No, you don’t have a right to immigrate and support Hamas

Ron DeSantis is indisputably correct. “If any individuals who are chanting ‘there is only one solution’ and ‘intifada! intifada!’ are here on visas,” Florida’s governor posted on X on Tuesday, “those visas should be canceled and they should be deported.”

“There is no right for any foreign national to live in this country and advocate for terror,” he added.

An American citizen, of course, has the right to chant jihadist and anti-Semitic slogans to his heart’s content. That’s part of the price of keeping free speech sacred. We should guard our First Amendment protections jealously, especially in light of recent censorship efforts targeting conservatives.

But there is no affirmative right to immigrate. Repatriation of an alien to his country of origin is not a punishment akin to a fine or imprisonment. It is simply the consequence of enforcing the sovereignty of our nation and our determination to admit only immigrants of merit.

In response to DeSantis’ vow to deport Hamas-supporting foreign students, White House national security spokesman John Kirby decided that this administration supports free speech again this week.

“I would just tell you, you don’t have to agree with every sentiment as expressed in a free country like this to stand by the idea of the First Amendment and the idea of peaceful protest,” Kirby told reporters. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Terms and conditions apply

Kirby should leave it at that, because anything more would be an embarrassment. The fact is, the First Amendment has never protected a foreign national’s privilege to enter or remain in the country.

Justice James Iredell, one of the original members of the U.S. Supreme Court, expressed the principle behind the rights of foreign nationals this way:

Any alien coming to this country must or ought to know, that this being an independent nation, it has all the rights concerning the removal of aliens which belong by the law of nations to any other; that while he remains in the country in the character of an alien, he can claim no other privilege than such as an alien is entitled to, and consequently, whatever [risk] he may incur in that capacity is incurred voluntarily, with the hope that in due time by his unexceptionable conduct, he may become a citizen of the United States.

In other words, a country can set any rules it wants to govern the conditions under which the alien remains in the country. The court codified this principle in its landmark 1892 decision Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, in which the justices emphatically declared: “It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.”

This wide-ranging power of a national government to exclude individuals — whether for just and prudent reasons or even for capricious and discriminatory reasons — also applies to the right to remove those aliens under any circumstance, as Congress and the president see fit.

Obviously, our government cannot punish an alien for mere speech, just as it cannot imprison anyone — citizen or immigrant — for speaking his mind. But our government can terminate his visa because repatriation to his country of origin is an exercise of sovereignty, not a punishment depriving an individual of his freedom.

The court underscored this point in Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893): “The right of a nation to expel or deport foreigners who have not been naturalized, or taken any steps towards becoming citizens of the country, rests upon the same grounds, and is as absolute and unqualified as the right to prohibit and prevent their entrance into the country.”

Why is this not a violation of his First or Fifth Amendment rights?

The court explained:

The order of deportation is not a punishment for crime. It is not a “banishment,” in the sense in which that word is often applied to the expulsion of a citizen from his country by way of punishment. It is but a method of enforcing the return to his own country of an alien who has not complied with the conditions upon the performance of which the government of the nation, acting within its constitutional authority and through the proper departments, has determined that his continuing to reside here shall depend. He has not, therefore, been deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process or law, and the provisions of the Constitution securing the right of trial by jury and prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishments have no application.

We’ve had laws on the books since the 1800s banning anarchists, then communists, and, following World War II, Nazis. We even have conditions in place prohibiting jihadists and their supporters from entering the country. Federal law bars entry to anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.”

In other words, anyone you see at a pro-Hamas rally who is here on a student visa or even a green card is violating his terms of entry and must be deported, pursuant to our existing laws. The people chanting “from the river to the sea” and “Intifada” share the same virulently genocidal ideology as Nazis. We have zealously guarded our anti-Nazi laws to the point that we have even denaturalized former Nazis who became U.S. citizens and have, in recent years, removed people well into their 90s and deported them back to Europe.

Even a naturalized citizen may be denaturalized if it can be proven he obtained citizenship fraudulently. For example, someone working for the Muslim Brotherhood could not possibly utter a valid oath to “abjure all allegiance” to foreign powers and to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Obviously, denaturalization requires more due process and shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. But for those jihadists and fellow travelers who are not citizens, they should be out of here quicker than Hamas kills unarmed Jews.

During the debate over the 1790 Naturalization Act, Theodore Sedgewick, a congressman and senator of the founding era, explained the goal of immigration to our fledgling republic:

The citizens of America preferred this country, because it is to be preferred; the like principle he wished might be held by every man who came from Europe to reside here; but there was at least some grounds to fear the contrary; their sensations, impregnated with prejudices of education, acquired under monarchical and aristocratical Governments, may deprive them of that zest for pure republicanism, which is necessary in order to taste its beneficence with that gratitude which we feel on the occasion.

Is it too much to ask that we keep out those fortified with prejudices of jihad, genocide, and savage Jew-hatred?