First they came for the Iranians | Hacker News Reader

First they came for the Iranians

scottaaronson.com

1,000 pointsaaronyy429 comments

I am an Iranian CS student. I had a fully funded PhD admission at one of the US universities. I was admitted for the Fall 2016 semester.

I am currently in Iran due to my visa not being issued despite the 7 months I have waited for it. I was able to defer my admission to Spring 2017 semester, but then _this_ happened.

I am quite sure that I will never be able to attend this program. I had very high hopes for my future because of this admission.

I was very sad today after hearing this news. I have to come up with a new plan for my life, since it never occurred to me that I would not be able to attend.

Edit: Thanks for all the support from the HN community.

I am sympathetic to your plight. Why not do as the article suggests and apply to Australia or Canada for your studies? Not sure of the availability of funded PhD research programmes here (Australia), but it may yield quicker results at the moment.

It hurts so much to read stories like this, where politics stands in the way of education, especially when the university already approved.

Have you thought about coming to Germany? Not the US, but not bad either..

https://www.daad.de/deutschland/stipendium/en/

On behalf of my fellow Americans, please allow me to offer you our deepest apology. Please know that most of our country doesn't hate or fear you. We will continue to do everything we can to fight this policy and others like it.

of course you don't, political elite never represents common folks out there (that includes supposedly evil places like North Korea, Iran, Iraq etc.). americans are, by my personal experience great people.

america's loss, some other place gain (judging from OP description, he won't have big troubles getting someplace else).

to OP - don't worry, seeing where US us steadily going after 9/11, without any attempt to even slow down, there are much better places to live, if you value things like true freedom. as somebody coming from Iran, I would presume so...

> We will continue to do everything we can to fight this policy and others like it.

You say that, but I'm afraid the implication might be "short of doing anything that matters". Where are the protests? Why aren't people in the streets? Don't make the same mistake Germans did under Hitler. The government relies on each step affecting few enough people that nobody will be bothered enough to march, and after a thousand little steps, you have a totalitarian government.

There are fairly large and violent protests against Trump. His supporters are regularly attacked. This has been true ever since he was a serious candidate.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/riots-break-out-wash... http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/inauguration-2017/anti-trum... http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/08/hillary-supporters-c... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/06/0...

In addition to violent (and some non-violent) protests, you also have direct action targeting his supporters. People who support Trump, or are mistakenly believed to support him, or just random passerby, are being assaulted (and in some cases, kidnapped or shot).

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/politics/richard-spenc... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/04/facebook-liv... http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/police-releas...

Do these things count as "anything that matters"?

> Do these things count as "anything that matters"?

No. Those aren't protests, they're vigilantism.

I'm pretty sure Spencer got punched in the face because he's a Nazi.

As for the rest of it, it's a little hilarious to act like the non violent protests aren't the majority of activity. Just the Women's marches (which aren't just about Trump but are obviously responsive to his presidency) were more in number, both location wise and participation wise, than any violent actions that have happened. If you want to limit it to immigration protests, the non violent protests yesterday had higher participation than the totality of anti-Trump violence (http://dcist.com/2017/01/theres_a_rally_planned_at_white_hou... ).

You can't just punch people in the face because they're Nazis. There's no way to do that that doesn't lead to an escalating violence cycle.

My comment is an analysis of the motivation for the punch not an analysis of punching as a tactic.

> You can't just punch people in the face because they're Nazis

Sure you can.

Millions of people showed up to supposedly protest Trump, yet Hillary Clinton couldn't consistently rally even a thousand people without help from A-rank celebrities.

There were already many different large scale protests across the nation several days ago. Those took months to organize and set up. Logistics alone makes another immediate large scale protest unlikely. The exception is unless there is clear and demonstrable malfeasance like in the case of S. Korea's president.

If Trump's draft executive order had said something like "permanent ban of all Muslims" then I have no doubts people would start protesting immediately. Careful reading of the draft though shows the following:

1) It's limited to seven countries. Notably missing Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

2) The ban on entry from these countries is 30 days to "reduce investigative burdens".

3) After that point all countries on that list need to provide additional screening info in order for visas to be accepted.

4) If the countries do not agree to provide said info after 60 days from notification, all nationals from that country will not be allowed entry unless under certain circumstances. Compliance will reverse this.

5) More countries may be added to this list based on recommendation by SecState (Tillerson) and SecDef (Mattis).

6) On a case by case basis, visas may be granted to nationals from banned countries.

I wouldn't call any of the above great, but calling this the precursor to Kristallnacht is a reach. Instead of losing your mind over everything objectionable that Trump does, it might be best to conserve your strength. Remember that fatiguing the people you want to support you with a constant state of emergency is a real thing. Proportional responses are best.

> If Trump's draft executive order had said something like "permanent ban of all Muslims" then I have no doubts people would start protesting immediately.

That's why it doesn't say that. You start with seven countries, then add five more ("I didn't protest the first seven, why would I protest five?") then a few more, and pretty soon, you got all Muslim countries. It's barely been a week and it's already seven, I imagine the entire set of Muslim countries can't take more than a month or two.

> The ban on entry from these countries is 30 days to "reduce investigative burdens".

For now, yes. That gives the government a month to extend the duration, if they want to.

> After that point all countries on that list need to provide additional screening info in order for visas to be accepted.

It takes months to organize a protest, how long do you think it will take a country to institute "additional screening" for the single other special snowflake country that demands it? Meanwhile, none of those countries' residents can travel (or return) to the US.

> If the countries do not agree to provide said info after 60 days from notification, all nationals from that country will not be allowed entry unless under certain circumstances.

And that doesn't bother you?

> Instead of losing your mind over everything objectionable that Trump does, it might be best to conserve your strength

Conserve your strength for what? There won't be a single incident that's worse than this. Germany didn't go from Socialist utopia to Kristallnacht in a day.

If he adds more, then that's a different situation. Right now is all I know. I'm not going to assume the worst until Trump actually displays a pattern of behavior.

One of the things I noticed is you passed over the people who are responsible for implementing and reporting to the President on this: Tillerson and Mattis. Neither of these men is anything remotely close to a Nazi. Mattis has far too much integrity, Tillerson as well.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21711926-rex-til...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/us/politics/james-mattis-...

Mattis is unlikely to support a full ban on all Muslims as he is on record saying that we need our Middle Eastern allies. It's one of the reasons he's against the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Tillerson strikes me as far too ethical a player to subscribe to the notion that we need such an approach. If he's that fair minded at Exxon Mobile, I doubt much will change when he's SecState. Remember he's backed by people like Condaleeza Rice, someone I hardly consider a Nazi.

If you're worried about Trump deciding to just add all the countries, I doubt he will. Trump is known for not being a deep policy wonk (unlike Obama and W) and mostly an instinctual leader. He can get away with this because he relies heavily on his subordinates for advice and gives them a large amount of leeway. This is not necessarily a bad leadership style and in this case, I think we're pretty safe considering the people who need to make these decisions.

Should Trump add every majority Muslim country in the world to the banned travel list, or it extends for a period of time that is significantly longer than he initially established, I think going nuts is probably warranted. That would be a single incident worse than this. There's four years of Trump, if you don't agree with him it might be best to not exhaust your people too early. Remember what Kasparov said:

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/808750564284702720?lan...

Mostly that list reads as countries full of people that probably don't like us much and have reason to for better or for worse:

"What all seven countries also have in common is that the United States government has violently intervened in them. The U.S. is currently bombing — or has bombed in the recent past — six of them. The U.S. has not bombed Iran, but has a long history of intervention including a recent cyberattack."

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/25/trumps-muslim-immigratio...

> If you're worried about Trump deciding to just add all the countries, I doubt he will

I hope you're right.

> That would be a single incident worse than this.

You're assuming he wouldn't be adding them little by little, which would be many small incidents, each about as bad as this one.

> There's four years of Trump, if you don't agree with him it might be best to not exhaust your people too early.

Yes, but you also need to take care to not wait too long before you act. I'd err on the side of protesting on this one.

> Mostly that list reads as countries full of people that probably don't like us much

I'm not sure many countries in the world are crazy about the US right now. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we don't ban travel based on who likes whom. There haven't been any US terrorists who came from Iran, so what's Trump's intention with this move?

> What all seven countries also have in common is that the United States government has violently intervened in them. The U.S. is currently bombing — or has bombed in the recent past — six of them.

This move isn't going to mend any fences either.

What you're forgetting is that the cabinet serves at the pleasure of the President, they are not counter parties to him. They carry out direction from the President. They can be fired and replaced very quickly.

> It's barely been a week and it's already seven, I imagine the entire set of Muslim countries can't take more than a month or two.

Without further evidence that this is a stable pattern, you appear to be succumbing to this: https://www.xkcd.com/605/

Why should we not consider that he called for a "ban on Muslims entering the United States" for months prior to his election? This is what he ran on so of course we have reason to suspect this will be a pattern.

> If Trump's draft executive order had said something like "permanent ban of all Muslims" then I have no doubts people would start protesting immediately.

It's useful to look at what Hannah Arendt said about the Nazis.

https://twitter.com/charlesarthur/status/824551572520796161

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CykynrCXEAAJOSE.jpg:large

Trump is saying what he needs to be true for him to start building his walls; deporting people; etc.

People have been screaming that the Republican party is the Nazi party since the days of Reagan. So far history has held this up to be absolutely not true. Forgive me if I'm a bit incredulous and give Trump the benefit of doubt until proven otherwise.

Here's another way to look at it:

"I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy."

-Moneyball

I don't understand how people who can understand and believe in things like quantum and multiple realities think that the only outcomes our world are strictly binary: Nazism or Progressive Liberalism.

>I don't understand how people who can understand and believe in things like quantum and multiple realities think that the only outcomes our world are strictly binary: Nazism or Progressive Liberalism.

That's a bit of a strawman, I think; no-one I've heard of, who thinks Trump is a fascist, arrived at that conclusion by saying "well he's not a progressive liberal so all that's left is nazi". It's been more like (whether correct or not) "his policies and views are similar to the historical policies and views associated with fascism, so he could be a fascist."

That's fair, let me go into more detail.

I know a lot of people who fervently believe that Trump is the second coming of Hitler. If you dig around on Twitter it won't be long before you find this sentiment practically everywhere. It's not "could be a fascist" it is "actually is a fascist and we need to actively resist".

This is not unique to Donald Trump. W Bush is the most recent example where Bush=Hitler was practically a slogan for liberals. Again, people claimed the same thing. "Policies and views are similar therefore" and went straight for the extremes. They didn't go for the benefit of the doubt at all, despite there being a lot of evidence that Bush was in no way at all a Nazi. I think it's fair to argue that it's a tenant of faith for liberals that all conservatives hate gays, hate minorities, hate women, etc. That these people exist in the Republican party is impossible to deny. To tar and feather the entire Republican party as this way is how we get to this binary world view.

As far as Donald Trump is concerned, I think if you've really dug into Donald Trump and done your homework on him, I think that calling him a fascist is grossly unfair. Let's take this article from 2000:

http://www.advocate.com/election/2015/9/28/read-donald-trump...

"Do you think gay people should be allowed to serve in the military?"

"Yes, if a gay person can be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or take another position of responsibility, why can't they serve this country in the military? “Don’t ask, don’t tell” has clearly failed. Gay people serve effectively in the military in a number of European countries. There is no reason why they can’t serve in the United States. Frankly, the state of our military is a wreck. Military pay is a joke, military benefits are ridiculous, and we can’t attract the kind of quality people we need to have an effective fighting force. The Pentagon is wasting millions on weapons they don’t need instead of focusing on the military needs in the changing world situation. The truth is, our nation defense is in the weakest state since Pearl Harbor. I favor a total reorganization of all branches of our military, and I would address the gay question more forthrightly within that reorganization."

"Are you running just to beat Pat Buchanan?"

"I used to like Pat. I was on Crossfire with him. I thought he was a nice guy. Then I read the things he had written about Hitler, Jews, blacks, gays, and Mexicans. I mean, I think it’s disgusting. That speech he made at the ’92 Republican convention was a disaster. He wants to divide Americans. Clearly, he has a love affair with Adolf Hitler, and that’s sick. Buchanan actually said gay people had chosen “satan[ism] and suicide.” Now he says he welcomes gay people into his campaign. The guy is a hypocrite."

Note that these views are not in a vaccuum. If you go back and read his views before the 2016 election, you get the picture of a Donald Trump who reads like a liberal. Nothing like a fascist at all. And yet many people have practically jumped at characterizing Trump as the second coming of Nazi Germany. The reasons why are a much longer discussion. I'm not saying any of this disproves that he is a Nazi. I'm saying that this decreases the likelihood that it is true. This is why I say people are expressing a binary worldview. From what I can see, many are not expressing that there could be a third possibility. Or fourth. Or a myriad of options.

>I think it's fair to argue that it's a tenant of faith for liberals that all conservatives hate gays, hate minorities, hate women, etc.

Well, to paraphrase your next sentence: "that these people exist in the Democratic party is impossible to deny, to tar and feather the entire Democratic party as this way is how we get to the binary world view."

In particular, I am a liberal in a rural Pennsylvania county that voted 75% for Trump, and I know that my conservative neighbors do not hate gays, minorities, and women. (Most people I've talked to were responsive to his position on coal mining; I'm not sure what will happen in four years if those jobs don't come back.)

>This is why I say people are expressing a binary worldview. From what I can see, many are not expressing that there could be a third possibility. Or fourth. Or a myriad of options.

You mentioned Twitter; if Trump being a Nazi is one bad option, and there are x-1 other good options, I think it's only natural that the kind of people who like to tweet are going to tweet about what they think is the most dangerous one.

I'm going to diverge from the topic, but do you really think those jobs will return given the cheapness now of solar and natural gas? The market without strings won't revive coal.

>do you really think those jobs will return given the cheapness now of solar and natural gas?

In the county and state where I live (Somerset County, PA) the majority of coal production is metallurgical, so we are more sensitive to the demand for steel than to the price of natural gas.

That demand is on an uptick, so there are 4 new mines planned for PA (2 in my county)[1]. But there was a similar spike in demand back in 2008, which didn't end up making much of an impact on employment. For example, PBS coals, whose headquarters I drive past every day, had ~600 employees in 2008 when they were bought by Severstal (a Russian steel company), who planned on adding ~150 more jobs.[2] In 2014 they were acquired by Corsa Coals (from Canada), who laid off about 130 miners in 2015.[3]

TLDR: no I don't think those jobs will return.

[1] http://www.coalage.com/news/latest/5510-4-new-met-mines-plan...

[2] http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1531216/russian_steelm...

[3] http://triblive.com/business/headlines/7530395-74/mines-coal...

>Well, to paraphrase your next sentence: "that these people exist in the Democratic party is impossible to deny, to tar and feather the entire Democratic party as this way is how we get to the binary world view."

