It is just horrific to watch the unfolding of everything that gives us a competitive edge and makes this country stand out. At the same time watching people cheer it.

We are sending our best and brightest into the welcoming arms of the competition. And I don’t mean this in a good guy bad guy way, more in the sense of healthy competition between sports teams.

We already know about the countless contributions of Immigrants, even when it comes to job creation from immigrant founded companies. As we turn them away, we continue to dissolve into unprecedented dysfunction, at a time that we most need to attract that energy to get us out of this nasty rut.

As an immigrant who came here from India at age 12, this is home. And it’s sad to see your home being eaten into by politically motivated termites and rotting at every level at the core, while many of my fellow Americans cheer it on our self-destruction.

I'm not seeing it. Unless Europe suddenly figures out how to pay real wages at the same time that China discovers how to not be horrible people can always be imported at the discretion of whoever is managing the system. People come to the US for the money.

Higher wages in US is just cost of doing business - most top tier people won’t work in US at lower salaries because of extreme uncertainty and zero safety net.

Salaries in Canada are lower but the safety net makes up for it.

this has to be a joke post. the safety net is provided to poor people, by the taxed salary of the high paid people. you are saying the high paid people want to work in canada, so they can pay for poor people?

my job pays 250k standard in the states. literally the same job, at the same company, is 160k canadian. it's even less in france.

yes, yes, you get insurance. so do i -about 8k/year taken out of my paycheck.

Switzerland is very welcoming

Canada?

Canada also has low salaries.

But better social services. Salaries will go up with more competition.

> We are sending our best and brightest into the welcoming arms of the competition.

Seems like an excellent opportunity to test this assertion.

What the f*ck is wrong with these people, this is so transparent. First they didn't want the "bad" immigrants coming, or the illegal immigrants, but now they don't want the students in higher education that are studying in the USA to be here either?!?!?! As if it's the students fault that the school they attend is forcing them to do online classes temporarily.

I'd imagine a good bit of these students have pretty extensive lives and plans in the US since they're here LEGALLY.

It was never about any of those things, it certainly was never about what is in the country's interest. It was always blind racism. In the very speech where trump announced his candidacy: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

This is a blanket statement about ALL mexican immigrants, and "you" refers to his entirely white base of supporters. The administration set up deliberately cruel and trauma-inducing family separations out of hatred, just as these policies are born out of hate. When backwards people talk about "illegals," they are never talking about people's legal immigration status, it's shorthand for race.

I think the right interpretation of this is that it's an attack on universities, not an attack on international students.

International students basically are not "stealing" Americans' jobs. They're creating them, in fact. They're high-dollar tourists, basically.

I believe this dates back to 2001 where one of the hijackers was in the US on a student visa despite never attending any classes. Basically you require a babysitter to be allowed to stay.

As for things that are "temporary", it's looking like the pandemic situation isn't changing any time soon unfortunately. I think everyone is just adapting. The govt is saying going totally online cannot become the new normal for internationals.

Students are certainly able to transfer, by the way. I know students who failed and rushed to apply to yet another school (they always find one too) to avoid being sent home as a result.

I used to believe that the sentiment against bad immigrants was justified. There are some really good reasons why you wouldn't want to open up your country to desperate people who are willing to be exploited because their home country is an even worse place. Of course none of those reasons matter when you even kick out the type of immigration that is actively beneficial for your country. At that point it's just plain old xenophobia which is never acceptable.

Hopefully colleges will create some sort of "hybrid" programs that is not completely online to allow foreign students to stay in the US.

But yeah, this is very sad.

It would be challenging to do so - the rule states that full time students can only enroll in one full-time online class.

That's not true, if the school is using a hybrid model students can take more courses online. https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/sevp-modifies-temporary-ex...

So... highly political, but to all the Americans here who just couldn't bring themselves to vote for email lady because she was just too neoliberal: mazel tov!

FYI, Obama administration ICE did plenty of these things. For instance the fake College sting operation was started under Obama administration. as soon as Obama took oath new immigration policies screwed h-1bs. Due to high unemployment Obama administration believed that these people were stealing jobs from Americans and contributing to high unemployment of American citizens. There were no protests at JFK for these people against these policies.

It's simply partisan thinking to believe that your political side favors legal immigration, they don't.

Is this move by ICE going to be additional motivation for schools to not go remote for September?

Even if they believe that will probably to cost lives on campus and in the local community?

I'm sure we'd love these students to come to Australia, once the border lockdowns are finished. Maybe an Australian university or one from another country will replace Havard, MIT etc in the global pecking order.

Education is already a big business in Australia, those universities love the foreign student revenue so much that they even lower the bar for English requirements so that more students can come over.

https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/cash-cows/11084858

Yep, and at a time when interstate borders have not reopened, let alone national borders, the Australian federal government is making an exemption for one group - international students

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/07/austr...

Twitter had hashtag #labswithoutvisas going on few weeks back where some professors have posted images of what their labs would look like without people on visas [1]. And this would be true for way more labs than what you will see on twitter. Most likely within couple of years, number of research papers coming from US would decline drastically.

[1] https://twitter.com/hashtag/labswithoutvisas

[sarcasm] Oh wait! All these research positions can go to Americans now, damn those pesky Indian, Chinese, Korean... etc kids who have been snatching these opportunities from deserving Americans. I don't see why Americans won't fill in these positions and MAGA. [/sarcasm]

It's a bit paternalistic to call restricting the set of options available to someone "doing them a favor".

What a disaster this administration is - literally taking the US backward deep into the Trump cave. I experienced great joy showing up at the US consulate to return my green card with a great big F-U smile on my face. Good riddance.

Why is this such a problem? So they go back home for a year, save lots of money on US rents, stay enrolled, then come back once in-person classes start again? is there any evidence that universities want to disenroll these students and therefore lose their extremely high tuition fees?

Well, first, some schools are going online only for the latter half of the semester. But my understanding of the current guidance is that this is not enough to meet the in-person requirements, and so students may have to leave anyway and miss that half. Second, intl. travel is highly disrupted already and will continue being so. Some countries will fare worse under covid than others, and so students may get stuck, even after their school states are doing better. No guidance was given on students from travel ban countries, who were already here after the travel bans. Third, student visas expire. Visa politics are very volatile lately. Summing up, many people are now subject to gratuitous uncertainty about whether they'll be able to come back in at all over the next 12 months. Suppose you have to leave, a lot of people have already signed leases, etc.

Finally, the guidance so far is quite ambiguous. It is not clear who is able to remain and who won't, and my department sent an email basically saying they are waiting for extra information to know what's going on. That already is bad in itself.

An additional challenge is that classes will, almost certainly, be scheduled based on "local time". Students attending from other countries may find themselves needing to significantly time-shift their studies.

This is definitely a major issue - the US has a lot of students who come in from China, which would require a very significant time shift. Those students may also not be able to access the digital resources they need for class due to internet censorship, or they may simply be unable to join live class sessions due to latency or overall speed issues.

I had overlooked the potential impact of internet censorship. It seems like it would be very hard to take a graduate-level class without access to resources like Google Scholar.

Ah, China...I see

Those are excellent points, thank you

Ah, optimism and assumptions.