By Camille T. Taiara

If there's one thing David Cole is clear on, it's that now is not a good time to be an Arab or a Muslim man in the United States. A professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the nation's foremost experts on the abuse of immigration law for what he calls "purposes it was never intended to serve," Cole has represented dozens of immigrants targeted for deportation by the federal government based on their nationality and, often, their political beliefs.

The Bay Guardian interviewed Cole as he was gearing up for a mid-November visit to the Bay Area to promote his latest book, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

Bay Guardian: What have been some of the more-recent tactics the government has used to target immigrants it considers undesirable?

David Cole: John Ashcroft has essentially used immigration law to undertake a campaign of ethnic profiling more extensive than any this country has seen since the internment of the Japanese during World War II.... It's using immigration law to go after people where the government lacks probable cause of any criminal conduct.... We required 80,000 people to register with immigration authorities simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries. The FBI sought to interview 8,000 men simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries. The government has prioritized the deportation of certain foreign nationals simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries. Virtually all of those who were subjected to preventive detention by the government in the wake of Sept. 11 in antiterrorism initiatives – approximately 5,000 foreign nationals – were from Arab or Muslim countries. From all of these campaigns, the government has identified not a single person charged as a member of al-Qaeda or as involved with Sept. 11.

BG: You've argued the public is less likely to object when the civil liberties that are being trampled are those of immigrants. But it seems that it opens the door to backsliding on the civil liberties of U.S. citizens as well.

DC: While Americans tend to be much less concerned when the government targets foreign nationals in the name of national security, they ought to be concerned. Not only because it's wrong ... but also because what the government does to foreign nationals inevitably gets extended to U.S. citizens. The first federal laws authorizing guilt by association were in the immigration laws and applied only to foreign nationals. But in the Smith Act of 1940, that concept of guilt by association was extended to U.S. citizens, and tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, were blacklisted, went to jail, based on their alleged affiliations with the Communist Party. The first federal laws penalizing subversive speech were targeted at foreign nationals: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the 1903 Immigration Act. During World War I this concept was extended to citizens, and over 1,000 people were locked up for merely speaking out against the draft or against the war. And it was extended again to U.S. citizens in the Smith Act, when it became a crime to advocate certain communist doctrines. The first federal law authorizing preventive detention during wartime was the Enemy Alien Act of 1798. That philosophy was extended to U.S. citizens in World War II, when 70,000 of the 110,000 persons of Japanese descent who were interned were U.S. citizens. And political spying by the federal government began as a way of tracking subversive immigrants in the early 20th century. That was extended to U.S. citizens to the point that Martin Luther King's private affairs in his private hotel room in Washington, D.C., were wiretapped on the theory that his group might be infiltrated by foreign influences.... [More recently,] the government initially argued that we could hold the people in Guantanamo as enemy combatants, without hearings or charges or access to lawyers, indefinitely, because they were foreign nationals and were not within the United States and therefore don't have Constitutional rights. But it's now extended that very practice to two U.S. citizens: Yaser Hamdi, who was allegedly picked up in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, who was arrested not on a battlefield but at O'Hare Airport.

BG: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

DC: I see a world today that has a higher degree of anti-Americanism than ever before in the history of this country. And I think part of that is due to our unilateral foreign policy, where we say that we get to play by rules that nobody else plays by, because we are the most powerful country in the world. The flip side of that is the double standard at home, where we insist on certain rights for ourselves but we're willing to deny them to others. The fact that there is an unprecedented level of anti-Americanism around the world is, to me, the greatest threat to our national security today. And our government has essentially fostered that by the kind of American exceptionalism that it has pursued both at home and abroad.