That's fair, I should have included that point as well.

>You mentioned Twitter; if Trump being a Nazi is one bad option, and there are x-1 other good options, I think it's only natural that the kind of people who like to tweet are going to tweet about what they think is the most dangerous one.

I mentioned twitter mainly because it's what comes to mind first. Here's a tumblr example:

"I have seen a lot of people talking about the issues that were removed from the White House website. What I have seen little discussion of (or any, tbh) is what’s gone up in their place. There are exactly six issues now listed:

America First Energy Plan

America First Foreign Policy

Bringing Back Jobs And Growth

Making Our Military Strong Again

Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community

Trade Deals Working For All Americans

Just those headings should be terrifying enough: between the focus on state violence and the coded “America First” white ultranationalism, this is an unabashedly, literally fascist platform."

https://shotfromguns.tumblr.com/post/156267047201/i-have-see...

Trump was a master manipulator. He barely had a policy dirrction. Ironically it's conservatism that loses in the long run.

Be in no doubt that such missteps will form the hadokens by which conservatism's will be k.o ed by the libs.

Sure. All the KO's in the House[0] Senate[1] and gubernatorial[2] elections have them shaking in their boots.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_gubernatorial_el...

Have you seen the 2018 Senate elections map in particular?

Let's see what happens in 30 days, then. My hopes are not high.

Also, if this really were just to reduce investigative burden, why not halt all refugees from all countries for 30 days?

> why not halt all refugees from all countries for 30 days?

Refugees from all countries have been halted for 120 days by the order. The refugee provisions are different than the general immigration ones.

It appears that they only want Muslims from countries that are either known state funders of terrorism or are being farmed for Cocaine.

> If Trump's draft executive order had said something like "permanent ban of all Muslims" then I have no doubts people would start protesting immediately.

1. It's not a draft, it's an issued order.

2. People did start protesting immediately.

> It's limited to seven countries.

Well, the initial 90-day ban in the order is. The order itself is much broader.

> The ban on entry from these countries is 30 days

90 days.

30 days is the timeline for the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to decide on information that countries (not limited to those covered by the 90-day ban) must provide in the future in order for immigration to be allowed from their country.

> 3) After that point all countries on that list need to provide additional screening info in order for visas to be accepted.

No, all countries period must provide the additional information once it is determined what that information is, within 60 days of the rules being issued. A list of countries (again, not limited to those in the 90-day ban) will be maintained, and entry from those countries will be banned; the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security are to recommend countries based on non-compliance, but the order neither indicates that non-compliance will consistently result in inclusion on the banned list, or that the list will be restricted to non-compliant countries.

There were protests last night in New York City: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/26/new-york-tru...

I'm afraid that even protests won't carry much weight against the tone-deaf bunch of corporate-funded cadre of bigoted politicians this electoral cycle has ushered into power on a narrow but fanatic power base. The first occasion for actually affecting matters will not arise before the next Congressional electoral cycle. The whole world is stuck with these people doing whatever meets their fancy for the next two years at least... and even then changing course will depend on the dejected silent majority somehow snapping out of their apathy and voting to say that enough is enough — that same silent majority whose apathy led to the fanatics getting their way a few months ago.

Needless to say, I'm not optimistic.

There are massive protests going on in Philadelphia right now, where President Trump and the entire Congress of Republicans are meeting to plan their strategy for the year.

It might be the largest street protest in Philadelphia's history.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpinPhilly?src=tren

[edit:grammar]

I am a naturalized American citizen, born in Iran. Up to yesterday I was giving this administration the benefit of the doubt. But an administration that demands political vetting of scientific results tripped my wire.

Now I am not sure what to make of our President mentioning "citizen, good citizens" in his remarks to DHS. After all, "no one expects the spanish inquisition".

I completely agree with you and expressed my best wishes and sympathy to OP - but I'd also like to take a moment to appreciate the irony of your username in this thread! :)

The situation is deplorable. I would suggest applying to Canada (as others have suggested), Machine Learning seems to be quite strong there. Otherwise, many of the application processes are still open in many European universities (if I recall from my time applying to grad school, ETH deadline as well as other continental universities are due sometime during Spring).

Edit: typos

I am deeply saddened to read this. I apologize, on behalf of the country.

Please know that the majority of people in the US do not support this policy. We want to see you reach your potential. We want to benefit from the talent you would bring.

Many of us will be working hard to fix this for the next several years.

I'm sorry I couldn't do more to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Why? Everyone should not get a visa. Country should have a right to decide whom they let in. I never heard anyone complaining when the rich got visa more easily than poor.

Countries should vet who they let in. They shouldn't blanket ban a country because of its leaders' policies, or else pretty soon US citizens won't be able to travel anywhere due to global disgust with Trump's bozocity.

I've heard lots of complaining about the ability of the rich to effectively buy visas.

As for why? Because this blanket ban is not useful, it violates the spirit of religious freedom, and it's going to cause a lot of real harm both to people who want to come here, and to our own country due to excluding people who will make us better.

> Please know that the majority of people in the US do not support this policy.

This seems to be false:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-taps-americans-war...

In the poll, 54 percent of Americans, including about three-quarters of Republicans, about half of independents and over a third of Democrats, said the United States takes in too many immigrants from the Middle East.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/curr...

Among all voters, 46% favor a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while 40% are opposed. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided.

Try to come to Germany, lots of Iranian expats study and work here. There are a few very good CS programs aswell (TU Munich for example). Most Phd positions come with a salary of ~1700-3400€ a month and there are no significant tuition fees. You might need to do a two year master degree first though, those are usually not funded, but there are no tuition fees either. Courses on the Phd and Masters level are taught in English.

Same in Switzerland. Check out ETHZ or EPFL.

Google even has a location in Germany so if you were planning on getting a PHD in the US and then moving into working for Google most likely you could take the same kind of path in Germany but without the tremendous education debt.

Here is a fully funded program: http://gradschool.cs.uni-saarland.de/

You get 800€ during your master and about twice that during your PhD. The institute is really good and there are two Max Planck Institutes (Informatics and Software Systems) right on campus. The program is entirely in English.

Try to create a group of people in a predicament like yours and start contacting Universities in Canada and talk to them about what can they do for you.

Universities ought to offer deferred admission to international admits from countries on the list.

We ought to demand it.

Deferred until when, exactly? A year? 4 years? 8?

It is unfair to expect the students to put their lives on hold indefinitely. I say they should pursue their education in places that welcome them like Canada or Germany.

A year would be a start

I'm an immigrant too - I've been here 9 years, but now I'm getting out.

Canada, Australia and New Zealand are viable options for me, and I've already been invited by 2 of these countries.

Don't be disheartened. You're smart (you got a fully funded PhD), and the world is very big, with many opportunities. Good luck!

I want to second this. I also had a Ph.D. full fund in the USA but I went to Sweden, and why? Well in that time I had an opportunity to work and fund an start up and boy I am so lucky to find my supervisor in Sweden (over a simple phone call).

Compared to the USA, universities in Sweden, offer far more support to for patents and starting your startups. You essentially get all the support and university won't own your work.

You may think what happened to you is bad (and it is) but sometimes it turns to a new and better opportunity.

Come check Toronto. Very immigrant-rich city, very welcoming and very multicultural.

The winters sometimes suck, but I find that brings us all together because nobody likes -10C.

My deepest apologies to you for the mindless horror that has taken hold of this country. Best of luck, brother.

Europe still has some of the best universities and allowance programs :)

Well, Europe has Oxford and Cambridge and?

Continental Europe tends towards having many "good" institutions at the expense of not having the extreme stand-outs like Stanford, MIT, or Harvard. There are also departments within universities which are excellent and well-known in their fields without being as well-known by the general public, as well as research institutes separate from universities, like the Max-Planck societies or EMBL.

Overall, I'd say the model makes it harder for something like Google to be created in Europe, but it makes it easier to get an education that will get you a job at Google.

The UK alone also has places like Imperial College, UCL, Warwick and Manchester, with top-notch CS departments. In Scotland alone there's Glasgow (birthplace of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) and Edinburgh (birthplace of Prolog).

As another commenter noted, mainland Europe tends to spread their academic resources rather than focusing on a few prestige sites like Oxford and Cambridge, but there are many fantastic CS departments. I don't know the current hot areas, but when I was a researcher in the early 2000s, there was lots of Haskell activity in Chalmers and TU Berlin.

I would bet you will still be able to attend soon. If you read the draft of the executive order you'd see that it is a temporary ban until they can start the improved vetting process. Your hopes should be way higher!

I can personally recommend the University of Waterloo, here in Canada. I did my Master's degree there in electrical engineering. The school has an excellent, and well recognized, CS program, and a significant percentage of both the graduate student body and the faculty (at least when I was there 8 years ago or so) were from Iran.

Waterloo itself isn't a particularly large city, but with two universities it has a significant student population, and it's not far from Toronto for anytime you're interested in more of a big city cultural experience.

Of course there are a number of excellent universities here in Canada; if Waterloo isn't to your liking, maybe check out UBC here on the west coast.

I really hope, as Scott suggests in the post, that a silver lining to this situation is that we have an opportunity to welcome more people like you into Canada.

Edit: I could even put you in touch with my old supervising professor (who's also from Iran) if you like; he's in the Engineering faculty as opposed to CS, but I'm sure he would know who to refer you to.

^ This!

Or if you are into AI, university of Montreal is also a hot bed right now with Mr Bengio.

Canadians will gladly take you, in fact I know an Iranian who just finished his math phd...

Courage! :)

And U of Toronto has one of the top Neural Networks groups anywhere. UBC is also a great university in a nice city.

yeah Waterloo has a great program. I've known a few Iranian students who were disappointed by University of Victoria and then went to Waterloo.

This might sound like a crazy idea, but why not try applying to a few Israeli universities: Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute, Hebrew University and Technion are considered to pretty top notch for Computer science and have a few Turing award winners. You'd be surprised that Israeli academics tend to be very welcoming of students from all over the world.

That is not without danger, I believe. Having Israeli stamps in your Iranien passport...

Wrong. Israel will stamp a separate piece of paper to leave in your passport during your visit for exactly this reason.

Having records of a their Israeli degree all over the internet is probably a bigger problem for somebody intending to return to Iran at some point in the near future, even if only just to visit.

Iranian government has spies everywhere and keeps pretty comprehensive lists of citizens they don't like and will harass them and throw them in prison, or executive them, on a whim when they try to re-enter.

Israeli society, however, is increasingly less and less tolerant of non-Jews. For example: http://www.timesofisrael.com/chief-rabbi-non-jews-shouldnt-b...

But an even bigger problem is going to be the Iranian government, which is really not keen on Iranians consorting with the Zionist entity. Even if the OP by some miracle managed to pull this off, they would run a very real risk of ending up in prison as a suspected Israeli spy.

Haha wow. Have you ever even been to Israel? Some of the most welcoming and loving people I've ever met. Sure, I'm Jewish, but I've also seen many average Israelis talk about their love for all and desire for peace. There are extremists in every community.

My Mexican friend visited with my fiancé (who is Jewish) and was detained, and then subsequently released over 6 times in a two week period without any warning, being questioned "are you Palestinian? Are you Muslim? What are you doing here?"

I don't think the point is about the citizens themselves, it's about how they normalize this kind of behavior by their police / government.

Unfortunately that's what happens when your state is under constant threat. Yes, the IDF and Israeli security forces do use profiling and I'm not saying I'm a fan. But they are the best in the world. They're very good at extracting information.

I don't agree with that kind of behavior either frankly, but it's a wonder the country is as safe as it is under constant threat. It's kind of a no-win situation for them. If they don't do that and are overcautious, they get attacked more. If they do, they get attacked for doing it.

I'm sorry for what happened to your Mexican friend and I hope he receives better treatment in the future.

>They're very good at extracting information.

That's a very nasty way of trivializing the use torture. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.757404

Methods like that do in no way help with any of the two sides getting closer to each other, they only serve to radicalize both sides even more.

Sure, I agree with you.

In Europe, there are many excellent universities and many countries with visas for phd students. Just come to Europe. Once your phd is bagged, the US will have another president, and you can go there (unless you like Europe too much by then).

I can't say much more than I'm sorry.

Remember: Donald Trump does not represent the will of the American people. He won the electoral college, but around 2.8 million more people voted for Clinton than voted for him. He does not represent our values, our morals, or our view of where the country should be going. He represents those straight white males who don't want to adapt to the future, who don't want to give up their power, and who don't recognize that America can only be successful when we help the world be successful.

I'll be honest, I think Trump is going to cost universities, labs, and businesses a lot of very smart people. I hope we'll be able to recover from the damage he's going to do, but I honestly don't know just how bad it will get.

Trump very clearly represents the will of an immense number of people and may represent the will of the majority of Americans in fact. For both Clinton and Trump that representation is far beyond those that actually voted. Clinton's camp will be the first to tell you that supposedly a lot of her supporters didn't vote in the election.

You say Trump represents straight white males (you imply that's all he represents). Trump won the vote of 53% of white women.

Trump won the popular vote in 30 of the 50 states. The popular vote in just two states - NY & CA, neither of which Trump could have ever competed in - determined that popular vote gap.

The facts don't support your premise at all.

The only relevant fact here is that millions more people voted against Trump than for him. The top reason people voted for Trump wasn't to support him or his policies, it was that he wasn't Clinton (http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/21/in-their-own-words-wh...). His approval rating is below 50% (http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-app...). Trump doesn't represent the majority in any sense of the word.

OP's premise was in part that only straight white males supported him. The fact is, the majority of white women supported him as well. So OP was wrong on a very, very big part of the premise being floated.

Trump's approval is 57%

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trum...

The notion that it's useful to pretend Trump represents a tiny group of supporters, for personal emotional comfort over facts, isn't going to be useful in actually trying to counter bad policy. Step one is recognizing that Trump has a very large base that put him into the White House. That he only lost the popular vote by 2.8 million (2.x% of all votes) with California and New York included, is astounding and points to just how large his actual base is. Not to mention the fact that Hillary didn't manage to pull a majority of votes, versus eg Obama's 51.1% in 2012, Obama's 53% in 2008, and Bush's 50.7% in 2004.

Across multiple poll providers, his approval -7.2[1] (although this hasn't updated with the latest Rasmussen poll). Rasmussen is the only provider that has him in positive territory.

Interestingly, Fox gives him the second worst result (only ABC/WashPost gives him worse)

[1] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/trump_favorabl...

That's a good way to sweep data like this under the rug:

(Left percent is Clinton, Right percent is Trump)

White men 31% 63%

White women 43 53

White women college graduates 51 45

White women non-college graduates 34 62

White men college graduates 39 54

White men non-college graduates 23 72

(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-couldnt-win-ove...)

