I can’t see anything that is to be gained from this, other than pandering to a xenophobic voter base.
Are there exemptions in place for when it is difficult to actually return to country of origin? (e.g. it remains very difficult to fly into China)
We've got her booked on a flight at the end of October, which is the best we can do right now. There are flights to China that you can get tomorrow through Taiwan or Hong Kong, but neither will allow you to board if you aren't Taiwanese or from Hong Kong (so no mainlanders). The remaining direct flights are in very limited supply and very hard to get and/or very expensive.
The EU is currently debating exemptions for spouses who have been separated, so I doubt they have exemptions for students.
And even if the exemptions and all are sorted out, who thinks it's a great idea for a whole bunch of students to have to fly in what will now potentially be crowded planes, and then have to spend at least a couple of weeks in quarantine, for something that was not a choice of theirs at all.
Also, as if the rental/retail market wasn't bad enough, especially in college towns many of which are single industry towns, this is gonna add to even more completely unnecessary and avoidable hardship.
This is disastrous policy in every form, other than if youre someone who gets off on unnecessary cruelty.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
I’ve never been to the US but, if this is the problem then wouldn’t it be better to make it easier for people to stay also after they have finished their degrees? If the goal is to have a lot of highly educated people in the US I mean.
Cruelty. Being publicly cruel.
No, it's designed to chase away non-immigrant student visa holders.
But it's part of a broader set of policies designed to make the US hostile to foreigners, whether current visa holders, non-immigrants visa applicants, or immigrant visa applicants.
This is going to ruin so many lives. An example of how this could result is significant hardship for international students is the case of Iranian students.
Iran has mandatory military service for all male citizens ages 18 and over. People who are students can defer their military service until their studies have concluded. If the studies are outside of Iran, the temporary exemption from military service for the purpose of education status allows students to be present in Iran for a maximum of 3 months per year (approximate length of the summer intermission, so students can have some vacation and visit their family). Stays longer than that are deemed to be at odds with being an active student in a foreign institution, so if a student is present in Iran for longer than that, they are deemed to no longer be a student—the exemption is invalidated and the person has to go through two years of military service before they are allowed to leave the country again.
Any male Iranian student who is forced to leave the US due to this directive is effectively expelled from their program. I am sure this is not a unique situation. There are likely many other such edge cases that affect certain demographics of students. I hope they reverse their decision, otherwise so many careers will end before they even begin.
Military service is just one of such cracks, there are likely many many more. Just imagine how many people are likely to lose their scholarships (that is their only way to pay for the program they are in) because this ruling triggers a clause in the scholarship terms, how many mature students with families now have to take their children out of school and out of country for who knows how long and what the effect of this on those children is going to be, ...
There is literally no reason for ICE to be doing this.
The IRR keeps losing more and more value, which means if they were getting help from home it keeps getting more and more expensive to be able to afford to live here.
And then on top of that they have to worry about piece of shits running this country that give no regard to their lives.
- live classes may happen in the middle of the night
- tools like GSuite are blocked in China
- internet connection quality varies
Given the amount of revenue foreign students bring in, this seems like the admin is using access to those students as a lever to force schools to reopen prematurely.
I've no idea how most of them will get any quality lab-bench research done. It pretty much nukes them.
"Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings."
I wonder if the Harvard decision today will be modified in response to this. I imagine their international students, especially in graduate studies, must be highly impacted.
Will this reduce pandemic ? No, it will incentivize colleges to offer in-person classes promoting COVID.
Will this reduce students on non-immigration visas ? Not sure it does (students might find in-person classes somewhere). Some students might just say 'fuck it' and study elsewhere. Maybe that's good for them.
Will this reduce unemployment? Maybe. But I'm doubtful. Most F1 students are barred from working off campus other than internships, and I doubt on-campus work and internships make a dent in unemployment.
I hope unis do a hybrid thing like CMU, otherwise it is a lot of pain for students who are already here.
This is the sad current state of affairs in this country. A pandemic became a political weapon.
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/programs/full-time-mba/...
> According to the Commerce Department, international students contributed $45 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/506072-ice-tells...
This is why I'm afraid of Pence getting President in the event Trump catches corona or has a heart attack or whatever. Or for whatever the Republicans put up after Trump. Because right now the only thing that keeps this administration from doing massive unrepairable damage is their own incompetence because Trump took a bunch of yes men as his advisors and Cabinet.
