Music scholar barred from US, but no one will tell her why

Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States. Her case has become a cause célèbre among musicologists and the subject of a protest campaign by the American Musicological Society and by academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where Ghuman was to have participated last month in the Bard Music Festival, showcasing Elgar's music. But the door has remained closed to Ghuman, an assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, CA, who is British and who had lived, studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt exclusion. The mystery of her case shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to defend against such a decision once the secretive government process has been set in motion. After a year of letters and inquiries, Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake. "I don't know why it's happened, what I'm accused of," said a tearful Ghuman. "There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely powerless." Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security, said officers at San Francisco International Airport had no choice but to bar Ghuman because the State Department, at its discretion, had revoked her visa. The State Department would not discuss the case, citing the confidentiality of individual visa records. Ghuman is certainly not alone in her frustration. Academic and civil liberties groups point to other foreign scholars who have been denied entry without explanation at an airport, or refused a visa when they applied. A pending lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union contends that the Bush administration is using heightened security measures to keep foreign scholars out on ideological grounds in violation of the First Amendment rights of US scholars to hear them. But Ghuman's case does not seem to fit such a pattern. Few believe that her book in progress, "India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890-1940," or her work on Elgar, best known by Americans for "Pomp and Circumstance," could have raised red flags in Washington. And if it were a question of security profiling, nothing in her background fits. Ghuman said that officers tore up her H-1B visa, which was valid through May 2008, defaced her British passport, and seemed suspicious of everything from her music cassettes to the fact that she had listed Welsh as a language she speaks. A redacted government report about the episode obtained by her lawyer under the Freedom of Information Act erroneously described her as "Hispanic." Ghuman said her demands to speak to the British consul were rebuffed. "They told me I was nobody, I was nowhere and I had no rights," she said. "For the first time, I understood what the deprivation of liberty means." As for the possibility that she has been deemed a security threat, Ghuman said: "It's not only insulting and heartbreaking, but how? In what way? Musicians, dangerous people? Is it my piano playing? "I have no indication at all," she added, "and it has been 13 ½ months." Inquiries by Ghuman's representative in Parliament and several members of Congress, including Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, have been to no avail, said Byron Adams, a professor of music at the University of California, Riverside, who said he had known Ghuman for years and respected her work. "All of these people have gotten the runaround from the State Department," Adams said.