Like it or not, the fact of the matter is that claiming that only white men supported Trump is incorrect. Going further and trying to dodge the point by claiming that only numbers matter is reductionist and doesn't address the kaleidoscopic issues that a diverse socio-economic-regional population has.

Do you know any interview or documentary of talking to samples of these populations? I wonder very much what they think. The interviews so far for me personally were showing that they are "morally deaf", but I am sure that this is not all the story (I probably living in my bubble).

This guy drove through the Southeast and talked to a bunch of Trump supporters: http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/08/02/listening-to...

Thanks, now I want to replace my bubble with a bulletproof west.

I can't suggest an interview or documentary, but if you want to keep tabs on how conservatives/republicans/midwesterners etc. think, I highly recommend reading this blog:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

Glenn Reynolds and his cadre of right leaning bloggers have a decent finger on the pulse of conservatives in general.

I try to read from as many opinions as possible from different sides. You'd be surprised how different the world is from another's eyes.

Pardon the generalization here, but I know a lot of "non-college people" who support things like Trump and Brexit and would like to offer up an interpretation as to what many of them are thinking. Bear in mind they skew a bit older as well so they've seen a lot change.

If you're a college educated person and/or a tech person and you live in a big coastal city the past few decades have probably been pretty great, these cities have boomed, there are all these new industries that have sprung up, they've produced great jobs, you are smart and you work hard, same as the people around you, and everyone has gotten more conscious about big picture issues like the environment, gender equality and multiculturalism.

If you are non college educated, you don't live in one of these booming cities (or you live in a shitty part of town), and you haven't gotten involved in the new economy the picture may be very different. A lot of people in this category have witnessed the decimation of the manufacturing base and the communities around it. They've watched meth sweep over the country and ruin lives. They've dealt firsthand with the ramifications of teen pregnancies, broken homes, perpetual joblessness. All problems which affect "non college" people much more than they affect those with college degrees and stable white collar jobs.

So a lot of these people have seen the world get worse, not better. Their focus is on stability in their personal lives and it's getting harder. When you take that as a given and you start talking about issues of morality and idealism they might even get offended - what makes you so great that you spend your time worrying about this stuff instead of the practical concerns of keeping your job, covering rent and food, and staying away from shit that'll ruin your life (booze, drugs, bad people, whatever)?

They have no idea what to do other than vote for someone who at least sounds like them and sounds like he wants to help. That definitely wasn't Hillary. It wasn't Obama or McCain or Romney either but when Trump came on the scene they perked up and they went to the polls. And in fairness if he ends up doing stuff like building oil pipelines and cutting funding to the EPA, then he's creating jobs they can do and giving the finger to the comfortable asshole academics who've never had to worry about these problems.

They are not morally deaf IMO. They just have more immediate problems to worry about in their lives (or perhaps did at some point and still maintain those attitudes).

The difficult but clear solution in my eyes is to help them get what they deserve as fellow citizens, and which "college people" have, which is jobs, safe neighborhoods, and stable lives.

According to you, the people outside these booming cities suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, failure to use birth control, failure to build healthy stable relationships and joblessness. (Strangely, the illegals Trump wants to deport don't seem to have trouble finding a job - weird how looking for a job and accepting one when found solves that problem.)

These people are morally deaf. They want to blame others their choice not to work, their choice to do drugs, their choice not to use a condom. Trump isn't proposing to fix the problem of people making bad choices. He's just telling these people that he's one of them and he blames others for their choices.

(Note: the same critique applies to many solid-blue subgroups, including groups who's inherent virtue is treated as a sacred cow within Blue America. I am explicitly NOT claiming Trump voters are somehow uniquely bad in this way.)

I'd say this is deeply unfair to people living in communities decimated by meth just as I would say it's deeply unfair to people living in inner cities. This is not to say that drugs alone are the problem, but that there are a multitude of factors creating an ugly feedback system.

Words are difficult to convey this sort of thing so I'm going to do my best:

1) The primary source of jobs in the region leaves due to macro issues that have nothing to do with the population. Since people have bought homes, their capital is fixed and they can't move. (Societal networks exacerbate this) 2) and 3) make leaving even harder.

2) Loss of jobs and no other options lead to deeply depressing situation. People turn to drugs in order to escape the crushing hopelessness. This feedbacks into 1) by making investment unattractive (which then feedbacks into 2)).

3) War on Drugs means that families get broken up as people inevitably get arrested and sent away for ages. Crime rate goes up. Feeds into 1) and 2).

Note that is vastly simplified and that the problem can begin anywhere on this three point system. As such the culture of the area transforms to reflect this new reality. When you are born into this kind of system and this is all you know, the chance of escape diminishes rapidly. I remember reading "The Corner" and how black males growing up in Baltimore had accepted that they would be dead by 20 and that having a kid was the only way that they were likely to have any kind of legacy. I don't know if it's easy to appreciate how haunting that must be.

I mean to some extent you are right. We all should be moral superpeople and be able to withstand every test of character than comes our way. Frankly though we are not all built that way and that's just reality. People are going to falter and people are going to fall into a morass and not get back up. Whipping them with their failings is not going to get results from everyone. Everyone needs different things. And some people just can't overcome their circumstances.

It kind of reminds me of the Ouroboros: where one thing ends and the other thing begins is unclear and possibly impossible to discern.

Your reasoning fails at (1). The money spent purchasing a home is sunk cost. It's gone. It's never coming back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th...

Furthermore, I claim it does not require us to be "moral superpeople" to get past this situation. There are many populations with vastly worse problems than (1) who don't turn to drugs, unplanned pregnancy, abandoning their wives and refusing to work. For example, the population of rural Mexico.

In fact, it's this tendency for rural Mexicans to be "moral superpeople" that created one of Trump's key platforms. Mexicans are willing to move, abandon their societal networks, find a job and work it. Isn't this why Trump wants to build a wall?

You realize that the sunk cost fallacy proves what I'm trying to say? Most people really struggle with that sort of thing. It's one of the reasons why behavioral economics has taken off in recent history. People are not perfect actors.

Of course there are people with problems who don't turn to drugs that are also poor. The point I'm trying to make is that saying the best and only solution isn't necessarily to say that people are lazy and that they need to shape up. Or build a wall for that matter.

It's also worth noting that the reasons why Mexicans can move and abandon their societal networks is because of the strength of the dollar versus the peso, the cost of living they are willing to put up with, and the work they are willing to do. Where is an American going to go that gets a similar instant upgrade in purchasing power? What about the societal reality that people in America are not willing to do backbreaking labor like picking fruit?

And who says rural Mexicans have it any better?

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/mexico-los...

...the cost of living they are willing to put up with, and the work they are willing to do...people in America are not willing to do backbreaking labor like picking fruit?

Yes, Mexicans are willing to do what it takes, while many Trump voters prefer to sit at home refusing to work and doing meth.

I was making the following core points: 1) the Trump voters apatters was defending suffer mainly from self-inflicted problems and b) Trump is exploiting their desire to blame others for their own bad choices in order to take power.

You haven't disagreed with me at all on this point. All you've said is that this behavior is somewhat predictable. I agree, it can be predicted. So what?

Some Mexicans are willing to do what it takes. Don't overgeneralize. It's not like the entire population of Mexico is in the US right now. Races and nationalities are not homogeneous.

Is there a segment of the population blaming others for their problems? Yes.

Are they totally wrong? No. They're not entirely right but they aren't entirely wrong.

Is it all self inflicted problems? Hell no. There is no way I would argue that. It is simply factually incorrect. People working in the auto factories with a high school education aren't responsible when the price of steel craters. Assuming that everyone has to go college is a tenant of faith that needs to change.

Characterizing a significant portion Trump voters as lazy meth heads is an incredible generalization. From a sheer numbers perspective I don't doubt it's sizable, but that would be in the sense that 100k is a large number. I think people want to work. I don't think people know where to look or what to do.

Is Trump exploiting these people to gain power?

As far as I can tell, in the usual way that politicians do things. Whether or not Trump can solve their problems is not something I feel I can predict. That's not to say I think Trump will be some kind of economic Jesus. I mainly feel that the future is incredibly difficult to predict and usually it's the result that no one expects that ends up being true.

To answer the last question (can he solve) the answer is probably no. Simply because he has no skills in negotiating Washington whatsoever. Its only been a few days but so far its all "sign anything put in front of him". Having no plan except to win the Presidency, and that's been accomplished, I think he's running on fumes.

If a former autoworker refuses to move to where the jobs are, and refuses to work in landscaping/elder care/other field that isn't dying, their plight is their fault.

It seems like the thrust of your comments in this thread is that some people are better than others. That is to say they are more moral, more intelligent, harder working, or whatever else.

Fair enough. What conclusion -- be it a policy decision, social structure, general attitude toward the world or whatever else -- does this line of thinking lead you to?

As it relates to this conversation, we should recognize that this invalidates the concerns you raised in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13490323

Specifically, those people are morally deaf, and we should recognize that their immediate problems are their own fault. The difficult but clear solution is for them to fix their own problems, and the rest of us should feel no particular obligation to take any action to help them (particularly if they are unwilling to help themselves).

> Yes, Mexicans are willing to do what it takes

Textbook case of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

What do you think of the articles that have been posted to HN about how people make worse decisions when they're under financial stress?

I think it's true and can explain behavior that is both self-destructive and selfish. To solve the problem you have to figure out how someone like that can get themselves out of the vicious cycle. Even if they are morally deaf I don't think much gets accomplished by focusing on that point.

Add to this the fact that certain behavioral strategies may seem self-destructive from one perspective but necessary from another. Drug use for example has nasty consequences but is frequently a mechanism for coping with some other very nasty problem. And you have... well, I don't know what, but a complicated world.

I am not saying Trump supporters are all jobless drug addicts but I absolutely think lower education, lower income demographics swung toward him because they have more direct experience with the dark side of modernization and the political establishment was tone deaf to this.

(Also, of the factors I mentioned I think the lack of college degree is the one most heavily correlated to lower income, lower employment, higher addiction, higher unintended pregnancy etc. not which city they're in.)

What do you think of the articles that have been posted to HN about how people make worse decisions when they're under financial stress?

I think they fail to explain the majority of the behavioral differences. Specifically, they fail to explain:

1) why the children of upper class parents do not start behaving like poor people when they are broke (e.g. during college or grad school).

2) why Mexicans make good choices like sneaking into America, working hard, forming stable family units and saving money.

3) why Indians make the same good choices even when they don't have the option of sneaking into America.

4) why unskilled Chinese immigrants (or folks back home) make the same good choices.

The Indian and Chinese ones are easy to explain - you get the best of those countries. Those countries in turn have suffered from brain drain for the past several decades.

You seem to be suggesting humans have an intrinsic quality - some are the "best", others are the presumably the worst. This intrinsic quality is then what drives behavior.

Of course, if people internationally can be "the best", then perhaps domestically people can be "the best" (or not) as well. For example, perhaps bad inner cities and Trump-voting rust belt regions are full of people who are very much NOT the best.

I think you're agreeing with me.

Your conclusion does not logically follow. Sure, some people may not be "the best", but that does not mean that an entire group of people (your "bad inner cities and Trump-voting rust belt regions") can be grouped into best or not-best. There will be a ranking of people (based on any criteria) in any region.

A charitable interpretation of both my comment and the comment I'm replying to is that the groups we are describing have a higher/lower proportion of people who are "the best" and "the worst".

Well 1) is easy to explain: children of upper class parents get supported financially; they also have a social safety net, so if they are out of work, their social circle will help them get one.

Lots of self centered emotionally driven actions and decisions most often leads to counter productive results though, so I don't know you can justify someone making things worse as not being his fault.

I also think you are speaking for other people with whom you seem to have no connection too. Maybe you think they're just voting for Trump, because they like his promess of bringing jobs back, or maybe, they're voting for him cause they want Iranians out of their country based on pure racism.

I have read that most Trump voters make around the median income and aren't poor.

And a lot of them voted for Obama twice and then trump.

While the other sibling comments showed the voting data, it need to be added that the top reason people voted for either candidate was that their candidate weren't the other candidate. Two of the three slogans of the Clinton campaign reflected this with "I'm With Her (and not with him)" and "Love Trumps Hate".

For approval ratings, the same goes. Both candidates had the worst approval rating of any candidate in US history. A rather clear message that neither of the two dominating political parties in the US represent the people.

>he only relevant fact here is that millions more people voted against Trump than for him.

No. We did not have a popular vote.

First, there is no real way to measure "the will of the majority" except through votes cast and, to a lesser extent, through polls. The majority of votes were cast for Clinton, not Trump. That's a clear fact. The polls are also clear that Trump had lower approval ratings than past presidents, and his disapproval ratings were far higher than any other president when they came into office. This is also a fact.

We can, of course, argue with who Trump represents, because depending on who we are, his words and his actions are going to be interpreted differently. My interpretation is that he represents straight white men. More specifically, wealthy straight, white, men.

New York and California make up over 18% of the population. Those citizens are absolutely just as important as citizens of any other state when it comes to discussing the popular vote. While Trump might have won the popular vote in 30 states, that does nothing to diminish the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by close to 2.8 million votes.

While I'll admit that some of what I said can be considered opinion, the other parts of what I said are VERY clearly supported by fact.

The NY/CA popular vote gap argument makes no sense. If you ignore the votes of the 38 million people living in states which supported Trump the most, to balance the votes of the 38 million people living in California, you get the same result -- Trump loses the popular vote.

It's so ridiculous. Guess what, if you ignore 58.5 million people's worth of red states, then Clinton would have won the election!

It's not only ridiculous, it's rather offensive. It pretty directly implies that Californians and New Yorkers should somehow count less, and more indirectly implies that Democrats aren't worthy Americans the way that people in flyover country are.

Still, a thin majority is the most pathetic kind of mandate.

This counts for everybody by the way, I lean left but am not particularly enamored with the approach the Democratic Party takes to governance.

Your post is racist, sexist, and factually wrong. Trump represents a repressed ideological view that has failed to be directly engaged, instead preferring othering and slander, as you demonstrated here.

The left-wing in the US is going to continue to lose elections as long as they prefer slander to understanding why people disagree with them and why their racist and sexist platform is falling out of favor.

I am for a lot of progressive policies, but the Democrats jumped the shark in to advocating bigotry, slander, and nonsense.

Recent example: 1 in 10 posters I saw at the women's march was outright sexist, yet 3 in 10 posters were bemoaning the "sexism" of other people for having similar numbers at their marches. Remove the plank from your own eye, etc etc.

Ed: I would genuinely enjoy someone explaining how dismissing the right-wing as sexist is any different than dismissing all of feminism as sexist because there exist sexist feminists.

"I would genuinely enjoy someone explaining how dismissing the right-wing as sexist is any different than dismissing all of feminism as sexist because there exist sexist feminists."

