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I spent 45 minutes this morning trying to get to the bottom of this whole thing - as usual there is more nuance to this than presented. - For as far back as I

• deleted 6y ago
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• skrowl 6y ago
  This is important. The media is trying to spin this as something new this administration is doing. It's sad that they're so biased against this administration to the point where they create a false narrative to try to blame Trump for everything. You literally could not have a student visa and attend classes 100% online in ANY of Obama's 8 years in office. Period. It's not a new policy, it's just going back to the way it was before the temporary covid-19 exemptions were put in place. It's not really a big news story when you get down to the fact and past the "TRUMP BAD!" headline.
  • asciident 6y ago
    The difference is a lot of universities are remote only, due to being more concerned about safety. So it's simply not possible for the students to take in-person courses. This was not the case during Obama's years.
  • joecot 6y ago
    Going back to the restrictions in place before COVID, while COVID is still very much a thing, and we haven't even finished the first wave while a second wave rises, is bad. While Conservative administrations are good at finding ways to punish people through neglecting to act as opposed to having to actively take action, this isn't behavior that should be lauded. The options here are either that the administration is risking lethal consequences for these students out of: 1) incompetence (they forgot to extend the exemptions), or 2) active negligence. Either is exceptionally bad. Whether it was an active decision or not to let these exceptions end, ICE seems almost gleeful to take the opportunity to kick these students out of the country, and ICE is entirely under the control of the executive branch.
  • burkaman 6y ago
    If a category 5 hurricane destroyed a university, and then ICE deported international students because they were no longer attending classes in person, do you think that would be news? It's just existing policy, their hands are tied. Or: why is it news that Trump refuses to wear a mask? Obama never wore one.
  • msie 6y ago
    Oh brother, you Trump supporters have no empathy. How can you not see the hardship of kicking out international students who are already here? COVID forcing the closure of universities is not their fault. And what if the universities reopen again in a couple of months as Trump promises? What a waste to leave the country only to have to come back again. You defend Trump saying that the same rule applied during Obama's years but Trump can/does whatever he wants including tear down things setup during Obama. So you have no excuse. You tried kicking out DACA kids but failed. There is a pattern here.
    • joejoeshabadoo5 6y ago
      I didn’t hear a lot of empathy in your argument.
      • DangitBobby 6y ago
        You must have missed this: > How can you not see the hardship of kicking out international students who are already here? COVID forcing the closure of universities is not their fault.
• burkaman 6y ago
  It is not an improvement, it's a punishment for universities being responsible. The outcome is worse for everyone involved, including anyone who lives near a college. "At least one in-person class" doesn't make any sense. Either in-person classes are safe, and the rules can go back to pre-pandemic, or they aren't, and forcing students and professors to attend them is dangerous and cruel. There is no legitimate justification for this. There's no slippery slope issue or anything, everybody accepts that these rules will go back to normal once it's safe to do so.
  • davidf18 6y ago
    They way, way overcharge for an on-line only experience. One misses the networking and the class interaction. There are very good quality MOOCs, coursera, etc. What's the difference if Harvard teaches an ML course, now on-line, and a Stanford MOOC?
  • DuskStar 6y ago
    The perspective of ICE is that there's no legitimate justification for someone to be in the US if they're only taking online courses.
    • sigzero 6y ago
      I would agree with that justification.
    • ouid 6y ago
      I think that just being in the same time zone as your school makes a pretty big difference.
      • alchemism 6y ago
        Any remote worker at a 'distributed' company would heartily agree.
    • burkaman 6y ago
      Well, I can give one. These students fully expected to attend in-person classes, paid for them in full, paid to get to America and get housing for that purpose, will attend in person again as soon as it is possible. Why can't they go home for one semester? 1) It's expensive. Flight home, rent for a US apartment they no longer occupy, potential rent for a new apartment at home, flight back here next semester. Where is a student supposed to get $5000+ to deal with this? 2) They need good internet access (and a laptop) wherever they're going. Not guaranteed, and not something the university can easily provide. 3) Timezones. Many classes are synchronous and discussion-based. Not only do you need internet good enough to support video calls, but you need to be awake at the same time as 15 other people in however many timezones. 4) It might be illegal. What if you're from China or Iran and your school uses G Suite for Education? Or they use Zoom, which is banned in 6 countries. Participating in your classes would be illegal. Can the university switch their entire infrastructure to a new platform in a couple months to support a few students for one semester for arbitrary reasons? 5) It might be unsafe. Not all students have a safe and stable place to go. 6) It achieves nothing. Literally no benefit for anyone. If you expect these students to come back in a semester or two, there is no point.
• UncleMeat 6y ago
  > This is the part that feels punitive and particularly onerous to me But that's the part that people are upset about. People aren't angry that there exists a policy to prevent students of fully online universities from getting visas. People are upset that because it is completely reasonable for a traditional brick-and-mortar university to run classes 100% online this coming semester (e.g., Harvard) and that suddenly a bunch of students who are attending Harvard and have been doing so for years are forced to leave the country on a moment's notice. What nuance is there? The original exception (you can take 100% online classes) was thoroughly reasonable given the pandemic and the new updated policy is completely unreasonable. It only harms people and benefits no one.
