Scholars from Muslim-majority countries deserve praise, not punishment

(RNS) — Sitting in a hospital room at the Mayo Clinic in May 2019, my family received some terrifying news. My wife of 24 years, Tabita, had pancreatic cancer.

We were floored. Tabita was young, 45, and a paragon of healthy and holistic living. It didn’t seem possible that she could have cancer. When I had managed to gather my composure, I assured her she would beat this. We were at the Mayo Clinic after all, one of the best health care institutions with the best doctors in the world. And we were in the United States, a nation replete with scientists and physicians hell-bent on finding cures for cancer. “Cancer will not win,” I assured her. “You’ve got this.”

I was wrong. Tabita died 14 months later after a grueling battle with an insidious disease that wreaked so much havoc on her internal organs that by the time of her death, her body looked like she had been in a war zone. She never had much of a chance. Approximately nine out of 10 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will die within five years.

If we are going to change this scenario, we need all hands on deck. We need the best and brightest of physicians and researchers to tackle this disease and to help make strides in early detection and successful treatment to improve survival rates.

We need doctors like Mustafa Raoof, a surgical oncologist from Pakistan who works at the City of Hope Cancer Center and whose research involves identifying DNA repair processes that reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer patients. We need Faraz Bishehsari, a gastroenterologist-scientist from Iran who directs the Gastroenterology Research Center at the University of Texas at Houston and whose research analyzes how environmental and lifestyle factors contribute to pancreatic cancer.

These doctors’ research and contributions are possible because each had the opportunity to come to the United States to continue their training and deepen their knowledge at some of our best universities and research institutions, including Harvard, Yale and Northwestern.

Theirs are not isolated cases, as the existence of the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America and the Persian American Medical Association testifies to. There is a growing number of medical professionals from their countries, plenty of whom have held residencies and fellowships at American universities, who bring their knowledge and skillsets to this country.

But many such international researchers are now falling victim to the federal government’s “Catch and Revoke” program, which is dedicated to revoking their visas, making them vulnerable to be arrested by ICE and shipped off to detention centers in Louisiana or Texas.

Their crime? In most cases they have done nothing other than espousing political views that some in the administration might deem offensive or contrary to U.S. foreign policy. Some haven’t even done this. But one discernible pattern involves the national origin or perceived religious identities of those targeted. Many are from Muslim-majority countries.

The Catch and Revoke program reflects a broader failure to recognize the significant contributions that students and scholars from Muslim-majority nations have made and will make to our nation and to the global community because of the opportunities afforded to them by American colleges and universities.

One of the most identifiable buildings in Chicago is the impressive Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower). Its main structural engineer, Fazlur Rahman Khan, was born and raised in Bangladesh. He received a Fulbright to pursue a Ph.D. in structural engineering at the University of Illinois in the 1950s and went on to become the “Einstein of structural engineering,” in the words of the Steel Tube Institute. He has had a lasting impact not only on the Chicago skyline but on skyscraper design and construction throughout the world.

A fellow Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, pursued a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University on his way to developing and refining micro-financing and micro-lending for impoverished populations, particularly women, to provide them with a pathway out of abject poverty. His work led to a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

The Egyptian aerospace engineer Tahani Amer completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Old Dominion University. She has leveraged her education to pursue a distinguished career at NASA for more than 30 years, where she has conducted research on Computational Fluid Dynamics to further NASA’s aeronautic research efforts.

Scores of students and scholars from Muslim-majority countries have made major contributions to the fields of medicine, journalism, education, technology, diplomacy and business. While some go on to engineer iconic skyscrapers or to win Nobel Prizes, most turn their learning and experiences at American universities into making contributions that attract less fame or public accolades but are just as essential.

Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish graduate student detained in March by ICE, likely would have been part of the latter group. She was pursuing research at Tufts University on how adolescents make use of social media to have a positive social impact. It’s research that has the potential to make a positive contribution to the study of child development in a digital age. Now Öztürk’s research is on indefinite hold, as is her future in the United States.

Our nation and the global community benefit greatly when we create opportunities for people of diverse religions and nationalities to study, teach and conduct research at our universities. When we maximize these opportunities, we improve the chances that cancer patients will survive, skylines will be populated with structurally sound buildings, people with limited access to conventional banking will be able to make a living and to boost their economies, and our planet and solar system will be studied and explored in pursuit of the common good.

Students and scholars from Muslim-majority countries don’t deserve to be treated collectively as a suspect population much less an existential threat. Their presence here is not a problem to be solved. It’s a privilege — for them and for us — for which we should be grateful.

(Todd Green, formerly a religious studies professor at Luther College and a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department, currently serves as senior director of campus partnerships at Interfaith America. He is the author, most recently, of “The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)