You just said OP is demonstrating othering and slander and then you expect intellectual honesty? And then you get ferociously downvoted? I think you're better off spending time with the following writer than expecting a serious response to your question.

"Conservatives have made incredible hay out of the perception that liberals sneer at people who don’t live in coastal enclaves. These arguments accept that frame even as they dispute its conclusions, which is not a good argumentative strategy. Additionally, many of these tweets have replies sneering at “rednecks.” Why are you doing that? What is the political value? Aren’t you trying to win elections precisely in the places where these statements would appear most insulting? This is the unfortunate reality: neither the Electoral College nor the Senate are going anywhere anytime soon. They are facts of life. You can refuse to do what’s necessary to win back power in a country structurally designed to make red states disproportionately powerful while Republicans set about implementing an agenda. Or you can develop a strategic political discourse that demonstrates a sensible attitude towards how you frame your appeals. I get it: these aren’t campaign slogans or TV ads for Democrats. But the communal rhetoric of an ideology matters. The day-to-day messaging of the members of a political party matters. What exactly is the political advantage that you think you’re getting from talking like this?"

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/01/10/ok-lets-get-constructive...

"His point is pretty simple: as political segregation increases, with people from dramatically different political camps less and less likely to interact, the really bitter political arguments are intra-group, not inter-group. That is, the battles that are most personal and toxic stop being Democrat-Republican but left-liberal, alt-trad, insurgents-establishment.

Alexander names a few indicative examples. Online atheism is a really good one, with battles within atheists of different dispositions being far more frequent and ugly than those between atheists and believers, precisely because the latter groups interact so rarely. Primary season 2016 was the ur-example. The actual presidential campaign was ugly in many ways. But the Sanders vs. Clinton and alt-right vs. establishment GOP fights were more personal, more tiring, more toxic. The perpetual tendency of Clinton partisans to say that Sanders supporters are “just as bad” as the alt-right – a Nazi-influenced far right extremist group, mind you – exemplifies this tendency. Fargroups are further away politically than neargroups, but they don’t live in our shared social and professional spaces while neargroups do, and so they don’t inspire quite the same kind of personal animus."

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/01/11/i-know-my-own-group-by-d...

Not particularly in favor of either side, but are you seriously implying that responding to a claim that you apparently think is obviously wrong would be harder than doing what you just did? That doesn't inspire much confidence.

Who said I thought he was obviously wrong? The point I was trying to make is that the likelihood of him getting the response that he was looking for from this audience is unlikely. Which is why I pointed him towards an audience/speaker that he might not know about that would be more in his line.

Fredrik deBoer is a liberal writer who is also deeply dissatisfied with the current status of liberal thought. I thought that the person above me would enjoy someone who holds similar beliefs but is unhappy with how those beliefs are being communicated with people in general.

For the record, I didn't expect a serious reply here. But I also refuse to shut up because my views are unpopular (in some crowds) or they'll take away my internet points. People live and die because of these topics -- they're serious.

That said, I appreciate the referral. I'm going to give some of his stuff a read.

> I'll be honest, I think Trump is going to cost universities, labs, and businesses a lot of very smart people

This is absolutely terrible for the OP, but is there really a shortage of smart and skilled people? Given the low pay for many scientific positions and notoriously awful conditions for postgrads and the like working in labs, I have my doubts. Maybe the upside is that with the tap of smart people turned down a little, conditions will improve for the people who are left.

>is there really a shortage of smart and skilled people?

Hell yes, and there always will be, for the right values of "smart" and "skilled".

>Given the low pay for many scientific positions... etc

The sad fact is that the low pay you mention causes so many really smart people to turn away from science as a career.

>Maybe the upside is that with the tap of smart people turned down a little, conditions will improve for the people who are left.

If you turn down the tap for the smart people going into science and non-zero-sum businesses (like stock trading etc), I am certain the conditions "for people who are left" will become worse than they would have been. Absolutely certain.

If there is a shortage, then why aren't they paid more highly and treated better?

Because if you want to actually do science it doesn't really produce profit, it produces knowledge and results which someone else may use for profit decades or centuries later and the idea of "shortages" or "supply" or "demand" are all ideas that come from the market which is not relevant here.

There's high pay for brilliant scientists who want to work on weapons manufacturing or oil drilling or high frequency trading or building scalable advertising platforms but not for doing actual science.

Then it sounds like we should be fixing the funding issue, not importing cheap labor to work in bad conditions.

Nevertheless, BLS statistics tell a different story.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste...

For most Ph.D.’s, the United States has a surplus of workers, especially in tenure-track positions in academia. The exceptions are certain fields within industry, such as petroleum engineering, process engineering, and computer engineering, and other fields in the government sector, such as nuclear engineering, materials science, and thermohydraulic engineering. Academia tends to absorb the Ph.D.’s who are unable to find positions in industry into postdoc positions. At the bachelor’s and master’s levels, there is consistent demand for employees in software development, as well as in high-growth areas such as mobile application development, data science, and petroleum engineering.

Generally speaking, there is a large surplus of science graduates, and many cannot find a job in their field and are looking to transition into other fields like software development.

You're just trolling this guy. Science knowledge is not transferable. I cannot make a rocket scientist do high energy particle physics research. If there is no demand for rocket scientist then his wage would be low.

How hard is that to understand?

I agree with most of what you said, but I don't see why you had to bring sexuality and ethnic background into it. I myself don't fit into the group that you specified, but I can still see that it is a stupid classification. Our opinions and beliefs are not reliant on what group we are categorised into.

Edit: I'm not a trump supporter.

He didn't just say "straight, white males." He said "He represents those straight white males who don't want to adapt to the future, who don't want to give up their power, and who don't recognize that America can only be successful when we help the world be successful."

In short, read the entire statement, not just three words.

(Also very much not a Trump supporter)

I too think this language is a little divisive, even if it's mostly accurate. Plenty of straight white women voted for Trump too, and more than enough non-whites, sadly. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be:

"He represents those people who don't want straight white males to give up their power"

A quick word of advice... I have seen firsthand people in similar logistical situations in the middle of the PhD (though not quite precipitated from such dire geopolitical circumstances). If your admission was based on a recommendation of a faculty at the same institute get in contact with them as they may have contacts in others countries looking for similar students. If they are senior faculty they may even have dual appointments at institutes outside of the US.

If there are no leads on those fronts, I suppose I can just wish you good luck. Germany and Canada come to mind. There is France too if you can speak French.

I encourage you to consider EPFL or ETH in Switzerland. Both are top-level universities in CS, where Iranians are welcome. The next deadline to apply to EPFL Phd school (EDIC) is in April. I wish you the best!

I'm sorry to hear about that, and as unfair as it is, if it's your dream, there are other options worth exploring. If you can get a PhD position at almost any EU university, it is always fully funded (and in fact paid). Many countries (the Netherlands as an example) have almost all CS PhD programs in English, so language wouldn't even be an issue - and there are plenty of Iranian students who are welcomed here.

Dublin Ireland (English speaking) has 2 top 200 universities. University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin (also called University of Dublin). With a student visa you can work in a job 20 hrs a week, 40 hrs in the summer. Funding will be hard enough for PhD, a fair number of people do Masters. USA software companies employ many people in Dublin (for when you finish/get a full work visa). USA software companies are in Dublin for tax reasons. If you (about 5 years if you are lucky) later get Irish citizenship you can work anywhere in the EU (European Union). Dublin does not compete favourably with top US destinations, but competes favourably with USA destinations outside the top 5 softare cities (and other European cities) marginal top rate income tax taxation pretty high, accommodation cost high. Toleration of other nationalities pretty good except for a small 'immigrants stealing our jobs' minority, immigration pretty recent (due to economic boom 1998 to 2008), generally from new in 2004 EU states (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania as no visa now required) and from India for software engineers.

What is your take on Ireland's situation should the UK race you to the bottom on being a location that provides a tax advantage?

I'm so sorry :(

You have options, lots of it. Look to Canada and Holland. They have fine programs too.

Come to Australia, we need you!

As many others have said: come to Canada! We would love to welcome you here.

As some have mentioned here, you have other options.

Iranian-Americans have been making serious, world-class [1][2][3][4], contribution to American society in a variety of fields. America's loss is some other nations' gain.

Just a small sample:

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Javan

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotfi_A._Zadeh

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani

Thanks for those links. I never knew the person behind Fuzzy Sets, a topic highly relevant to the HN crowd. Lotfi Zadeh is one of the giants we stand on.

Foundations for the case you're trying to make are not very persuasive: 3 out of 4 people on this list seem to have moved during a much friendlier Shah's regime, before the 1979 revolution which turned Iran into a theocracy.

The character of the Iranian people is not based on politics du jour, or even religion for that matter. Our civilization has been around for a few thousands years and it speaks for itself.

[p.s.]

Here are the words of one of our noted poets. He was a ("scary") Muslim, living in 13th century. This is what he had to say and this is our creed:

    Adam's sons are the members of the same body
    Their creation from the same clay
    Should one organ be troubled by pain
    Others would suffer severe strain
    You who are careless of people's suffering
    Deserve not the name, "human being"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saadi_Shirazi

You wish to tell me that the character of people is not based on religion in a theocracy, where the ruler is literally called "Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution"?

Iran executes over 1000 people every year using very barbaric methods every year: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/irans-stagger...

It does speak for itself that after thousands of years you ended up in one of the most backwards forms of government possible, though I'm not sure you realize the implications of what it speaks of.

There are various ways, my sweet little keyboard 'warrior' [1], to guage the character of a people.

You could visit the country and get a feel for the people. Or if are averse to it -- which in your valiant case can not possibly be due to a deficit of courage -- you can google for travelogues of people who have and see what they say. [2]

Or, you can take off your battle headdress and put on a scholarly cap, and reflect on whether cultural, intellectual, and spiritual values and artifacts passed faithfuly from one generation to another are in any way significant in determining the character of a people.

Or, you can pause a bit and wonder why the regime in Iran is called "authoritarian". If a regime reflects the true character of the governed, would it be called "authoritarian" or "representative"? As our president likes to remind the nation, "torture works". It sure does.

But I have to hand it to Iranians back in the old country, they haven't just rolled over and certainly don't need people like you to be prompted into protesting against the regime's outrages. But you know, Iran has its neanderthal subclasses just like we do here in good old USA.

(How do you like it, my little warrior, getting groped by TSA agents? You enjoy that? Do you feel filled with the spirit of "the free and the brave" when you censor yourself on social media so you won't get harrassed at the border? Yes?)

> It does speak for itself that after thousands of years you ended up in one of the most backwards forms of government possible, though I'm not sure you realize the implications of what it speaks of.

There is some truth to that! I was a kid myself then but people who should have known better made some critical and catastrophic errors in judgment back in '78. Propaganda works wonders.

But you know what my sweet little warrior, it also doesn't speak well of the nominal allies of the prior regime that worked hand-in-hand behind the scene with the elements that are now ruling over the Iranian people.

And there is this thing about civilizational ebb and flow but get back to me in a thousand years or so and we'll compare notes!

[1]: per your profile: "As battle approaches, decorum departs."

[2]: here, let me google it for you: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=visit%20to%20Ira...

> (How do you like it, my little warrior, getting groped by TSA agents? You enjoy that? Do you feel filled with the spirit of "the free and the brave" when you censor yourself on social media so you won't get harrassed at the border? Yes?)

Sorry to disappoint, I have never been groped by the TSA agents. Probably has something to do with the fact that I'm Russian and my travels to the US were strictly business, sponsored by a respected company.

That is also why I know a thing or two about authoritarianism and people that allow it, all the while suffering it's oppression.

> And there is this thing about civilizational ebb and flow but get back to me in a thousand years or so and we'll compare notes!

I'm back to you and we can start now since my country's been around for more than a thousand years. We both mainly export oil, we both live in countries under sanctions by the United States.

Mine is an authoritarian shithole, yours is even worse, and it shows right here - you resorting to ad hominems like "little keyboard warrior".

That about sums it up.

Meanwhile every single one of the 9/11 hijackers would be allowed by Trump to enter the USA.

Decent people in the world are simply more likely to boycott the US as a result of xenophobic "America First" actions like this[1]. As you said, it's the USA's loss; the world is a big place.

[1] On top of the already established bullshit, described in threads like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13453189

Ironically I am in a similar situation too, I am last year bachelor student, I have found a professor and laboratory to work in one of the universities in the United States, and I was going to apply for Fall 2018. Now from what I can see I should forget about the US.

And my field was System Software (I am particularly in love with Operating System Security).

I know it wont' help, but as a US citizen, please accept my apologies for everything that you're going through due to these circumstances being set up by the new administration here. My wife is also an Iranian CS student and she's been here for the past few years. She's looking to go home to see her family for Nowruz, and we're not even sure if it's a good idea for her to do so, despite her being a greencard holder. I'm hoping for the best for her, for you, and for all of us.

Please take a look at Australia (lots of Iranian PhDs going to unis in Melbourne; great CS programs in Sydney too), or Canada, where your skills will not only be appreciated but you will have a clear path to permanent residency based on your education and skills.

I'm Iranian, but born in the US, work in immigration and can connect you with excellent people (Iranian too) in Australia who can help you walk through all of this.

Even if you get into the US for your PhD program, you face a tangled web to actually achieve a green card, and that was before Trump.

Sallam throwaway jaan :)

Don't let this hold you back or defer your plans. As a former PhD student in the U.S, I can tell you that you have plenty of options in Canada and Europe. Some of my best professors studied in these areas.

Moafagh baash!

Don't worry, Australia, Germany and France would love to help you out (and Canada as mentioned). My mother was admitted to a US university in the 1950s but decided to go to Australia instead. (Good for me since I was born!)

Also even if you got here, depending on where that uni is located, your problems would either be over or just getting worse. E.g. there are periodic waves of violence against foreign students (Japanese in the 80s/90s; Middle East and Sikhs (??) in 00s and 10s) in certain states.

Things do change. When we first came to the US we landed in D.C. and drove north to find a hotel. My parents would not have been allowed to stay in the same hotel in Virgina. But now I live in the States and don't worry about that. I worry about other things but do believe that things will change for the better. This reaction is the last gasp of the old people.

Seven months? What does this have to do with Trump?

Trump is ostensibly using the 9/11 play card to justify banning few muslim countries [0]. This is obviously a lie, since most of 911 hijackers were Saudis and his executive order is not banning the Saudis. I'm guessing on the strength of the Saudi lobby in DC [1] AND/OR Trump's potential business conflict in Saudi Arabia [2].

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/337545704/Draft-Executive-Or...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia_lobby_in_the_Unit...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/donald-t...

Can't mess with the Saudis. But we sure can ban the people they are bombing to hell, you know the Yemenis with British made bombs no less. And ban all the other people whose countries we helped destroy, you know just to add insult to injury. Really the best way to make people think we the vanguards of freedom. I am sure though Trump has some business dealing with the Saudis, I think there is a Trump hotel in Dubai.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/306990-trum...