  • sigzero 6y ago
    If you are taking 100% online classes there is no reason to have or need the VISA. The exception being for things like COVID etc. Those should be exceptional circumstances.
    • strstr 6y ago
      This definitely doesn’t make sense to me. Time zones are going to be a huge issue. If a coworker told me they were going to work from an asian/european timezone, we could try to make it work, but it’s definitely a hassle. The story is no different for universities and their courses.
    • mithr 6y ago
      Please explain your plan for what happens the following semester, once in-person classes resume, and these students are stuck abroad until such time that they are able to renew their visa stamps (which is a notoriously expensive, long process that can result in denials for completely arbitrary reasons).
  • v_throw 6y ago
    What you are also discounting for is that once the student exits the country, they are caught in the quagmire of securing a stamping to reenter. Given the stance the current administration has taken around virtually all consular appointments/stampings, these students might as well consider their chances of returning to the US to pursue their respective degrees to be close to zero. Also my understanding is that the criteria for being allowed to stay doesn't differentiate on the level of the degree. For instance, Phd students who have completed their course work but are busy working on their thesis and building their publishing record are royally screwed. I expect a number of transfers of some of the best and brightest to research universities in Canada and Europe. I personally witnessed how much of a boon the mistreatment of Iranian students by the US govt. was to universities in Canada. They got some of the best and brightest who would have otherwise been gobbled up by top schools in the US. I expect a massive and permanent exodus of foreign students to other countries with more pragmatic policies in place.
• deleted 6y ago
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• JamisonM 6y ago
  It seems like the framing is entirely fair. Any reasonable administrative body would look at the circumstances involved in this and do the thing that would disrupt lives the least for the benefit of everyone involved. "So on the one hand it's actually an improvement." This seems kind of silly.
  • eric_b 6y ago
    The universities knew this was a possibility. They want to charge full tuition (particularly to their international students who account for a disproportionate share of revenue) and go online-only with no consequences. I'm not sure that's entirely reasonable either. From my experience, distance learning isn't really worth very much. This applies to K-12 as well as university. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect in-person classes in the Fall if you're paying full tuition. We expect our grocery store workers to show up and do their jobs during COVID, I think it's reasonable to expect the same of university faculty.
    • newen 6y ago
      It's not typically attending the classes themselves that are the benefits of going to college. It's working with other students on homework, projects, etc., networking, socializing.
    • UncleMeat 6y ago
      Sure. Universities are megacorporations that aren't exactly doing it for charity. They charge an arm and a leg and online education sucks by comparison. I'd like to see universities slash their tuitions for the online system. Literally none of that makes it okay to evict people from the country under this policy. This isn't about the Trump administration standing up for students against universities. This is about the Trump administration shitting on immigrants.
    • JamisonM 6y ago
      Ok, but what does that have to do with the immigration status of their students?
• WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
  The oddest thing about this whole topic, especially in light of the current social unrest in the USA is that people seem to totally miss the fact that Universities, American tech corporations, and the whole American economy is a cynical human resource extraction operation that syphon off the best and brightest to keep the American economy going, where it would have an immensely hard time running otherwise. I see that as the core motivation for the Harvard and MIT lawsuit, keeping the flow of that foreign talent drug flowing, not some kind of emotive narrative about injustice or unfairness. The American economy and society is essentially a kind of massive Ponzi scheme or con job (short for trick of confidence), where the foreign "human resources" are required to keep the scheme from collapsing. The day that China, India, Europe, Russia, etc. realize that they are being extracted of some of their very most important and valuable resources, their best and brightest, and they cut the USA off; it will cause massive panic and pangs of terror among the US ruling class that needs to keep the flow of fresh supply of the foreign best and brightest to prevent their con job from being exposed. There is all this talk of slavery and colonialism and resource extraction of the past that has sabotaged and disadvantaged countries and societies and communities. In reality though it never stopped, it only took on a different and largely more profitable form like how a con artist may shift and move around and dissolve and form new companies as needed while the con always remains more or less the same. The same cynical exploitation and extraction of resources from one society to fuel and enrich another has always remained in place even if the branding, labeling, and narrative around it has changed over time. If people want to "tear down the system of exploitation and abuse" (or however it is characterized) all they would need to do is stop feeding the American economy with their best and brightest, let alone even their hard working manual labor like Central America is doing, who are not available to contribute to developing their own societies because they are busy serving the American corporations to "Make America Great Again". In reality, the US economy is so riddled with massive holes and flaws that it is like a sieve that requires a constant and ever larger flow of the best and brightest and hardest working and most motivated and driven just to keep the con going. If that were to seize up, if foreign countries and leaders realized how they were sabotaging themselves and stopped fueling the US economy, the energy and economic activity of the USA would immediately start draining out at a dizzying rate. I would love for someone to correct me if I am looking at this incorrectly.
• credit_guy 6y ago
  > These exemptions were for Spring and Summer and universities were awaiting the rules for Fall. I went to the original ICE/SEVP documents and I didn't find any mention that the rules were for Spring and Summer, and not for Fall. Here they are: March-9 document: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/bcm2003-01.pdf https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/bcm2003-01.pdf March-13 document: https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/2020/Coronavirus%20Guidance_3.13.20.pdf https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/2...