One visa rejection is news in Hong Kong; hundreds of such rejections are a statistic in the United States. Ryan Thoreson, a US legal scholar, made international news when the Immigration Department denied him a work visa to take up a full-time post to teach human rights and sexual minority rights at the University of Hong Kong. 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. In January 2020, Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director and Thoreson’s boss, decided to release its “World Report 2020” in the city , which carried an essay on the Chinese government’s “assault” on the international human rights system. That was a most sensitive time, when riots were still happening, though dying down. He wasn’t surprised that he was denied entry to Hong Kong . As expected, it created an international newsworthy incident generating plenty of publicity for his report. Since then, Roth’s group has criticised every major political development in the city. 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. Fellow Post columnist Chandran Nair calls such news stories a by-product of white privilege . Hundreds of Chinese students and scholars have been denied visas to continue their study or work in the United States, an immigration policy started by former US president Donald Trump and continued by successor Joe Biden . Imagine if every rejection generated a few news stories in the international press! That would never happen, of course. The blanket and often automatic rejections stem from US government programmes targeting Chinese students and researchers who could transfer sensitive hi-tech information from artificial intelligence and engineering to medicine and biotechnology to China. I am sure those hundreds of Chinese deserve to be rejected, unlike Thoreson.