Dubai is not in Saudi Arabia. It's in the UAE. However his family have expressed interest in building hotels in Saudi Arabia.

My guess though was the omission has more to do with energy price stability and/or arms exports.

Yeah, as this fiasco unfolds, the last thing we need is people lumping countries together while complaining about other people lumping countries together.

Dubai is a city in a different country. Same peninsula, but there's like seven countries dividing up that chunk of land.

The US gets only 8.1% of its oil from Saudi Arabia now, and that's dropping each year. The US is at last in a position to tell Saudi Arabia where to get off.

US and Britain sell the Saudis over 100 billion dollars in arms. You can't get Saudis off your back with just no longer needing their oil. They still got money. And the military industrial complex needs to eat.

It's a political thing. Oil is a fungible resource. Saudi Arabia helps control the market. US doesn't want to lose that power by pissing them off.

As oil goes, so goes the world.

US fracking pissed Saudi Arabia off big time. The gov't didn't seem to mind.

Saudi is a big buyer of US weapons. Considering how hard Trump tries to please and borrow influence from military, I doubt he is going to do anything about it.

Race and religion matters, if you are not in the league, you better make sure you have power or money, or something to offer. At least to me, that is what Trump believes.

Race and religion are for the masses. It's a tool to divide and conquer them. The elite only speak the language of power and money. The Saudis make their people follow archaic Islamic laws with sexual repression while their princes are sexually abusing Americans in America and their royals have harems filled with Americans prostitutes. It's ridiculous.

Why would the US military care about selling weapons? They are made by private companies.

The US military can sometimes get their weapons cheaper, if there are a lot of foreign buyers to share the cost in various ways.

If Lockheed is successful and able to fund itself well, fund new weapons programs, the military is happier for obvious reasons. Not to mention the crossover between the public and private spheres when it comes to careers.

There is also a follow on effect. If other countries have F-15s, the US needs to have something better. Today we are friends, but that could change (e.g. Iran and the F-14)

It's about jobs, jobs. Programs building weapons that other countries buy keep jobs. And the Saudi's buy a ton of weapons.

Isn't it true, that the second US tells Saudi Arabia where they can stick their oil, they will become best friends with Russia? And isn't this the reason why US tries to keep good relations with them,despite the whole country being a cancer of humanity?

A whole country a cancer to humanity?

I suspect this sort of generalization is what caused the student visa problem in the first place.

It's a bit more interesting wrt. most 9/11 hijackers being Saudis: I think it's pretty much confirmed at this point that it was a deliberate choice by al Qaida, attempting to deteriorate US-Saudi relations.

But as long as Saudis are omitted from this regulation, it's pretty ineffective. Then again, how much of "terrorism legislation" is actually preventing terrorism, as opposed to extending the powers of police and prosecution, or just being populist "I'm doing something"?

"It's a bit more interesting wrt. most 9/11 hijackers being Saudis: I think it's pretty much confirmed at this point that it was a deliberate choice by al Qaida, attempting to deteriorate US-Saudi relations."

I think that Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest problem in the world. In fact, I wish Trump would have banned them too or even suggested a regime change:

1. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/02...

2. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/01...

For Iran I have high hopes. They started the fundamentalist bullshit and I have the impression they may be the first to get rid of it. In fact, there are first signs (German link, try google translate): https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

> For Iran I have high hopes. They started the fundamentalist bullshit

Please try to learn even the slightest thing about this subject before you make statements so confidently. Wahhabism started in Saudi Arabia in the early 20th century and spread due to Saudi oil money in the 30's and 40's. Meanwhile Iran was a pluralistic society right up until 1979.

Please try to learn even the slightest thing about this subject before you make statements so confidently.

While there is a tiny bit of truth in your statement, Saudi Arabia changed a lot in 1979 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure

Saudi King Khaled however, did not react to the upheaval by cracking down on religious puritans in general, but by giving the ulama and religious conservatives more power over the next decade. He is thought to have believed that "the solution to the religious upheaval was simple -- more religion." First, photographs of women in newspapers were banned, then women on television. Cinemas and music shops were shut down. School curriculum was changed to provide many more hours of religious studies, eliminating classes on subjects like non-Islamic history. Gender segregation was extended "to the humblest coffee shop". The religious police became more assertive.[

So it is up to debate, if Wahhabism really predates Islam extremism so far or at all. But regarding for Saudi Arabia I have little to no hope at all.

Again, to use your wording, Please try to learn even the slightest thing about this subject before you make statements so confidently.

So America shouldn't support a progressive Saudi monarchy attempting to break the control of their religious bloc, but instead support an Iranian regime dedicated to export their religious revolution. Makes sense.

>It's a bit more interesting wrt. most 9/11 hijackers being Saudis: I think it's pretty much confirmed at this point that it was a deliberate choice by al Qaida, attempting to deteriorate US-Saudi relations.

Saudis have a looooong history of funding all kinds of terrorist groups across the whole muslim world.

Sure. They basically created and funded al Qaida in the 1980s to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then bin Laden came back to Saudi Arabia and offered to help against Saddam when he invaded Kuwait, and the Saudis told him to go away. After that they became more enemies than friends, but with the weird twist that the Saudi government wants to appear ideologically relatively aligned with al Qaida, such that al Qaida has little support for overthrowing the house of Saud.

It's not just Qaida though, they sponsor all kinds of Sunni extremists all over the globe.

Regardless of the hijackers motives, Saudi Arabia is by far the worst country when it comes to exporting and supporting terror. Iran is an island of sanity by comparison, and there are no Shia terrorist organizations nowadays (Hezbollah are not terrorists - they don't blow up random civilians).

this is so true. simple fact in face of all those years of propaganda against iran.

by no means are they some altruistic peace lovers, but considering other countries in the region, US could get much more if they would be allies since technically there are no obstacles (apart from 1979 US embassy issue, but nobody got killed, all released eventually... worse things happen, ie Behgazi and nobody cares if it serves some agenda).

If you go there nowadays, all the signs are in 2 languages - Farsi and English. Everybody speaks at least a bit English. Compared to say France :)

>US could get much more if they would be allies since technically there are no obstacles

It's weird, it's almost like pioneering and supplying technology (VBIED's) to kill American troops, and founding terrorist organizations to kill American allies somehow sours the relationships between the two countries.

Saeed Malekpour is still in prison, that alone for me makes Iran a no-go country. http://thenextweb.com/me/2012/01/19/death-sentence-for-irani...

Iran is horrible. It's a nightmare to live but it's much much better than Saudi

As an Iranian, I have to say it's mostly boring. This article, originally written about Malaysia, hits close to home:

https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/06/everyday-authoritarianism...

What you hear in the news about Iran is not its everyday life. Imagine if you lived in a country where the only news you saw in the media about the US was violence and police brutality and just all the bad stuff. How would you have imagined it would be like to do something mundane, for example go down the street to buy some milk? You would have imagined that you would get mugged for sure, maybe shot during mugging, then tased by the police that decided to arrest you when you called 911 for an ambulance, and handed a million dollar bill for the hospital stay, and then you have to spend the next 30 years in a for-profit prison as a slave getting constantly sexually assaulted.

The interesting thing is Iranian media portrays the US in the same caricaturistic ‎manner that the US media portrays Iran. My family were legitimately concerned about my safety when I announced my intention to go to Texas for a PhD. Probably as worried as you would be if you had to move to Iran.

(I ended up going to Canada instead, so it's all good.)

I completely understand your point. It is boring and OK for average citizens but when we talk about states like Iran and Saudi, the context is more about your rights if you speak up against the governments, are some kind of activist or are part of a religious/ethnic minority. Life for that subgroup of people is not exactly the same as for the majority in such states. North Korea is an extreme example of this and India/Pakistan are mild examples. Iran and Saudi are somewhere in between.

I suppose Rafic Hariri isn't "random" as he was after all Lebanon's democratically elect Prime Minister when Hezbollah assassinated him, but how about the 21 people who also died in that bombing?

I personally know a man who lost his wife (mother of their 3 kids) when Hezbollah bombed the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. 85 civilians were killed, but then again mostly Jewish so not exactly "random" either.

It always amazes me how many Western activists approach the world like a Hollywood movie. If Saudis are bad, and Trump is bad, then obviously their Shia rivals must be good!

That is true but 21 to thousands that just die in Yemen or by Isis is not even considerable. I think we should compare them and not going to say that one is not bad at all. They are both are fundamentally against human freedom and liberal ideas, but one is so far worst.

Although I think if only west could stop buying their oils then they both will suffocate. There is not a single country with rich oil in the Middle-east that uses the money from oil for their people. They all have first and second class citizens.

Sadr's death squads and Houthis.

If blowing up random civilians is the definition of terror then I'm sure the Syrian government would qualify.

So he is banning, among others, Syrians and Somalians?

Need a passport? Just pick up a Somali passport on the street for a few bucks. They are not biometric: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3704127.stm

Syrian passports, real and fake, are for Sale in Syria. The ISIS has its hands on real documents in occupied countries.

Sounds like a very reasonable decision for me. Should have banned Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Wahabist terrorism. too.

Not everybody has to go nuts like Merkel and open the borders for millions of illegal (by law!) immigrants.

Merkel was acting on what she believed to be a moral imperative: that those fleeing danger have a right to asylum. All her decisions follow logically if you accept that premise. I. e. it would make no sense to make such a right dependent on the total number of refugees.

In the specific moment you're alluding to she made the decision to suspend the Dublin rules because they were clearly failing (i. e. refugees were clearly being mistreated by the Hungary regime, and the situation in Greece was deteriorating to the point where both the country and the refugees urgently needed relief). At that point, the basic right outlined above and the Dublin rules were in conflict, and human rights generally trump implementation specifics such as Dublin in these circumstances.

In any case, the Dublin convention governs the burden-sharing between nations and does not impact an individual's relation with these states, or their basic rights. That's comparable to, for example, medical care in an emergency: your insurance company may have all sorts of debt with the hospital, but the doctors are still required to treat your compound fracture.

"In the specific moment you're alluding to she made the decision to suspend the Dublin rules because they were clearly failing"

The problem with "making the decision" is that there is no executive order for the German chancellor, as apposed to the US president in the German constitution. Ruling by chancellor decree had fallen out of favor in Germany in the last 70 years. Ms. Merkel with her dubious past with East German state security ("IM Erika") does not need to be re-elected. She needs to stand in front of a judge!

I'll probably be unable to convince you with legal arguments, so maybe you should file a criminal complaint (which is easy and free) and let actual legal professionals make that determination.

And before you accuse the system of justice of just being part of some sort of conspiracy, I'll add that there are plenty of examples of courts disagreeing with the administrations. Most recent examples I can think of is the failed bid to ban the right-wing NPD, and their verdict regarding the ban of muslim headdresses.

No, actually you are right. You CANT convince me. Before I appreciate the legal opinion on some poster on ycombinator I prefer the opinion of a former German supreme court judge: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article150947586/Mer...

What exactly in the article are you referring to? He -- a former supreme court judge of one of the German states, not of Germany -- doesn't outright claim anything illegal was done.

He sort of, fairly timidly, questions it, with the flimsiest of legal analogies: the legislature has to agree to military missions, e.g. participation in UN missions, and thus (?!) something something Merkel. It's a complete non-sequitur.

http://www.epochtimes.de/politik/deutschland/bundesverfassun...

That link is just a copy of this original article: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/deutschland/udo-ulf....

Now if you look into this Kopp Verlag, you will find that the Verfassungsschutz is keeping an eye on them because they might be spreading right-wing ideology which seeks to overthrow the constitutional structure of Germany.

Interesting source for claims of unconstitutional behavior by Merkel ^^.

Now I'm not saying that any of this necessarily makes what they say untrue, but I guess your choice of sources makes one thing clear: Nobody here will be able to convince you.

Well, you found an actual federal judge that wrote an actual paper, even if you linked to some third rate news source instead.

Here's the paper: http://bayern.de/Gutachten_Prof_Di_Fabio

Here's a rebuttal: http://verfassungsblog.de/dem-freistaat-zum-gefallen-ueber-u...

Neither of those passports makes you exempt from the visa requirement to travel to the US.

Holy shit:

> U.S. permanent residents (green card holders) who are outside of the United States may be barred from reentry.

That's huge. I don't mean to diminish the importance of banning new immigrants and visitors on a religious basis, that's bad too. But banning people who have already legally immigrated from re-entering the country is completely nuts. There are no doubt people who have lived in this country for decades who happen to be abroad at the moment and are now stuck away from their homes for an unknown period. There will be people who have lived in this country for decades who will be faced with an illness or death in the family and will have to make a choice between going to visit or retaining their ability to stay where they live.

I'm trying really hard not to be cynical, but...these measures aren't made with logic in mind. They are shiny objects thrown to the voter base which primarily lives segregated lives away from immigrants, H1Bs, or anyone else affected by this idiotic action. It is also likely that headline-grabbers like these are used as cover for more insidious schemes, and to quiet down constant claims of blatant corruption.

nothing about this last election is logical.

But this is not new. If you leave the US for more than 6 months, you can potentially lose your green card at the discretion of CBP regardless of where you're from.

But to be barred re-entry for less than 6 months is new.

OP is not talking about people away for 6 months. These are American residents who might be traveling for a week and suddenly find themselves homeless. If you think that can't happen to you, I have a bridge to sell you.

I went to sleep on election night and woke up homeless.

So it's "not new" that a green card holder who happens to be in Canada right now might be barred from reentering the country? It's "not new" that a green card holder whose mother falls ill in their home country will not be able to return home after visiting her for a week?

You're right that CBP can fuck you over at their discretion. But as long as you keep your nose clean, they don't. Having green card holders get suddenly screwed over like this just because of where they're from is new.

Wrong. That is not the issue here. In the draft which leaked, it clearly suspends immigrant and nonimmigrant entry to nationals of the listed countries. According to this, a US green card holder who is an Iranian citizen cannot travel back to the US after, say, vacationing in London.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3415909/Draft-Exe...

In addition, due to the suspension of Visa Waiver Program to nationals of these countries last year, an Iranian-Australian, (or Iranian-German, etc.), living in and a citizen of Australia for 30+ years and hasn't even visited Iran in that period, cannot visit the US visa-free any longer. So that means they need a B-2 tourist visa. Problem is, this E.O. suspends issuance of nonimmigrant visas to these people, so they now no longer have a way to enter the US.

Will he actually sign this E.O.? Apparently it was supposed to be signed yesterday, but didn't happen. He is in Philly right now so I'm not sure if this one's going to happen or not.

I was confused as to where this quote was coming from at first, but figured it out: https://www.niacaction.org/what-does-trumps-ban-on-iranians-...

