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VIEWPOINT

Friends don’t deserve special treatment

The Arabic proverb “He who leaves home lessens his prestige” has taken on fresh meaning since America’s Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) began enforcing new regulations.

Designed to weed out terrorists from the millions of immigrants, students and tourists who travel to America, the “special registration procedures” tend to target Arab nationals.

However apologetically conducted, the procedures are an unpleasant inconvenience at the very least, causing long delays during which family members are often separated. Embassy officials are required to identify visa applicants they think should be subject to special treatment – which includes being fingerprinted, interrogated and photographed.

These individuals may be students at American universities or professionals who are residents in America. Some have been prevented from returning. All find themselves in the humiliating position of having to justify their reasons to be in America, despite having legitimate businesses or careers there.

While no one denies the need for caution in America, the “special registration procedures” reflect short-term, alarmist thinking. Aside from the alienation people cannot help but feel while being institutionally processed as a possible threat to American security, the new regulations promise a more insidious closing of doors. At a time when understanding between America and the rest of the world is so clearly lacking, the value of interaction should not be dismissed.

Egyptians have also suffered blows from terrorism and are committed partners in the goal of its eradication. To be treated instead as potential perpetrators is disheartening and unfair.

Early this year, anticipating the isolationist trend, the Washington Post carried an article by Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian professor of political science and Arab studies at Georgetown University. Fandy comes from a modest family in Assiut, where he studied and taught at the university before being selected for a Fulbright scholarship and completing his degrees in America. In the article, he pointed out that while he made his career in Georgetown, some of his contemporaries from Assiut ended up in Kandahar.

Fandy’s life offers a neat example of the benefits of getting to know one another. America’s new INS regulations will discourage interactions of multicultural students and teachers at universities, not to mention the contributions that graduates make as adults to their nations and communities.

This may be the information age, but knowledge of each other remains a precious commodity. This should not be so. Globalization, of which America is a leading advocate, is supposed to mean interdependence, getting to know your partners, growing familiar with other cultures and ways of thinking and above all appreciating their diversity.

Several leaders of Egypt’s business community members are American alumni, as are members of the cabinet. All these graduates, I believe, would agree that the experience was enlarging, and that its effects reached deep into our careers and management style. The new regulations may, unfortunately, create impediments to business and will certainly do little to encourage new commercial ties.

Last month, as part of a delegation of private sector investors, I attended the first meetings in Washington of the US-Egypt Business Council. All of us on the delegation, accompanied by Minister of Foreign Trade Youssef Boutros-Ghali, expressed our concerns and lobbied for trade and economic support.

Ten of my co-delegates are also AmCham Egypt members, who know the value of opening new lines of communication. This has been AmCham Egypt’s primary role, as interlocutor between the American and Egyptian business communities, for 20 years.

The US-Egypt Business Council will add depth to Egypt’s lobbying presence in America, which must grow to become more constant and diversified. We not only need to reach Washington, but also grassroots America, where there is much opportunity, not just for commerce but for getting to know each other firsthand.

That’s not only the best way to do business, it’s also the best way to overcome the negative connotations that become attached to Egyptian and Arab cultures as a result of unawareness and overreaction.

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