Customs Giving Literacy Tests At JFK Is A Thing Now

Literacy tests are unconstitutional, and it's horrible that I have to remind people of that.

(Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)

(Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)

The problem, I keep trying to tell those obstinate Trump supporters who breathe their foulness into my bubble, is with selective enforcement. Border protection can take any number of repugnant steps to make America an unwelcoming place. But what makes it “racist” and “unconstitutional” is when you arbitrarily and capriciously apply some barriers to some people and no barriers to other people just because of how they look.

Here’s what happened to a Nigerian software engineer working for Andela flying to the U.S. on a valid visa:

BoingBoing explains:

The CBP guards who detained Omin after his 24-hour flight were skeptical that he was a real software engineer. They apparently googled “quizzes to give to software engineers” and told him to answer ten questions (e.g. “Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced” and “What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?”) to gain entry into the country.

The ordeal ended when a CBP officer called Andela and confirmed that Omin was an engineer.

There are so many things wrong with this, I’m just going to resort to bullet points:

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  • Nigeria is not on the travel ban list.
  • The travel ban list is unconstitutional.
  • Omin had a valid visa.
  • Visas don’t become “less valid” based on the color of your skin.
  • This would never happen to a white person, from anywhere.
  • This would never happen to a white software engineer.
  • This is a new jack literacy test.
  • Literacy tests are unconstitutional.
  • Have you ever flown from Nigeria to JFK? I have. It’s a long flight. If you ask me to name my children after that flight, there’s only a 50% chance I’d get it right.
  • CBP IS NOT AUTHORIZED TO MAKE THIS S**T UP AS THEY GO ALONG.

If EVERYBODY who came in on a work visa had to answer some questions to prove they work in the field they claim to, that would be one thing. It would be a horrible thing that would probably keep people from coming to the country just because of the lines, but it would be a thing.

But Customs doesn’t force this scrutiny on everybody. Just on people who look “different” — based on an entirely white-normative view of difference.

As usual, if you could make white people live for one day as a brown person, this whole damn country would be different.

US border guards can’t believe Nigerian man is a software engineer, google “questions to ask a software engineer” and give him a pop quiz [BoingBoing]

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Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.