Like ‘refusing business from people named Mohammed,’ this one falls under the category of ‘they can’t possibly be that stupid.’ A recent Yale grad claims her grandparents’ origins on the Pakistan side of pre-Partition Punjab helped persuade the State Department to deny her an internship:

Benita Singh

Last December, I received an internship at the Embassy in San Salvador. Yet in May, four weeks before my internship was to begin, I received phone messages regarding my “foreign-born relatives” and “extensive travel overseas.” When I told my parents about the calls, they were impressed by what they perceived as my friends’ witty pranks. “Foreign-born relatives?” my mother said incredulously, “people from the government don’t talk like that.”

… The calls were from an actual State Department investigator… After asking about my grandparents’ places of birth, the dates they left Pakistan during the Partition, my parents’ U.S. citizenship, and my own “extensive travels,” he told me that my security clearance would be rescinded, and that I should arrange alternate plans for the summer. [Link]

Given her name, chances are that Benita Singh is a Punjabi Sikh, and like my grandparents, hers probably fled during Partition and ended up near Delhi almost 60 years ago. Under the State Department’s logic, it’s suspicious to be ‘from’ a country which didn’t even exist at the time.

Singh was recently honored in Newsweek for social entrepreneurship in Guatemala (via Sepia Mutiny).