that the thought of going to Hong Kong somehow looks like (in my words) "good news" -- with an exclamation point.

Is this simply a matter of salience, with people like me seeing the US in a negative light merely because we are familiar with it and might be prone to overstating how bad the Trumpian style of authoritarianism is?  Possibly, but I think not.

First, there have been (and still are) many people being held in American prisons and detention centers who, in my colleague's phrasing, "I don't think should be."  The US under Trump is trying to seize and deport one million people per year, and many of them end up in prison or other detention, where many have died.  Some people were treated brutally for no other reason than having written or said things that the Administration dislikes.

In July of this year, more than half of ICE arrests were of people who had not been convicted of -- or even charged with -- a crime.  And even those who are not ultimately deported are subject to inhumane treatment, including conditions in detention that shock the conscience (of those people who have consciences).  I have not seen any comparisons between the US's treatment of wrongly seized people and how things are handled in Hong Kong, but at the very least, it is clear that the US is acting in ways that we once would have described as only imaginable under an authoritarian regime like China's.

Second, the audience for my email was specifically people who are not to my knowledge likely to be harassed or jailed when traveling to Hong Kong.  I will, of course, monitor this closely in the coming months, but the Chinese government simply does not seem to care about people who show up for a couple of days to attend professional events.  Again, however, I could be wrong.

Third, plenty of Americans have also fled to the UK and elsewhere, for what amounts to the same reasons that people in Hong Kong are fleeing what had been their home.

In any event, I write all of this to agree with what my British colleague wrote.  Indeed, I think it fair to imagine that she used the word "ironic" precisely because it has in fact become shockingly accurate to make the comparison.

People like me follow the minutiae of US news cycles, and we chase shiny objects like Trump's failing health, his obviously false promise to pay people $5000 each if Republicans win the midterms, gerrymandering, and so on.  But while all of those stories are important in their own ways, the touchstone when assessing the current government should be that the US now scares countless people to the point where they choose not to enter the country, even for something as bland as an academic meeting.

Most fundamentally, the country's immigration system has become a dystopian nightmare, a change in policy that was motivated by bigotry but is being pursued so maniacally that it can now be dangerous for anyone to be anywhere at any time.  No wonder people no longer want to be here. 

- Neil H. Buchanan