Washington, D.C. (March 12, 2024) – In honor of Women’s History Month in the United States and International Women’s Day worldwide, the Center for Immigration Studies releases a report considering the use of ideological screening to combat violence against women in the United States.
The report, Excluding Misogyny: Curtailing Violence Against Women Through Ideological Exclusion, explores how screening to prevent the arrival in the country of aliens who advocate, or simply believe in, culturally or ideologically based violence against women can be a highly effective method to protect girls and women and leverage immigration policy to drive positive social change.
As the United Nations has amply documented and condemned, various horrific forms of culturally and religiously based violence against women persist in many areas of the world, including practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, female infanticide, sex-selection abortion to prevent the birth of girls, and dowry-related killings, among others. George Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Center and author of the report, emphasizes the importance of adopting measures to prevent the introduction and spread of these abhorrent practices in the United States through immigration policy.
The president has the statutory power to prohibit the entry of aliens whose entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States” and can use it to combat culturally and religiously based violence against women. But Fishman concludes the most effective way to prevent aliens who advocate or believe in violence against women from coming to our shores would be for Congress to make such advocacy and belief a statutory ground of inadmissibility. Congress could also consider making such advocacy and belief a statutory ground of deportability for admitted aliens.
Fishman notes that “By preventing the arrival of individuals who advocate or condone, or plan to practice, violence against women, the United States can strengthen our commitment to gender equality and human rights.”
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