Right, sorry, it's linked from the article posted here.

I'm not sure if NIAC's analysis of the executive order is correct regarding this matter.

I would also question if the President can ban legal permanent residences of the country from re-entering simply based on where they were borned.

I'm curious on what basis you doubt their claim. Because if the claim is true, there are many abroad who ought to board a plane home NOW.

I believe this would be the relevant bit:

"I hereby find that the immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of aliens from countries designated pursuant to [law], would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, and I hereby suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants, of such persons for 30 days from the date of this order."

I don't know just how entering with a green card qualifies, but "immigrant and nonimmigrant" would seem to cover everything.

As far as actually having the power to do so, everything I've read indicates that the President has extremely broad powers to determine which noncitizens are allowed enter the country.

I abhor Trump, but something about this statement irks me:

> To the Trump regime, I make one request: if you ever decide that it’s the policy of the US government to deport my PhD students, then deport me first. I’m practically begging you: come to my house, arrest me, revoke my citizenship, and tear up the awards I’ve accepted at the White House and the State Department. I’d consider that to be the greatest honor of my career.

Given the pedestal that you (presumably, by the amount of points this has gotten) are on, there are more actionable ways to be useful, rather than be a martyr. No mention in the post on how to stop Trump. For example, telling your readers how they can take action to stop Trump. I'll share some of my own thoughts on how to do this. Feel free to respond to this if it's not exhaustive enough.

To follow my own advice, if anyone sees this:

1. Call

  - Local congresspeople (http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/)

  - Senators (https://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/)

  - Local officials (https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials)

2. Participate

  - Get involved in local elections (this is a decent start - to become informed locally http://www.npr.org/stations/)

  - Protest

  - Attend town hall and city council meetings (see npr)

3. Share

  - Tell your friends

4. Vote (https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote)

5. Volunteer

6. Stop reading and start doing one of the other things.

Who knows? It may actually help. The news footage of a middle class white man being dragged away by jack booted thugs may elicit much more attention, sympathy and outrage than a "Middle Eastern looking" man undergoing the same, one would think?

And in this current world awash in pithy slogans, short attention spans and social media generated activism, it may actually be more effective.

This is the executive's power. There is literally nothing that can be done about it for the next 4 years besides try to change Trump's mind (or pray he does something impeachable).

>There is literally nothing that can be done about it for the next 4 years

Actually mass protests to the level of e.g. the French May of 68 might very well bring down a government.

But that is for a determined population.

Except in France, May 68, De Gaulle (conservatist) wasn't ousted, he even came back in favourable position after 3 days off the grid: He threatened to use the État d'Urgence against the strikers, dissolved the Assembly and the new election yielded 353 of 486 seats in his favour. People, at the end, voted for security.

In De Gaulle's case yes. But this has not been the case in every mass protest movement in all countries (plus, France voted, which is much larger than Paris, where the demonstrations were mostly held).

> the new election yielded 353 of 486 seats in his favor

That's probably why the protests didn't work. People in power are incredibly well informed and can predict those things reasonably well.

I keep being surprised by the power that such protests actually have. You'll read all sorts of statements like "what should anybody care about a bunch of hippies on the streets etc.", and in the US there also seems to be an undercurrent of regarding all protests as illegal, or highlighting the smallest incidents that could possibly scare the "soccer mum" demographic.

But then there are frequent examples of protests accomplishing everything from regime change (arab spring) to less-obvious but still substantial changes (see for example the G7/G8 agendas from before and after the meetings started to be a focus for mass demonstrations). Even Occupy, which has probably been the subject of more derision than any other movement, has actually had a major impact: The 99%/1% has become one of the leading narratives of politics in the US and Europe.

Technically congress or the supreme court can overturn executive orders, and this has happened in the past.

Well, he is a bit of a populist, so if you convince enough people, he'll probably go with the flow, on some things at least.

According to the Brookings Institution memo on the Emoluments Clause[1]:

> if Mr. Trump enters office in what would obviously constitute a knowing and indeed intentional violation of the Emoluments Clause and then declines to cure that violation during his tenure, Congress would be well within its rights to impeach him for engaging in “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

So, it is conceivable that he could be removed within the next four years if he loses the support of Congress.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gs_1216...

The discussion about whether this or that is kind of irrelevant. While the Constitution outlines the sort of offenses Congress may impeach for, it also provides no oversight. There's nobody who can prevent Congress from impeaching for an insufficient offense, nor is there anybody who can force Congress to impeach if they don't want to.

Ultimately, all that matters is whether Congress decides to do it. If they do, then it happens. If they don't, it doesn't. The specific offenses and wording of the Constitution will no doubt matter when it comes to how the individual members of Congress think about the issue, but no more than that. In particular, it doesn't really matter what the Constitution says or how a judge would interpret it, only how the various members of Congress understand it, or choose to interpret it.

I think it's fairly likely to happen, in any case. He and Congress don't see eye to eye on many things, and it may not take too long at all before he pisses them off sufficiently to have them get fed up with it. I imagine they'd rather be dealing with Pence anyway.

There was plenty of time to do something about it. We've been slouching into an imperial presidency for a long time. Democrats could have trimmed it back when they held Congress and the White House. Instead they cheered when Obama said "I have a phone and a pen."

They dismantled checks and balances for temporary tactical advantage because they thought their opponents were a "rump party, mainly confined to the South".

> pray he does something impeachable

I think it's more than that, it has to be impeachable AND Senate Republicans have to dislike it enough to upset their boss, right? Without Senate Republicans' support there can be no impeachment hearing can there?

What if he blatantly breaks the law? Is there anything the supreme court can do?

They have no ability to bring a criminal case against anyone without the cooperation of the executive branch, which Trump controls.

Citizens could file civil lawsuits against the federal government to get injunctions against him. But even then I believe the only repercussion for him not following those injunctions would be Congress impeaching him.

Basically, in order to get charged with a crime the executive branch has to do it. Since the president is the head executive, there has to be a special case for him/her: Congress can bring charges I.e. impeachment proceedings.

Even before Trump, the US had a system in which a Chinese or an Indian who gets a PhD from Scott's department (say) takes > 10 years to get a green card. Previous administrations have laid a solid foundation of shitty treatment of foreigners to which Trump is merely making minor additions.

Re: #1, both of my senators' numbers terminate in a recording that asks me to leave a message with my contact information. I have a hard time believing anybody listens to these. Am I wrong?

More broadly, I talked to one person at the office of one my state's reps. I complained about this order and said I hoped the rep would voice his opposition, and the person said the rep would. But how much does that matter, especially since the rep is in a heavily Democrat district already? Is targeting swing Republicans a better idea?

Pressure. It may not not be as politically effective, but the weakling Dems need to be pushed in order to fight for us.

My father successfully brought over two of our relatives from Iran during the Obama presidency (thanks Obama). They were a doctor and a professional soccer player. However, the other application for his older sister and my mother's brother has been processing for nearly 20 years. She's nearing her 70s. And my mother's brother has all but lost hope.

Looks like it's not going to ever happen under Mr. Trump.

Oh well. I wouldn't say it's as urgent as having PhD-level brains here...but it's too bad. We're doing the process right. We're doing it legally. We're following all the proper procedure and making sure that nothing is overlooked or done to cheat the process.

My father (who voted for Trump) is in complete denial: he thinks "The people around Trump told him to do that."

Very sad.

That penultimate paragraph. Jesus Christ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

I'm reminded of something I read by people who were in the cultural revolution. They always convinced themselves that Mao had bad advisers and they'd get purged soon. Took decades to twig that the problem was Mao himself.

It isn't just Mao. "If only Stalin knew" was a popular refrain.

what motivated your father to vote for trump?

With your father's thoughts: Does it matter? Policy is policy, who cares whether it's specifically Trump or just his aides, as long as your Irani relatives are being deported for bullshit reasons?

Because they may continue to support that person, mistakenly thinking that the policies they disagree with are from people other than that person.

One of the strangest moves during the election was that Trump stopped by Edison, NJ, to deliver a stump speech. Edison has a very heavy immigrant population, particularly from from south-east Asia. Which makes no sense, since the organization he was stumping for (an explicitly Hindu organization) would likely be very adversely affected by his immigration changes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/us/politics/trump-modi-in...

"Today, we learned that Trump is suspending the issuance of US visas to people from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Iran (but strangely not Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Wahhabist terrorism)."

And yet, from the very source linked in the article--

"Details about the forthcoming executive orders are still unconfirmed. But here’s what we can say with high confidence."

If you trust AP, then sure, it's likely that it will happen. But it's still important to draw a distinction between "has done" or "is doing" and "is expected to do". Articles like this, posted before any official announcement, are merely adding to the Trump hysteria.

I'm not sure why AP is the subject of your scorn here. They're accurately reporting the document that was leaked, and it's in the publics' interest to learn about such actions as soon as possible. Such leaks are sometimes intended as trial balloons, for example, and the reporting may stop the worst from happening by allowing the public to react at a time where the administrations still has a face-saving way out. That may actually be what is happening with the similar leak of Trump's intended reinstatement of torture as official US policy.

The uncertainty expressed in the piece does not mean that the AP is unsure if the document is real. They usually get such material from sources they know, and have experience with. They are firstly hedging against the possibility of the administration changing its mind, and – specifically for the current flurry of executive actions – there is a lot of legal uncertainty because it isn't always clear how they are to be interpreted, if they fall within the executive branches' authority, and how they fit into existing laws.

The AP was not the subject of my scorn.

It's unclear what Trump is trying to accomplish here. It seems stupid and I feel bad for the people whose lives it diverts or puts in hold. But the Nazi comparison either trivializes the Holocaust or unfairly hitlerizes Donald Trump for what may be a legitimate concern over technology transfer to a country that actively opposes US interests. There are plenty of countries that suspend student visas without going on to murder millions of people, and indeed we did exactly that under Jimmy Carter for much longer than thirty days. Standing up for students and education and science is an important duty for a professor, and I hope he'll continue with it, but this kind of hyperbole doesn't seem helpful.

> But the Nazi comparison either trivializes the Holocaust or unfairly hitlerizes Donald Trump for what may be a legitimate concern over technology transfer to a country that actively opposes US interests.

It does neither. Warning that "that's how Germany started" doesn't mean that banning visas is as severe as burning people, or saying that trump will burn people. It means that one should be careful because these are warning signs, and one should act cautiously and nip them in the bud.

You don't see doctors saying "you probably have a cold, but it might be pneumonia, but I won't prescribe strong medication because that will trivialize pneumonia or unfairly characterize your cold". Just be careful with what's going on, and protest all these changes that bode ill in addition to writing blog posts.

Meh. Hyperbole bothers me. But as long as you're using a healthcare analogy, allow me to suggest the possibility of negative side effects to the strong medicine. For example it is widely accepted that antibiotics are currently overprescribed, making them less of a strong and powerful weapon against disease over time.

To take the metaphor further, the really strong antibiotics have a chance to destroy the kidneys, making you a permanent dialysis case.

Which relates to the original point how? If you protest too much, your country will end up needing permanent aid from other countries in order to even stay together?

I feel that people shouldn't be extending an analogy without being clear on how it relates to the original point.

If you can only talk divisively and dismiss the concerns of people who don't agree with you, then you will continue to harm the unity of this country. Even if we don't agree with one another, we still should be able to live with one another peacefully. That is not to say stop protesting and engaging people. It means that people need to stop over generalizing and practice some empathy with others. It means not demonizing people who don't agree with you and sometimes it means just walking away instead of taking the swing.

I think of Mr. Rogers a lot these days and how he called everyone his neighbor. In a sense, we live in a world now where we actually all can be neighbors. And good neighbors don't treat each other like enemies.

If people truly believe that "Love Trumps Hate" and that's not just a slogan, people need to start acting that way.

What are the negative side effects to protesting policies like this?

The negative effect isn't of protesting policies like this. It is of doing so in a way that is not fair to Mr Trump, and which allows other people to dismiss your protest as the whining of a not particularly sophisticated child.

The language neither trivializes the Holocaust nor does it unfairly hitlerizes Trump. It describes what is going on in a way more of the general population can understand.

There have been many populist governments around the world over time. Hitler wasn't the first to do that sort of thing. Unfortunately, not everyone remembers all the names or knows the history - so comparing him to a lesser-known leader (which he might be more comparable too) just doesn't work. It is like reading a literary reference to a book you've never read - it is easy to miss the context, even after the reference is explained.

So we use Hitler because we understand the Holocaust (and the like) was far too horrible for words to describe and we'd like to avoid going near anything of that manner. We draw comparisons between the early Hitler days and now because we notice them. Coincidentally, it follows a general pattern of authoritarian and fascist leaders and it scares the heck out of us.

And you think, surely, that can't happen here. This is the United States, after all. And at the same time, Trump is up there talking about how we should be using torture and waterboarding more because he's convinced it works. And we aren't sitting here appalled because we've started to become immune to his rhetoric. He's been saying this sort of thing for months. What else are we going to be sensitized to?

Furthermore, what does it mean for me when I go to visit family back in the states? If I get a tan and look "middle eastern", will I get harassed? Are they going to bring up that a portion of my family is Syrian, even though my grandmother was born in the US to immigrant parents? What of my family that still lives there? I know this stuff isn't an issue right now, but I'm afraid of what happens if it escalates. It isn't like we can trust the things that is being said from the top at this point.

This "unhelpful" hyperbole is the only thing we really have to be able to express this stuff to others.

Listen if Hitler is the only comparison you think people understand, and you think the only way to convince them that a thing is bad and should be avoided is because, like, Hitler, and because in some racism dream where you get darker than you are and a bunch of majority culture white rednecks confuses you for a terrorist instead of just a normal american of partially Syrian or Italian or Mexican or native American or Guatemalan extraction that's fine. Call trump Hitler all you want. You won't be the first, and apparently you have a fellow traveler as a professor at MIT. Just don't expect me to take you seriously. Not when you're comparing Trump to Hitler for putting a hold on visas of students from a country whose official policy calls for the destruction of Israel and which is actively hostile to the interests of the united states, and who might facilitate potentially dangerous technology transfers to same. Though for the sake of consistency, and to seem less partisan, you may wish to consider similarly comparing Jimmy Carter to Josef Dzugashvili because he put a much longer hold on Iranian student visas in the late 70's.

Your call.

There's a german saying: "It did happen and therefore it can happen again". That could be extended to "It did happen, and therefore it could happen anywhere".

I'm also reminded of Hannah Arendt's theory of the "banality of evil". She basically warned against considering the Holocaust as the result of a singular set of circumstances, describing it instead as a process of many steps, by many (often unremarkable) people, with each step small enough not to trigger significant reactions.

The US is obviously still far, far away from death camps. But the changes in what is politically accepted are already gigantic if you step back. That's a process that has been going on since long before Trump, maybe since Nixon or at the very least GWB. And it includes not just the federal government but also, for example, recent developments in North Carolina.

