Before You Visit America, Hand Over Your Instagram

The U.S. now plans to inspect five years of tourists’ online lives. This is not the country we’re supposed to be.

I’m an optimist by my nature, especially when it comes to America. I love our country something fierce. And I’ve been dismayed over the years to see a creeping pessimism, even disdain, about the United States in certain precincts of both the left and the right. Sometimes it poses as world-weary sophistication; sometimes it appears as rage. It usually finds historical or contemporary faults—there are plenty to choose from—and makes those faults the definition of what this country is.

None of that makes sense to me. I’ve traveled the world—more than 80 countries—and every time I came home I felt grateful, lucky, proud.

But don’t get me wrong—as a reporter, I’ve covered many stories that showed me our failings as a people.

I was in Louisiana in 2006 covering the story of white high-school kids who tied a noose on a tree as a warning to keep the black kids from sitting in the ample shade the tree provided. While I was standing outside a convenience store with my producer Talesha (a Black woman), a car drove by slowly, a young man leaned out the window, and without anger or shame or any emotion at all, but with perfect clarity, he shouted the n-word at her. I was shocked; I thought I was in a time warp and decades had somehow disappeared. Talesha smiled at me, a smile that was only slightly judgmental.

I remember interviewing a man, a former Marine in Maryland. He’d lost everything—his wife, his family, his freedom—after being convicted of the rape and murder of a child. He was sentenced to death, spent eight years on death row, came within a few weeks of being executed. Then DNA tests—new at that time—completely cleared him. He was scarred, more by rage than anything else I could see, but what I mostly remember is how he walked. Slowly, so slowly. Like he had all the time in the world.

And so much more. Rural communities shattered by the opioid epidemic—which was deliberately accelerated by a family of billionaires. Mother’s Day in a state prison; the cries of the children when visiting hours were over were unbearable. I covered Hurricane Katrina, and watched as New Orleans drowned and the President of the United States flew over for a look-see.

And of course, I’ve covered this current American crisis—the full-on attempt by President Donald Trump to remake our constitutional order by force, concentrate vast powers and corrupt riches in his own hands, change the nature of this democracy.

But even in this moment, deep down, I think Trump will fail, and our country will heal. It’s faith, faith born of love and of the facts of our history. Like the opening line of The Godfather, spoken by the undertaker (but also by director Francis Ford Coppola, one feels), “I believe in America.” Me, too.

And then there are days like yesterday. A day when a single government proposal tells you more about the actual state of a nation than a thousand speeches or all the good things that we know are true about the American people.

The New York Times reported—here—that soon, under new Homeland Security regulations, before tourists and students from countries like Britain, France, Germany, and South Korea can visit America, they will have to hand over as much as five years of their social-media history.

Yes—your Instagram, your TikTok, your jokes, your heartbreaks, your memes, your adolescent experiments in being human. All of it, sifted by a government official who has the power to decide whether you get to set foot in the United States.

And it hit me—hard—that this isn’t just bad policy. It’s not just a purposely petty and nasty thing for a country to do. It’s a betrayal of the very idea of America.

I think about a 19-year-old kid in Seoul or Berlin who dreams of studying here. What’s on their social media? The stupid stuff. The exuberant stuff. The trying-on of identities. The mistakes. That’s what being 19 looks like. And we’re telling them: Open your private digital life to us—or stay home.

We used to be the country that trusted freedom. We used to be the young country. Now we’re telling the world that entering America requires an ideological strip search.

And we are doing this on the same day the President of the United States referred to immigrants from certain nations—his words—as “shithole countries.” (A word he was reported to have used in his first term to describe countries in Africa; back then he denied saying it and called it “fake news;” now he’s sharing his “shithole countries” riff in public, on camera.)

It’s all of a piece: the smallness, the insecurity, the fear masquerading as strength. So much of our foreign policy now seems to me to stem from a coward’s view of America in the world—constantly turning away, running away, scared of others, scared of trade, scared of losing our precious bodily fluids or whatever crackpottery is on offer from the administration today.

Customs and Border Patrol calls this a “paradigm shift,” and they’re right. Until now, social media checks focused on verifying facts—criminal activity, fraud, real threats. This new policy is about speech. About judging people for the things they say online. We will decide who gets to show up in our country based not on what they’ve done, but on whether someone in our bureaucracy finds their posts acceptable. It’s nauseating.

And the consequences will be real. Students will choose Canada or Australia instead. Researchers will skip our conferences. Families will vacation elsewhere. The world will look at us—not with hostility, but with bafflement. “America wants to read our Instagram? Since when?”

I grew up believing in a bigger, braver country—a place that didn’t cower before words but answered them with more speech, more debate, more confidence. A nation that opened its doors because we trusted our own ideals enough to let others bring their own.

Oh ye of such little American faith!

I truly do not understand how people who are so chest-thumpingly patriotic declare in so many ways so frequently that they do not think that American values and the American way of life are truly strong, strong enough to withstand the ideas others might have, or strong enough, for goodness’s sake, to handle even the TikToks of others.

I covered the first Mardi Gras after Hurricane Katrina. It was sad and beautiful—and still a pretty damn good party. But New Orleans was not only physically ravaged by the hurricane—the city itself was changing. When the levees broke, most of the neighborhoods swept away were Black neighborhoods. Months later, those residents were gone, flooded out; many never returned. But in their place, tens of thousands were already coming to New Orleans: the workers who were engaged in the great task of rebuilding. Most of these workers, like so many in America’s construction industries, were Latinos.

One night, I interviewed a city councilman, Oliver Thomas, out on a quiet corner off Bourbon Street, and I asked him about the impact of this population change on the city. Did Thomas—a Black man—think that with the shift in population, something would be lost out of New Orleans’ incomparable culture, so suffused with the historical experience, music, food, speech and spirit of Black Americans?

Councilman Thomas laughed at me. A friendly laugh, but one that expressed incredulousness at my obtuseness. Then he said one of the most beautiful things about America I have ever heard anyone say.

“Nah. That ain’t how it works. It’s just another flavor in the gumbo, man.”

He loved his city, and knew she would not just survive, but thrive. That is how real American patriots respond to challenges. A few years later, Thomas went to prison for taking bribes. Last I heard, he was a talk-radio host, and thinking of running for office again. The Big Easy. She never disappoints.

It’s just another flavor in the gumbo, man.

If we insist on becoming the uptight, narrow-minded, nasty country reflected in this new social-media policy at our border—so fearful, so prying, so suspicious—we won’t just lose tourists. We’ll lose something infinitely more important: the sense that America is a place defined by openness, not anxiety. By liberty, not surveillance. By faith in our values, not fear of the world’s diversity and noise.

The real danger isn’t that fewer people will come. It’s that we are becoming the sort of country fewer people want to come to.

—Terry