The editors have rightly come out in favor of asylum for Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of one of Hamas’s founders, who turned on the terrorist group and became a double agent, eventually converting to Christianity. He was denied asylum initially not because they thought he was lying (which is very, very common among asylum seekers), but because he’d given “material support” to a terrorist group, which was hard to avoid since he was spying for the Israelis and had to maintain his cover. He has an appeal hearing Wednesday on his asylum claim. A few observations: ● There’s no chance whatsoever he’ll be deported to the West Bank, no matter how Wednesday’s hearing turns out. There is a post-WWII principle in international law called “non-refoulement,” which prohibits the return of people to a place they’ll be killed, à la the Soviet POWs and others returned to Stalin. If you had to imagine the platonic archetype of a person protected by non-refoulement, it would be the son of a Hamas killer who switched allegiances, spied for the Zionist entity, and then became an apostate. I don’t know if there’s anything he could do to make it more likely that he’d be killed upon return to the Middle East. ● The problem of people being denied refugee resettlement or asylum because they provided “material support” to terrorists is broader than just this case. Here is a piece from a couple years back describing the problems faced by, for instance, a Liberian family who were denied resettlement because they’d cooked and fetched water for some gangster rebel group — while they were held captive by the rebels. The concept is sound; we do indeed want to keep out those who’ve provided aid and comfort to terrorists. But asylum officers and immigration judges need some latitude and commonsense guidelines on how to apply the bar to make absurd outcomes less likely. This isn’t to say the resettlement itself is usually a good idea; it should be limited only to those whose lives are in immediate danger and have nowhere else to go, which does not describe the majority of refugees we admit. But whatever our standard for refugee status, we shouldn’t be turning people down because of coerced support to terrorist groups or, in Yousef’s case, support provided as part of a clandestine effort to fight the terrorist group. ● One of the reasons we lean so heavily on the “material support” bar is that Congress has prohibited “ideological exclusion.” In 1990, with the Cold War over and history at an end, Barney Frank shepherded an amendment that prevented the exclusion or deportation of any alien “because of any past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution of the United States,” thus applying the First Amendment to all foreigners abroad. (See the statutory language here.) This means that just being the leader of the first-Tuesday-of-the-month Death to America rally in Karachi doesn’t mean you can be denied admission to the United States. So, rather than the relatively simple tactic of simply excluding or deporting foreigners who hate America, immigration and visa officers have to grope for some instance of “material support” for terrorist groups as a means of excluding or deporting them.