As a somewhat tangential factoid, that may help to break the shell of the Nazi-cliche and give it back some meaning: I was recently at a festival in Poland and, in the midst of the usual atmosphere created by the beats of electronic music and the somewhat unusual diet that goes with it, I stumbled upon a plaque commemorating the place as the site of "a concentration camp for children aged 6 to 12". You really start to wonder: how much has to happen to a person until they get to the thought, "yeah, those 6 to 12 year olds, we really need to do something about them"?

There's certainly value in being mindful of the Holocaust, and of the great capacity for evil, even if banal, inside of us all, and to acknowledge and fight against it each day. But I remain unconvinced that calling those I disagree with over legitimate policy concerns Hitler is either a) fair or b) particularly useful.

What's more worrisome is how fervently anti-science the new administration is. Academics may eventually be persecuted in the US across the board - as they are already at the EPA, USDA etc - and regardless of citizenship.

I firmly believe anyone with a brain should begin making contingency plans to regroup somewhere like Australia or Japan, outside of the reaches of far-right populism. An Erdogan-style academic purge may be on the agenda and sooner than we think

when it comes to Islam Japan goes well past "far right populism". It's not a coincidence there's less than 70k Muslims in Japan.

Well, you can't say that Japan is anti-intellectualism at least.

Genuine question, is there an anti-muslim immigration policy in japan or some other force at play?

That does not seem to be the case: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16347/is-islam-b...

Australia and Japan aren't fantastic examples. Canada works better.

I don't think we're far away enough

This couldn't be farther from the truth. People branding the current administration like this are destabilizing the country. The media in this country is on an ideological witch hunt, and you are proliferating it.

Friend, if witches are causing irreparable damage, shouldn't do everything we can to proliferate a hunt for them?

This is completely unacceptable, and truly crosses the line. I have many Iranian coworkers and friends here in the bay area. The thought of branding them as terrorists and revoking their work or student visas is absolutely unbelievable. I think the Trump administration and the GOP are in for a rude awakening if they think these policies are going to stand.

"I think the Trump administration and the GOP are in for a rude awakening if they think these policies are going to stand."

I hope you're right, but at least for the next 2 years, who/what is going to stop them?

Not once in history has there been a quick office reboot ? No way to amend the constitution, to change the planning ?

I'm counting days until impeachment, seriously.

>I hope you're right, but at least for the next 2 years, who/what is going to stop them?

The courts. It's our only option. There are multiple pending lawsuits against Trump already. A civil rights group filed suit against him on day one for breaching the emoluments clause of the constitution.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/liberal-watchdog-gro...

Trump's base right now are people who have never met an Iranian, and would probably be quite happy to see your coworkers sent to Guantanamo. Trump's policies will stand because his base stands by them, and because the GOP rank-and-file fear Trump, and his people in the midterm elections.

If you want to do something, use your political awakening to help change some minds. At both the top and bottom of the power chain, doesn't matter. Steer the conversation

I think that's a naive view of Trump "supporters". For instance, it seems like Iranian-Americans were split on Clinton v. Trump [0][1]. I've also talked to quite a few people who voted for Trump but do not agree with his stance on borders or immigration. Finally, depicting all the people who voted for Trump as ignorant rednecks is probably not conductive to dialogue.

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/0...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13489227

I really truly do not care at all about the sensitivities of Trump supporters at this point.

Sentiments like yours do not help the current situation where everyone is talking past each other. Demonizing and labeling people like others is not the solution. Characterizing the motivations of 60+ million people as racist is the epitome of mental weakness. How do you expect to solve xenophobic behavior when you are employing the exact same mental processes? All you are doing is perpetuating the cycle of hatred.

Empathy takes time and effort, especially in an age where we don't have to exercise it at all. The easy path is to disregard those we disagree with in order to preserve our own sense of moral righteousness.

People have been racist throughout history. The majority of people. When did the majority suddenly stop? There's no mental weakness involved in describing things as they are.

In practice, this isn't the case. Racism just became something to be ashamed of, so now we can't discuss racism openly for fear of offending racists. At least the "rednecks" are honest about it.

And I hate to tell you, they're not interested in dialogue. They've got enough numbers, districting advantages and voter suppression laws that they don't care what you think.

So one of the things I've learned as time has progressed as a software engineer is that the more time I spend programming, the more I realize how incompetent I am. The amount which I do not know just seems to grow and grow and grow.

For me the same thing has come from politics. I've spent a lot of time reading and listening to not only NPR, the NY Times, The New Yorker, but also right leaning sites like Drudge, Instapundit, NRO and so on. The more I read both sides, the less I am absolutely certain of my view of reality and that my answers are necessarily the best answers. You really begin to appreciate just how much difference there can be with no intentional malice at all.

One commonality I see between both sides is a belief that neither side wants to listen. There is no shortage of idiots on either side, but you'd also be surprised how many thoughtful people on both sides exist. I've read a lot of right wing bloggers state that they have no problem with gay marriage, and yet they get lumped into the same barrel as fervent Christians. Same with Robert Spencer. I've seen a lot of resentment from writers who have attacked him but they're treated like they're all Nazis just because they are both "right wing".

I feel like the problem isn't racism so much as the problem is we've created linguistic weapons that were appropriate 30-40 years ago for a much different conflict. What I mean by that is the weight of calling someone a racist evokes thoughts of fire hoses and dogs and church burnings. But is that the right word for someone who flippantly calls an Asian person "Ling Ling"? Is it racially insensitive? Absolutely! But does it merit automatically going to the nines and unloading on someone with full abandon? Why do we take several malformed sentences as immediate evidence and license to publicly shame a stranger we know nothing about?

The internet has allowed so many people of different backgrounds and makeups to communicate with each other directly. But what I think this has shown is how bad we are at it. How many people in the Bay Area can say they actually know and communicate regularly and productively with a conservative? The problem in my minds is not right or left. It is that we haven't learned the right way to talk to each other that does not increase factionalism and strife. I'm worried it may do irreparable damage before long.

None of this is to say racism is a solved problem in America. Many people alive still remember what segregation truly meant. Those things don't just go away. I am not addressing actual racists either. There is however a large nebulous area where people may have ill formed beliefs, but not because of hatred. What I am saying is that I fully believe that most things that people attribute to malice come mostly from ignorance or fear. If our goal is to unite us all under the commonality of the US Flag, then assuming hostility is the worst way to go.

No one is immune to the words of others. Except sociopaths.

Case in point:

Some fervent Christians don't have a problem with gay marriage.

Nobody meets God's standard; feels pointless to wage war on anyone else who doesn't when we don't either.

The thing a lot of conservatives miss here is that, for a lot of progressives, gay marriage is a moral imperative. Not caring isn't good enough if you're still happy to vote for someone like Mike Pence.

You make a noble point, but it will not change anything at this stage. I am human. As are all of us. My well of empathy for Trump's people has gone completely bone dry. I am past the tipping point.

They elected an egotistical reality TV star, backed by a hostile foreign government, to the White House and he's taking a wrecking ball to every institution of federal government exactly as one would have expected him to. Any assertion that tears should be shed or some level of respect should be offered to Trump's people or duped Republicans, is absurd nonsense. The only feeling I have left for these people is rage and it grows with every passing day.

Things are going to get very very ugly soon

No Republican was duped. He's doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Temporary ban on immigration, build a wall, take an axe to the bloated federal government, can the TPP, next week we should get our first conservative supreme court nominee. Even better it is driving leftists into a rage, showing everyone where the real bullying and violence comes from - the Left! I have never been more hopeful about the future!

> Temporary ban on immigration [...] I have never been more hopeful about the future!

I was curious about you -there are not many that support your positions in HN- and I checked your past comments. You seem to be an immigrant too, as you define yourself as a "Valley startup expat". If that's the case, how can you support a ban on immigration -even if it's temporary- being an immigrant yourself? Don't get offended, I'm genuinely curious.

I am not offended, no worries. A temporary ban on immigration for the purpose of security is a reasonable proposition to me. Every country has the right to secure itself and define who can and can't enter the country. It is fundamental to the concept of being a nation. India, China, Japan, Korea, even Mexico all have very restrictive immigration policies and I have yet to see anyone work themselves into a rage over it on Hackernews. India even started building a wall between itself and Bangladesh (I have no idea if they completed it honestly, but again I don't remember an outcry at the time).

Historically the US has gone through times of very low immigration and also times of very high immigration. It will swing back in twenty or thirty years.

Specifically in reference to this article, there are very few PhD seats for advanced physics in the US and the universities are so prestigious if someone is denied a visa from a temporarily banned country, another person of equal brilliance from another country will take that seat.

The pendulum swings both ways, and right now it is swinging faster and harder than ever before in this country. When it swings back, in a tsunami of the unrelenting rage and profound hatred for the other side, there will be blood. That is the future.

Possibly. Remember it is the right wingers with all the guns :-)

You can troll your way into a civil war, but you can't troll your way out of it.

I think the person saying there will be blood is the troll and the aggressor. I was just pointing out who has the guns and the police.

You never caring about politics is what ultimately put Trump in office.

Advice from a high-level staffer for a Senator:

There are two things that everyone concerned should be doing all the time right now, and they're by far the most important things.

You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing.

1. The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention is to have face-to-face time - if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you're in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the "mobile offices" that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson's website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.

2. But, those in-person events don't happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling. You should make 6 calls a day: 2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators & your 1 Representative.

Any sort of online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash (unless you have a particularly strong emotional story - but even then it's not worth the time it took you to craft that letter).

Calls are what all the congresspeople pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They're also sorted by zip code and area code. Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it's a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc...), it's often closer to 11-1, and that's recently pushed Democratic congressmen on the fence to vote with the Republicans. In the last 8 years, Republicans have called, and Democrats haven't.

So, when you call:

A) When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you're calling about ("Hi, I'd like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please") - local offices won't always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don't, that's ok - ask for their name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don't leave a message (unless the office doesn't pick up at all - then you can...but it's better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).

B) Give them your zip code. They won't always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they'll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.

C) If you can make it personal, make it personal. "I voted for you in the last election and I'm worried/happy/whatever" or "I'm a teacher, and I am appalled by Betsy DeVos," or "as a single mother" or "as a white, middle class woman," or whatever.

D) Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don't go down a whole list - they're figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists. So, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn't really matter - even if there's not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It's important that they just keep getting calls.

E) Be clear on what you want - "I'm disappointed that the Senator..." or "I want to thank the Senator for their vote on..." or "I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because..." Don't leave any ambiguity.

F) They may get to know your voice/get sick of you - it doesn't matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they're really sick of you, they'll be gone in 6 weeks. From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward (which is a lot of people) don't worry about it - there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some, there are lots of others floating around these day). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural. Put the 6 numbers in your phone (all under P – Politician. An example is McCaskill MO, Politician McCaskill DC, Politician Blunt MO, etc...) which makes it really easy to click down the list each day.

I can confirm this. My cousin and his wife met as senior staffers for sitting senators. (They're now both lobbyists; go figure.) This mirrors — even significantly expands — their counsel.

Is it worth calling a senator who doesn't represent you? For example, there are some proposals being pushed by senators in NC I don't agree with, but I don't live in NC.

I have called a couple of times and at bare minimum they asked me the zip code I am calling from. Cold logic would dictate that if you are calling from a zip code outside their voting district, they will ignore you. However, imagine you are getting thousands of calls every single day from all over the country. As a human being, can you really stand to flatly ignore that day in day out?

Not really.

Typically the first thing interns will do is at minimum gather your zip, if not address. Congressional offices receive a fair amount of out-of-district phone calls and non-constituent phone calls will get you a "Thanks for your concerns, have a nice day!"

And, tbh, I sort of disagree with GP's comment about calling every day. Offices might have a high turnover rate, they might not. The offices most definitely do keep track of who calls and they know who the repeat callers are. A lot of time the repeat callers tend to have mental issues (unsure how else to phrase that)—congressional offices get lots of weird phone calls.

I mean yeah, call about issues. It's the best way, other than a face-to-face conversation. (Assuming, too, that the legislator has their CM or an aide with them to take your contact info.) But calling every day will put you on the "ugh, not this guy" list.

Just give a zip code from that state.

Question: what if your representative already supports what you're saying? Like what if they're already Democrat? What can they even do? The Republicans are the ones who seem to be supporting this. That's what's always stumped me about this advice.

I would also like an answer to this. Most people that are opponents of these sorts of policies live in areas that are represented by senators/congresspeople that have a similar view.

Use the Tea Party strategy: threaten to fund and support primary opposition from the left unless they push back harder.

The GOP only barely has a majority in the Senate. They'll need Democratic support for some things, and as far as I know filibusters are still legal.

I would imagine it might also help to organise a list of popular topics on a website/forum - eg: Tuesday thousands call about education, Wednesday thousands call about immigration etc?

my senator and congresspeople are already fully engaged in anti-trump activity (warren, markey)

what else

This process seems ripe for abuse. Phone calls do not necessarily come from the geographic area they appear to, and there likely aren't any legal consequences for lying about zip code.

How can this be both the most effective way to influence a politician, and at the same time not be subverted to the point that such feedback cannot be trusted? Are there other checks that are less obvious?

If what you say is true, I'd have to believe that lobbying groups are already abusing this, either by posing as people they are not, paying people to pose, or by paying actual constituents to express concerns on their behalf.

I've wondered about this question myself. Wondering whether a financially well-resourced group would just use money to get access as an easier and more efficient approach to influence of a member of Congress. That to simulate an avalanche of calls from concerned citizens by paying people to call is a less financially efficient method to get influence. (I'm just speculating.)

That's plausible, but I think it would mean that phone calls don't actually have much influence if someone with money is influencing the politician in the other direction. I'm willing to believe that phone calls actually don't have much influence, but I keep hearing from former staffers that they are influential. Maybe they say this because it influences their recommendations to the politician (which may or may not be heeded), but this would still leave the system open to abuse.

This is the first time in my life that I don't feel safe in my own country. There is literally no difference between me (someone born in the US whose parents came here from Iran in the 90s), and people my age living in Iran right now who want to come to the US for a better education.

The ban on Iranians has nothing to do with terrorism. I might be wrong but I don't think there are any real Shiite terror group. And yes I don't think it's fitting to call Hazbollah as a terrorist group -- the same label that you'd give Al Qaeda or ISIS. I honestly can't think of a time where a Shiite group was responsible for indiscriminate killing.

>I don't think there are any real Shiite terror group.

Hezbollah is a banned Shia outfit that is involved in killing in many countries including Syria.

Killing is different than terrorism, US military is involved in killing in many countries as well!

Are you seriously equivocating the US Military which has specific RoEs and people who deliberately target civilians as a means to achieve their goals? That argument does not pass the smell test.

