My Take | No surprise scholar from hostile NGO denied visa
- Hundreds of Chinese students and scholars have had their visa applications rejected in the United States, but it seems to matter more if a local university can’t hire an American human rights specialist
One visa rejection is news in Hong Kong; hundreds of such rejections are a statistic in the United States.
No official explanation was given, but it seems fairly obvious. He works for Human Rights Watch (HRW), an American NGO which made no bones about supporting the highly destructive riots and protests in 2019, and has gone out of its way to pick fights with the city’s government. I leave aside its constant stream of reports over the years criticising China’s human rights, which I haven’t read.
The Immigration Department would really have to be masochistic to let one of Roth’s associates take up a tenure-track job at the city’s most prestigious university. Perhaps Thoreson could recruit his students to work as interns for HRW and advocate for transsexual rights. That might justify his employment and productivity in Hong Kong, but I can appreciate the department might think differently.