A government filled by someone with the malice of the current Republicans and the competence of actual professionals? Good night democracy.
If the schools feel so strongly against reopening they should waive their tuition for anyone already enrolled to attend online and close enrollment to new students, and give anyone the option to defer if desired.
I don’t blame ICE for not extending their exemption past the summer for online classes. The visa does not allow for online courses. Schools are not making an evidence based decision here, and should not expect special treatment if they aren’t willing to offer actual classes. I hope the students who are suing will prevail in court for unjust enrichment.
1. difficulty of returning home 2. risk of pandemic spread by returning home 3. internet connectivity issues 4. timezone issues 5. software availability issues 6. home suitability for studying 7. ....
"I don't blame ICE". Destroy ICE. This is appalling.
When I became a citizen 3 years ago, I told people that one motivation was that I was very very slightly afraid of Trump even though I was a white european permanent resident of 28 years. It's only taken 3 years to get to where I'd say "not imminently but genuinely afraid" for that sort of immigration status.
There’s no excuse for outright canceling classes. Classes can absolutely be held safely, if these universities simply chose to invest in the training, procedures, and equipment necessary to do so.
Instead they chose to bank their tuition payments and setup a Zoom call.
This is not a new policy, student visas have never allowed for online classes, and the universities certainly knew this. I think the blame pretty clearly lies with schools who decided to close up shop.
This pretty nuts. From what I understand, even schools that are allowing everyone on campus will have a majority of their classes online or have them be up to the discretion of professors.
This may keep the vast majority of international students out of the US.
That would make it not a "school[] operating under normal in-person classes" but rather a "school[] adopting a hybrid model." No?
Brown had made special accommodations to allow their international students to remain in dorms over this summer. By eliminating extraneous travel, these accommodations were in the best interest of both these students and the general public. Who is served by expelling them!?
The nativist agenda.
197 days...
One minute a semester in-person instruction per course, for starters.
I’m completely in favor of this guerilla approach to fighting stupid knee jerk policy changes.
Alternatively universities have to reopen to people so that it looks like they agree with the absurd demands of the current administration to open earlier than they should.
It's hard enough to study hard and achieve goals. Why come here where you will be treated like unwanted foreigners at best and asylees who should be arrested at worst?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advi...
Trump hates universities. So he’ll do anything to ensure universities are on life support. This is a great way for him to bring the uncertainties to follow his orders.
Trump is telling universities to open up for in person classes or lose all their international students, who will mostly choose universities that have in-person classes over online classes after ICE's ruling.
This is a diabolical move, arm twisting universities into opening up or else losing international students - a major sources of revenue.
You have thousands of foreigners, a large portion of which might not be in the country, waiting to return to the US to continue their studies. Many of those countries don't even allow US travelers to arrive at this time. Everybody is urging for caution, but that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals preparing to arrive back here, with possible infections, is something an agency might be concerned about. So naturally, why not prevent this travel from happening in the first place with a policy like that?
Of course it's a heavy handed approach, but so are the lock-downs and closed schools. So we go to great length trying to prevent the spread, we close schools for over 4 month, and some don't even want schools open in the fall, but somehow an influx of half a million students is something nobody should be concerned about?
Those are valid discussions to be had. Assuming right away that this is a way to force universities to open is not a very genuine way of thinking. You cannot encourage full online classes for health reasons, and applaud that on Monday, and on Tuesday complain we don't allow students from all over the world to return just to sit in front of a computer.
Everybody is laser focused on these case numbers, and some states will close schools due to high case counts in the fall, impacting millions of families. If you support that, you should probably also support any measures possible to keep case counts low, including discouraging international travel.
Seems like someone didn't read the OP.
Think about this in a way an accountable official would think.
Most universities don't know what they will do yet in the fall. If you make an exemption for people who are currently already in the country, what would that solve? It would artificially pick those students over those who happened to travel home for the summer. You can't do that. That would probably make such a rule unlawful. So you have to craft such a "heavy handed" rule in such a way that it doesn't have loop holes that can be exploited. Don't think lawyers didn't review this exemption for weeks.
And my earlier points still stand.
I'm not trying to convince people that this rule is all that good. But understand where it comes from, and don't think it's all because of a particular administration. There is certainly logic to this rule. You may not agree with it, but I might not agree with closed schools either.
