Last week, the British government published a list of 16 people barred from the country. Eight Muslim clerics, writers and political advocates were among them. And then there was a right-wing radio host from San Francisco, an anti-gay pastor and his like-minded daughter from Kansas, and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from Florida.
Their crimes: "spreading hate."
The first reaction of many was shock. To ban someone for what they say (like the radio host, Michael Savage) rather than what they do? That's out of place in a democracy, right?
The level of shock may be a measure of how far we have traveled in the United States since our own 9/11 neurosis: in the age of Obama, America is dismantling the prison at Guantánamo Bay and lifting restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to travel to Cuba, rules from an even more ancient era.
According to Ben Ward of Human Rights Watch in London, the British list was mainly about the Muslims — the American right-wingers were politically correct padding — and shows just how much Britain and countries like France and Spain still worry about the militant Islamists in their midst.
But of course we shouldn't be so naïve. People are stopped from traveling all the time — around the globe and in the United States. They are held back for minor and major infractions, but also for what they think or say, although Britain more or less stands alone in making public who is banned — a name-and-shame list, as the British government put it.
Perhaps the most common reason for being stopped at a border is a shady past, like a criminal record. According to Lucille Cirillo, a spokeswoman for United States Customs and Border Protection, the approach is not list-based but more opportunistic: asked at the border to declare a criminal history or other illicit activity on a visa waiver form, reprehensibles often do so.
This approach has been enough to catch "the odd Rolling Stone or two," Ms. Cirillo said. It also stopped Amy Winehouse, and in March 2008, Sebastian Horsley, a British artist/exhibitionist and author of an antic memoir of rampant drug use and encounters with prostitutes. Mr. Horsley was turned back at Newark airport for "moral turpitude." The definition "is pretty broad, from child endangerment to drug use to rape," Ms. Cirillo said.
In a seeming celebrity diplomatic tit-for-tat, Britain continues to fight to bar the rapper Snoop Dogg after a reported melee at Heathrow Airport.
Apart from run-of-the-mill misdeeds like heroin addiction and financial fraud, the United States will stop you for suspected terrorist activity — and for this it has a list, although it is not public.
To make the Coordinated Terrorist Watchlist, which has been maintained since 2003, you have to be "reasonably" suspected of "involvement in terrorist activity," according to Chad Kolton, spokesman for the F.B.I.'s Terrorist Screening Center in northern Virginia. It can be fund-raising or recruiting, "but it's a fairly high standard," he said, and so probably does not include simply speaking about terrorism.
The list has 400,000 names. About 95 percent of people on the list are not United States citizens, and the vast majority are not in the country. Last week, a Justice Department report found that about 24,000 names had been kept on the list in error because of outdated or irrelevant information.
Mr. Kolton said that 40 to 50 people who are named show up in a "positive encounter" on the center's screens each day. Some are stopped, he said; others are allowed to fly on and are monitored.
During the cold war, the United States had a rich tradition of excluding people it didn't like on ideological grounds. Morton H. Halperin, a consultant to the Open Society Institute, an organization that promotes democracy around the world, said the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 targeted Communists but in the following decades was applied rather more broadly. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the act famously excluded the future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and the writers Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Doris Lessing and Dario Fo.
Although Congress eventually repealed the act, the power of "ideological exclusion" persists today in the USA Patriot Act, according to Caroline Fredrickson of the A.C.L.U. The act allows the authorities to bar foreigners who use a "position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity." In a letter in March to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, the A.C.L.U. and other human rights groups said that dozens of scholars and intellectuals were being banned from the country "not on the basis of their actions but on the basis of their ideas."
Perhaps the most celebrated recent case is that of Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim scholar who was prevented from entering the United States by the Bush administration in 2004 when he had a job lined up at the University of Notre Dame. He now teaches at Oxford.
Lists or no lists, "many governments exclude people whose views they don't like," said Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute. "They simply deny them visas. China excludes people all the time. They don't ordinarily give explanations."
Finally, there are those restrictions imposed on heads of state — international pariahs and their entourages — whose behavior has made them subject to international sanctions. This includes the Mugabes and Bashirs of the world.
But do bans work? One of the consequences of the British list, it seems, was the sudden global celebrity of Mr. Savage, who responded by saying he would sue the British home secretary.
Mr. Savage's inability to enter Britain (and he apparently hadn't even expressed a wish to) will presumably not stop him from espousing his views. The British can hear him on the Internet.
In another recent incident, Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, was barred from Britain after he had been invited to the House of Lords for a screening of his film "Fitna." The film caused outrage in the Muslim world. He later traveled to Washington for a screening.
Robert Mugabeof Zimbabwe, who has been barred by the
European Unionfrom entering member states, nevertheless claimed an exemption under
United Nationsrules when he traveled last year to a food conference in Rome — where, according to the European press, his wife went shopping.