This American Writer Was Politically Screened by the Hong Kong Immigration Department
She's one of many foreigners unable to enter Hong Kong for political reasons since 2019
In late 2025, American writer Susan Blumberg-Kason was invited by a Hong Kong organization to attend a cultural event in Hong Kong in early 2026. She was instructed to apply for a ten-day work visa for the short visit. When she did, she received queries from the Hong Kong Immigration Department regarding her past literary activities and social media posts. She responded to the first query, primarily about her literary activities, because she wished to go to Hong Kong and she didn’t want to cause difficulties for the host organization. But when she got a follow-up inquiry from the Immigration Department that focused on her past social media posts, she had been told that her visa application would be so delayed that the events to which she had been invited would have to be cancelled. So she did not respond to the second inquiry. As a result, she was unable to obtain a visa to enter Hong Kong or attend the event.
Her experience is part of a pattern of foreigners being barred from entering Hong Kong or denied work visas since 2019 for apparently political reasons. Many of the foreigners who have been barred had past ties with Hong Kong, having worked there as journalists, photographers and scholars. Some had worked on human rights issues. Some had expressed support for Hong Kong protesters and/or the pro-democracy movement. In all, including Blumberg-Kason’s, there have been at least 22 publicly reported cases of foreigners being barred entry or having been denied work visas since 2019.
Blumberg-Kason’s case is therefore not unique. What is significant about it is the insight it provides into the extent to which the Immigration Department screened her politically. Blumberg-Kason was somewhat surprised by the attention her visa application received, given that neither her books nor other literary activities have been especially “politically sensitive.” It is not hard to imagine that if the Immigration Department engages in such investigative measures in the case of the visa application of an American writer wishing to visit Hong Kong for a short period, it is making similar efforts in other cases.
Like most of the other foreigners barred from entering Hong Kong or denied work visas, Blumberg-Kason has a connection with the city. In the 1990s, she studied at Chinese University of Hong Kong on a student visa and then worked at the Open University of Hong Kong as an editor on a work visa. After that, on at least one occasion, in the 2010s, she entered Hong Kong on a tourist visa to attend a cultural event. She had never previously experienced any difficulties with Hong Kong immigration authorities, and in the recent case, she had not expected any problems, especially as she was invited by a reputable host organization. She had even asked her mother to join her and gotten plane tickets.
Then, in mid-February 2026, she received an email from the Immigration Department. It inquired about her book reviews of Jason Y. Ng’s Umbrellas in Bloom in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2016 and of Lauren Hilgers’ Patriot Number One in South China Morning Post in 2018. It also asked why she co-edited the anthology Hong Kong Noir with Jason Y. Ng, whether she had ever organized or participated in any political protests in Hong Kong or around the world, and whether she worked for any political party, government or non-governmental organization around the world.
Attached to the email was a PDF which included two screenshots from her Instagram account in 2019. One featured the image of a well-known poster of Totoro with scenes from the 2014 Umbrella Movement. Another showed Blumberg-Kason holding her hand over one of her eyes. For anyone familiar with the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the act would be familiar, and Blumberg-Kason told me that it was done in solidarity with a woman who was shot in the eye at a protest, an incident infamous in Hong Kong. She was asked to confirm that these were indeed her posts, and explain why she posted them and whether she understood what she was doing.
After receiving advice from the host organization in Hong Kong, she responded to the Immigration Department. While waiting for it to get back to her, hopefully with approval of her application, she heard from the host organization, which told her one of their people had received a phone call from the Immigration Department informing them that her visa application was delayed and the events she was to take part in would have to be cancelled.
She then separately inquired with the Immigration Department as to whether she could get a tourist visa to enter Hong Kong; after all, she already had the plane tickets for her and her mother. She went so far as to promise she would not attend any event associated with the host organization and to emphasize that she merely wished to visit the city with her mother. Two days later she received a reply that read like a form letter saying any US citizen can visit Hong Kong on a 90-day tourist visa unless there’s an “adverse report” against them. She said, “I knew at that point that I wouldn’t pursue this.”
A day later, the Immigration Department sent her another PDF with the file number of her work visa application that included 16 screenshots of tweets she had posted in between June 2019 and March 2020 about police brutality during the protests. Below is the first page of screenshots; see the other pages at the bottom of this post.
This time, Blumberg-Kason didn’t respond—after all, she’d already been told by the host organization that the events she was to take part in had to be cancelled due to the visa delay. She never heard from the Immigration Department again. She said she expects she won’t be able to go to Hong Kong again and is “heartbroken” about this.
I have not previously seen evidence such as this that indicates the lengths to which the Hong Kong Immigration Department goes to politically vet visa applicants. In fact, what is most striking is that the agency was so open about its screening, revealing it to the applicant and seeking a response. In other cases of which I’m aware, the people seeking to enter Hong Kong or applying for a work visa simply got rejected with no explanation at all.
I have not reached out to the Immigration Department seeking comment on this case. In the past, when reporters have done so, they typically received a stock response to the effect that the Immigration Department as a matter of policy does not comment on individual cases, etc. In the event the Immigration Department does comment on this case, I will be sure to update this piece to include it.
It’s striking that Immigration Department officials spend their days poring over the backgrounds, records and years-old social media posts of visa applicants. It is a sign of what Hong Kong has become in this new era of repression. The national security law, and the way in which it is implemented by the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government, is used not only to target Hong Kongers the regime considers “enemies of the state” with arrest, prosecution and imprisonment; it pervades all of society, in particular through its embedding throughout the civil service and government agencies and many industries over which they have authority such as media and film, as well as schools and libraries. (For examples of how this works, see my reports on book censorship and film censorship as well as my translation of playwright Candace Chong’s post discussing being de facto banned from the Hong Kong stage.)
In this particular example, the Immigration Department has incorporated the ethos of the national security law into its work. The host organization will likely think twice in the future about what foreign cultural figures it invites to take part in its activities, effectively engaging in a form of proactive self-censorship which is pervasive in Hong Kong today. Other cultural organizations will be aware of such incidents and “adjust” their work accordingly. Each organization is simply looking out after its own interests, striving for self-preservation, trying to continue to operate within constantly narrowing spaces. In this way is Hong Kong changed, one small act at a time; over the past six years, it has been transformed, becoming a much less free and open society.
Of course, a state/jurisdiction has the prerogative to guard their borders and decide which non-citizens are allowed to enter. But there should be precise and transparent reasons for denial of entry, such as a clear and concrete national security threat or a reasonable suspicion that an individual may upon entering the jurisdiction carry out crimes or not follow immigration laws. If every country used the criteria applied to Blumberg-Kason by the Hong Kong Immigration Department—that she had a history of being critical of the Hong Kong government and police—then there would be a great many countries in the world from which I would be barred entry. The very country I live in now, the United States, has under Trump adopted this as standard operating procedure, having taken to vetting foreigners living here and attempting to enter based on their political opinions. It is one of those telling signs that a place is becoming more authoritarian. It is not the sort of world I wish to live in. Lucky for it, the US is at least not ruled by the largest and most powerful dictatorship in the world.
Hong Kong, which has long billed itself as “Asia’s World City,” seems to be striving to emulate those small, oil-rich, authoritarian Gulf states that it’s been courting since relations with Western countries dissolved after 2019: Foreigner, if all you want to do is make or spend money, you may pass; but if you have ever openly expressed political views that we consider hostile to our way of doing things, you’re not welcome.
Below are images of the other screenshots the Immigration Department asked Blumberg-Kason to explain.
