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Comment by aclimatt | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. It was downright sinister of the DHS to implicate the students in this when they themselves legitimized the school in no less than three different places. To quote the article, "if you can't trust the government, who can you trust?"

I understand what the government says by "you have to know the law", but it's idiocy to expect everyone to be a lawyer, and instead we all use our best judgement.

Maybe the signs were clear that UNNJ were fake, maybe they weren't, but fraud implies a knowing and willful attempt to break the law, and almost all of these cases seem far from it. It's shameful to make most of these students appear in immigration court.

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Yeah, it's hard to think of an analogous scheme. It'd be as if in "To Catch a Predator", the state legislature's website was altered temporarily to lower the age of consent.

Or if there was online verification of your date's driver's license that was faked to show she was of legal age, solely to entrap you.

It'd be like if you go to another country and the government there tells you the age of consent is 16 and you meet a girl who claims to be 24. You've seen her government issued ID and it says she is 24. Then it turns out she is actually 17 and the age of consent is actually 18 and it was all an elaborate ruse to catch you-- you sexual deviant!

It's more like if you go to a service that promises to provide 13 year old girls, but with legitimate ID that says that they're 18. This was a school that guaranteed that you wouldn't have to attend a school.

Some of these students need to sue the government over this. But I doubt they will have the resources or the standing to do so. At the end of the day who wins from doing this? The US government? No. The students. No. America? No. No one wins. It's just big bureaucracy justifying its budget and its existence.

US has 300 million people. 1,000 students make little difference. Whether legal or not.

It looked legitimate except for the part where you didn't have to go any classes or learn anything. You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that goes against the spirit of the law - and if your intent is to walk that line not getting a lawyer is irresponsible.

However, the university always had a reason to postpone the courses, just like scammers.

In that story, the university was the scammer, always asking for a few more days to "get their money back" and giving them a good faith gift as soon as students started asking questions.

Then, the government punished them for biting to the government run scam.

Isn't this made a bit murkier by the fact that practical training through work experience can be a legitimate part of such a course of study? It's not like they were working at maccas or something.

There are other visas for that. I did an internship on a J-1 for example. I would find it hard to believe these students didn't know what they were doing was questionable.

I feel like basically everything about immigration law seems to go against the spirit of the law in that sense.

E.g., one of the most common ways to get a work permit in the US is to do a university degree, then you get to work for one year ("OPT"), during which your employer can apply for an H1B visa for you.

But the literal meaning of OPT is "optional practical training", and your job is referred to as "practical training" in all documents. Of course it's nothing of the sort, it's just a job. For me, coming from a foreign country, this seems super dodgy and against the spirit of the law. But it's completely standard and above-the-board.

> It looked legitimate except for the part where you didn't have to go any classes or learn anything.

So just like most Ivy League schools?

Laws that are self-defeating to their ostensible purpose are almost the norm at this point, though. I don't expect anyone, as a matter of law, to say "wait, that's ridiculous, that incentivizes me to do X, when obviously the law exists to promote not-X, so obviously this scheme to ramp up our X is shady."

If you want an example, here's one off the cuff: the law that says you can only bring free water out at restaurants if the patron asks. If anything, the automatic water displaces the consumption of other drinks, which generally require other ag products that are far more rainwater intense per liter consumed. So if I'm a waiter, am I undermining or supporting "the spirit of that law" if I remind people to ask?

Where is that law? I know tons of restaurants that offer free water without being asked.

Recent California thing: http://sf.eater.com/2015/3/17/8237891/serving-water-californ...

Not sure it's just me or if I have misread this, but the article says the university claimed it has classes before DHS announced it was fake and provides no classes at all. Quote: "...and Twitter messages about classes canceled because of bad weather". In that sense, even though it is doubtable on whether this sting operation is an entrapment for students in a legal term, it is an "entrapment" for the students in the fact. Presumably, We can see that before government shut down the university, students were only been told "you don't HAVE TO go to class" for some period of time when they were in CPT (or internship), but NOT been told the university NEVER had and won't going to have any classes. Being in the lie that the university may hold class somewhere, or in the future, and it was relatively new and totally legitimate, students could buy it and participate into this later known "scheme".

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