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Pakistani Doctor on H-1B Visa Indicted for Jihadist Plot

https://cis.org/Bensman/Pakistani-Doctor-H1B-Visa-Indicted-Jihadist-Plot

During his two years working as a “research coordinator” on an H-1B visa for the Rochester, Minn., Mayo Clinic, Pakistani medical doctor Muhammad Masood allegedly saw himself as having gotten “behind enemy lines” where “not many people cant [sic] even reach here to attack.”

By January and February 2020, according to the complaint, the 28-year-old was messaging on an encrypted platform about how sick he had grown of smiling every day at the “passing kuffar”, a derogatory term for non-Muslims that often justifies execution. All the smiling was “just not to make them suspicios [sic] … I cannot tolerate it anymore.”

The Masood case raises a number of issues that ought to be debated as matters of public policy and homeland security. For one, this case undermines criticism that President Trump’s “travel ban” wrongly blocked U.S. entry of doctors from Muslim-majority countries on the temporary work visas. As well, the case is cause for reassessing current security vetting protocols in countries not on the travel restriction list, to ensure that hot security threats are not imported among the doctors, engineers, and other skilled professionals who use the H-1B visa to leave countries of national security interest. And lastly, the American public, elected leaders, and security professionals should never assume that force fields of credibility immunize doctors from security investigations and thorough vetting. They don’t, as we well learned from Dr. Nidal Hassan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 and from a bizarrely long list of other Hippocratic Oath breakers described below.

The Masood arrest undermines critics of President Trump’s travel restrictions on Muslim-majority nations, some of which have explicitly complained that it has blocked foreign-born physicians from, initially, seven Muslim-majority countries (Pakistan not among them) on the travel-restrictions list. For example, a 2017 New York Times report quoted medical establishment figures lamenting that Trump’s “travel ban” had blocked thousands of desperately needed foreign physicians (like Masood) who, if they could achieve the requirements, would work in under-served small towns and poor urban neighborhoods that American doctors eschew as not lucrative enough.