Editor’s note: Nathan Kalman-Lamb is on the editorial board of the NB Media Co-op. The NB Media Co-op denounces Kalman-Lamb being denied entry to the US and stands in solidarity with him and all those who are harmed by the policing of borders.
Over the weekend, creepy oligarchs, Proud Boys, January 6 Capitol raiders, and other far-right detritus formed a revanchist ooze that engulfed Washington, DC.
Friday evening was supposed to offer a political respite. I was set to interview two authors at the famed Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington about a topic dear to readers of this column: the moral emptiness of the NCAA.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, both professors in Canada, have written a provocative book called The End of College Football. What a temporary relief it would be to talk about the courage of the people speaking out against the rank exploitation of young athletes.
There was one problem: The US denied Kalman-Lamb entry. Kalman-Lamb had woken up at 2:30 am in Fredericton, the capital city of New Brunswick, to catch his flight to Montreal, where he planned to transfer to DC. But in Montreal, he had no idea what was about to happen as he approached customs: “I experienced something I have never had happen nor witnessed before: An airport employee strode forward to intercept me before I could enter the line.”
They had been waiting for him.
The employee pulled Kalman-Lamb away and made him sit to the side. Kalman-Lamb’s questions as to why this was happening and concerns about missing his flight were ignored.
When the airport employee returned, the person was accompanied by an officer with the US Department of Homeland Security, who told Kalman-Lamb that not only was he barred from entering the United States, but if he ever wanted to get into the country in the future, he’d have to go to the US consulate for a formal interview to receive a visa. “Although I repeatedly asked him why I had been denied,” Nathan told me, “he claimed first that it wasn’t a good place to talk about it in public in front of people, and then when I said by all means we can do it somewhere else, he said he wasn’t authorized to tell me.”
Kalman-Lamb then approached US immigration for some clarity as to whether there was a misunderstanding about the nature of the trip. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, he said, then “began screaming at and berating me, calling over a Quebec police officer, and threatening me with arrest. I was marched back to the Air Canada desk and told if I came up to immigration again I would be arrested. They spoke very abusively towards me for an extended period, even though I continuously assured them I understood and would not try to talk further.”
Then Kalman-Lamb was told that Air Canada wouldn’t reimburse his ticket and he would need to pay $650 to return home. If he took any alternative means of transportation, he would again be at risk for arrest. This turned out to be an empty threat, and Kalman-Lamb eventually made it home by other means, spending most of the hours in transit trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
“I have some theories,” he explained. “My strongest guess is that it is because I have been reasonably outspoken in my critiques of the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. As a consequence, I was listed by Canary Mission as an antisemite, a listing that is prominent when someone googles my name. I also was the moderator of a keynote panel at the NASSS [North American Society for the Sociology of Sport] conference in Chicago in October about the relationship between the genocide and sport. My guess is that those facts, in conjunction with the proximity to the inauguration, caused me to be flagged.”
This certainly could have happened because of Canary Mission, which is a powerful, well-connected McCarthyite smear organization that brands people critical of the Israeli occupation as “anti-Jewish.” Its mission is to use fear of being labeled as antisemitic to silence critics. There could be new immigration restrictions aimed at anyone willing to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocidal, and the determination of who can enter the country could increasingly be left to groups like Canary Mission. Another possibility is that Kalman-Lamb was blocked from entering the US because of a new algorithmic enemies list aimed at “outside agitators.”
Personally, I’d like to think that moneyed boosters at Ohio State and Notre Dame, so threatened by Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s work (perhaps they read their piece in The Nation calling for the abolition of college football) that they made some sniveling calls to hurt our event. (Probably not, although these boosters have their hands on some powerful levers.)
But the root of the problem (and I believe that in this coming political era we need to explain the root causes of all that is hurtling toward us) is the borders themselves—these sites of social control and violence. Kalman-Lamb said to me, “Discriminatory migration laws, policies, and practices are also deployed to prevent those viewed as racially and/or politically undesirable from contaminating the purported purity of the nation. The bottom line is this: No one should ever be treated as illegal, and human beings all deserve the right to move freely across the world.”
As for the event itself, it was a smashing success, with terrific energy. Kalman-Lamb’s co-author, Derek Silva, made the many injustices that pervade college football real for the crowd. But Kalman-Lamb’s absence was a stark reminder that all the work we do going forward—whether it’s seeking justice for college athletes or union rights at a coffee shop—now exists in a dark political context that we are going to have to prepare for and navigate.
An earlier version of this article included a reference to the actions of an agent from the “Canadian Border Patrol.” In fact, the agent was from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This article was updated at 7:50 a.m. on Jan. 24, 2025.
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