Iran has been sponsoring and supplying if not actively participating in terrorist attacks going back decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state-sponsored_terro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quds_Force#Activities

Anyone saying Iran does not participate in terrorism either has not read enough or is willfully blind.

I am not saying Iran is not involved, I am just saying US is doing the same thing. Keep in mind, Iran is not doing the bombing herself, it supports groups that are doing the attacks. US is supporting groups and governments that killd lots of people. How they are different?

You specifically called out the US Military in this case and now you're applying your comments to the entire US. Which one are you actually criticizing?

Broadly speaking the US does some shady shit no doubt. Last I checked though we don't train people to walk into markets and blow themselves up. Arguing that because the US has blood on its hands, that makes it morally equivalent to people who actively support people who use non combatants as human shields and so on is some real weak tea.

> Last I checked though we don't train people to walk into ?>markets and blow themselves up.

Check again.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/737430/CIA-ISIS-Wikileak...

> Killing is different than terrorism, US military is involved >in killing in many countries as well!

Terrorism is a relative term.

Thanks for downvote. However it was nice if you could educate why is it not.

Hmm, Iran actively supports ~100 Shiite terror groups in Syria and Iraq. If you speak Arabic, here is an article in Al-Hayat.

http://www.alhayat.com/Articles/9542195/

And of course Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Al Hayat has a pro Saudi bias. But even if we left that aside the article opens with the claim that Iran sponsored militias equal in atrocities that is of ISIS -- which is obviously false.

Not sure if you speak arabic or if you're from the middle east but hate for Shiites from Sunnis are more extreme than their hate for Israel -- in fact many clerics actively ask for genocide against them.

The State Department has long called Iran "the most active state sponsor of terrorism", but as far as I know, the US has not been their target.

> Designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984, Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2010. Iran’s financial, material, and logistic support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia had a direct impact on international efforts to promote peace, threatened economic stability in the Gulf, and undermined the growth of democracy.

https://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2010/170260.htm

Here are two examples of what I think the world would objectively call terrorism where Iran/Hezbollah was involved: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Burgas_bus_bombing

There are of course countless more examples.

People seem more upset that Trump is not letting people into the country than that Obama has been dropping bombs on 6 of these countries.

I'm not wild about the Trump immigration ban on these countries, but I really, really hope he ends these wars.

You can be mad at both things, or none. You don't have to pick or choose one over the other. I can be hungry and thirsty at the same time, or I can be tired and also have a mean sun-burn. The two issues are pretty unrelated.

I agree. But I am far more outraged at our government getting involved in foreign wars and dropping bombs all over the world than I am in them not letting people into the country from countries we are bombing. I think most people would have the same feeling if they thought about it carefully.

This is the draft of the executive order. Section 3 explains how the US entry ban could be extended indefinitely. http://documents.latimes.com/read-draft-copy-president-trump...

Wow. This is more hostile than I ever imagined. Banning 70 million people from Iran when there is no terrorism link for the country is, at best, idiotic. (Iran is anti-ISIS and apart from its conflict with the US has no precedent of terrorism)

I'm really speechless.

Other than them supporting the Iraqi insurgency and being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, right?

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/capitol-hill/201...

That's definitively an act of war but I would not call that a terrorist act. I think to qualify as a terrorist act it needs to be directed at: 1. Civilians and 2. Time of peace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state-sponsored_terro...

In July 2012, the United States State Department released a report on terrorism around the world in 2011. The report states that "Iran remained an active state sponsor of terrorism in 2011 and increased its terrorist-related activity" and that "Iran also continued to provide financial, material, and logistical support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia."

This is not a report from a Republican administration but Obama's administration.

That is likely for theirbsupport of Hamas for their role in trying to expand their hegemony in the Middle East and their conflicts with Saudia Arabia and Israel. Iran is not a part of global jihad.

Does any of this sound like it supports your viewpoint?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_thought_and_legacy_o...

Since his death, politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran have been "largely defined by attempts to claim Khomeini's legacy", according to at least one scholar, and "staying faithful to his ideology has been the litmus test for all political activity" there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_thought_and_legacy_o...

Khomeini strongly supported the spread of Islam throughout the non-Muslim world.

    We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry 'There is no god but Allah' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.

... `We have often proclaimed this truth in our domestic and foreign policy, namely that we have set as our goal the world-wide spread of the influence of Islam and the suppression of the rule of the world conquerors ... We wish to cause the corrupt roots of Zionism, capitalism and Communism to wither throughout the world. We wish, as does God almighty, to destroy the systems which are based on these three foundations, and to promote the Islamic order of the Prophet ... in the world of arrogance.`

As the current President of the Us exemplifies, there's a huge gulf between rhetoric and actions.

Personally, I have no fear of Iran or Iranians committing violent acts on US soil.

Also, if this ruling stands, it unfairly affects people from Iran who aren't even Muslim (not that it should matter). In LA, there is a very large community of Persian Jews who would be cut off from their family.

It's amazing that some nations are deemed terrorist by American government, which itself is responsible for the deaths of most innocent civilians over the last century. Starting with dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, funding Mujhadeen on Afghanistan, installing Shah in Iran, toppling Saddam Hussein, Indirectly funding terrorism in Kashmir, and all the mess in South America. What's the best guess ? 10 million innocent civilians killed ?

Still not as many as Russia did during the same time period. Stalin alone blows that total right out of the water. Mao and the Khmer Rouge are right behind him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...

None of this takes away from the morally questionable actions of the US. But saying the US is responsible for the most innocent civilian casualties in the last half century is not true.

I'm not sure we should make it a competition!

> American government, which itself is responsible for the deaths of most innocent civilians over the last century

Oh geez. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, broadly the Empire of Japan, among others would like a word with you.

> Starting with dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima

An entirely appropriate act to stop a rampaging war machine that had slaughtered millions in a war of conquest in east Asia, and joined with the Axis powers in declaring war on the United States etc. Dramatically more Japanese would have died, had the US simply invaded instead of using nuclear weapons. More importantly, far more Americans would have died in the process of trying to stop the aggressor: Japan.

> toppling Saddam Hussein

The US lost thousands of soldiers, and a trillion dollars, trying to keep the Iraqis from killing each other in a civil war after making the mistake of removing Saddam. You're obviously being intentionally disingenuous about what actually happened: the Iraqi factions declared war on each other, the extreme majority of all civilian deaths were Iraqis killing each other.

> funding Mujhadeen on Afghanistan

Something that didn't kill nearly as many civilians as the vast Soviet genocide / invasion it was meant to interrupt.

>atomic bomb

Firebombing was far worse. Dresden alone was about equivalent or worse than a-bombs, right? And Japan had been firebombed pretty heavily as well.

This is just too sad. Iranians at grad school often struck me as incredibly smart - be it students or faculty.

The recent breakthrough in TSP approximation was due to an Iranian; the woman who won the Field's prize earlier was one too! They are a tiny nation but are very well represented.

They were already at the receiving end of the stick under Obama, having to deal with the sanction and single entry student visas.

These policies make no sense considering their distinctions as immigrants; it's an affront to one's humanity TBH.

What I don't get is, it is obviously against everything we stand for and for sure not in line with our constitution to discriminate based on religion. After all, religious freedom was one of the reasons they founded our country.

Given all of that I don't understand why we can't sue? Take this to the Supreme Court? They didn't use any religion in the executive action but it is so clearly targeted at one individual religion that it could easily be struck down...

The argument that it's clearly targeted at one individual religion doesn't stick that well. If that were true there were a lot of countries that are predominantly Muslim that were left off the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

Arguing a racial thing is a bit difficult as well as there were plenty of Arab countries that were left out.

An interesting commonality is this:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/25/trumps-muslim-immigratio...

Therefore I think it's easy to argue that the common factor isn't necessarily race or religion, but considered hostile status with the US.

Great point, guildwriter. To extend that thought - it never ceases to amaze me the expectations people have regarding America. For example, if we were at war with China, Russia, whoever - no one would be shocked if those countries denied our citizens entry until the conflict was over. But reverse it and there is outrage.

Similarly, I have no expectation that I would ever be able to, for example, travel to another country on "vacation" and just stay indefinitely after my visa expired. I would never think that would fly. I fully expect that at some point I would be facing either serious charges or a quick deportation, possibly with the stipulation that I was never allowed to return - or that violating the visa a second time would mean a jail sentence. Yet here in America, that's just people "trying to live the American dream", rules and laws be damned. Violating the sovereignty of a nation should always be taken seriously.

Maybe because American citizens aren't tripping over themselves to immigrate to those countries? Also history has proven time and time again that prejudice against immigrants from American war enemies was always based on xenophobia and racism rather than legitimate security concerns. [0][1]

Regarding your second paragraph, what bizarro-America do you live in? That's exactly what happens to people who overstay their visas. You last sentence also betrays your own xenophobia: you associate people looking to "live the American dream" with wanting to violate the sovereignty of American.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-German_sentiment#United_S... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

There is this section in the draft order, which presumably could allow for phd students to enter the US as being in the national interest.

(g) Notwithstanding a suspension pursuant to subsection (c) of this section or pursuant to a Presidential proclamation described in subsection (e) ofthis section, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.

I really can't believe this. First the US goes into Iran, and destabilizes the popular government (see: 1953). Now, after literally no threat from any Iranian immigrants, they ban them. Good thing my parents came here before, I guess??

The threat isn't directly from Iranian immigrants but the the nation itself. I would like to remind you that the Obama administration's state department declared Iran to be the largest state sponsor of terrorism. That's not something to take lightly.

Obama's position clearly states that the Iranian government is the issue. Trump's clearly says "We don't want your kind in our country"

I had trouble loading the page, here is a google-cache url: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

This is obviously extremely unfortunate for those involved, I predict it will be very short lived but we'll have to wait and see.

One thing I like about this sort of controversy though is perhaps some day, some people might start wondering who these mullahs are and how they came to be. Now that type of conversation would be rather uncomfortable, and I suspect is somewhat of an underlying cause of a lot of the hand wringing we're seeing from various government agencies.

EDIT: Interesting I've got two downvotes already, do people think the interesting history of the leadership of Iran is some sort of a conspiracy theory?

Conspiracy theory? No. Conspiracy? Yes. I often wonder what the Middle East and Iran would look like today if the CIA and the Brits had not overthrown the democratically elected Mosaddegh government.

I wonder what the world would like like if western nations hadn't meddled so much in other's affairs.

That would actually make a really good TV series: "What the World Would Have Looked Like - Episode 3: Germany Wins World War 2". Of course there are numerous theories for each, but that's ok, just state that at the beginning and say this is just one of many possible theories, it's just for fun. I'd watch that type of show for sure.

Germany is a western country.

As is Sweden.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Mosaddeq had scant respect for democratic norms - look into how he conducted his parliamentary votes.

We should go even further. A bunch of lines were drawn post WW1 to punish Germany and her allies. There wasn't much thought put into it beyond short term gain and it created some awful situations like that of the Kurds in Iraq.

Does the President have the power to unilaterally impose exit-visa requirements?

This is an extremely important question. Empirically, exit visas seem like an extremely good feature for having a fucked-up country (North Korea, USSR, Warsaw Pact, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy all had them, Saudi Arabia does for foreign workers, and very few others have them)

This is a good question. Obama claimed the president has the power to assassinate american citizens without trial and Trump is claiming further powers over immigration, science and the media. None of these things should be the sole purview of the president, this is why rule via executive orders is so dangerous. It would lead to the end of the republic.

The American republic now resembles the late roman one, complete with populist consuls and rioting factions.

Hah. I was thinking this morning that Trump could be the US's Nero.

This is being exacerbated by the increasing factionalism within the US itself. I'm starting to understand better and better why Washington warned us of political parties in his farwell address

"Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."

Washington's farewell address was a political speech. He was unequivocally a federalist, and his speech was aimed at suppressing anti-federalism. He basically believed there should be only one party - his and Hamilton/Adams' party.

That's why very soon afterwards federalists in Congress passed laws allowing the President to imprison people for reporting truthfully what was happening in Congress (out of the fear it would generate outrage in the populace) and even for mere criticism of the President. For much of his tenure as Vice President under Adams, Jefferson lived in fear of his safety and was even afraid to speak out in private letters, as he believed federalists were reading his mail looking for something to ruin him with. Early America was incredibly factious, with rebellions and armed private militias and mobs perpetrating violence (and threats of violence) on their political opponents.

Politics hasn't changed much over time. Read Washington's speeches like you would Trump's or Obama's.

That's an interesting take, that's the first time I've heard of that interpretation. Is that the view of any specific authors?

I feel like Washington is extremely venerated, which makes me a bit suspicious. It's not quite a cult of personality like Stalin but nobody's perfect.

A accounts seem to imply that Washington was a reluctant leader who didn't want to get involved in politics: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-George-Washington-refuse-a-thi...

The letters of most of the major figures of the time are publicly available, as are the newspapers of the era via Google Books and other free, online resources. I highly recommend reading as much as you can. That's a lot of reading, so if you want a shortcut, I'd recommend the book "American Aurora." It is essentially a selection of newspaper articles, Federalist and Democratic-Republican both, and letters, concatenated to form a narrative. You should, however, keep in mind that it is intentionally slanted towards the Democratic-Republicans.

> I feel like Washington is extremely venerated, which makes me a bit suspicious. It's not quite a cult of personality like Stalin but nobody's perfect.

The cult of personality around Washington was quite deliberately engineered and some of his contemporaries - some even nominally his friends - privately lamented that someone (in their eyes) so awful would be, for all ages, venerated as a great man and a hero, but they regarded it as necessary that the nasty infancy of the country would be glossed into something more noble. (I do think his contemporaries judged him too harshly, but things always look different centuries later.)

> This is being exacerbated by the increasing factionalism within the US itself.

The increasing factionalism recently in the US is arguably (barring perhaps some overshoot directly connected to Trump, on both sides) return to the long-term norm as the major political realignments resulting from the New Deal and Civil Rights movements upsetting the pre-existing alignment of the parties completes, and the parties return to a state of cohesiveness.

The strength of this professor's protest comes from that fact that he puts skin in the game via his request to be deported himself before his students are. Self-sacrifice sends a powerful message, and in my recollection, many consequential protests from history have been grounded in it.

It's cute signaling. It won't happen. Even if it would, he'd settle in nicely into his new professorship at Technion.

It always surprises me how countries don't offer automatic citizenship for people either working towards or who have already received advanced degrees in scientific/engineering fields. Surely there are few better ways to achieve technological superiority, either for economic or military reasons. It also tends to filter out religious extremists, if that's your justification for immigration restrictions in the first place.

False - many of the 9/11 hijackers had engineering degrees. Engineering education especially in a lot of those countries actually makes one less of a critical thinker and more vulnerable to accept dogma without objecting.

Interesting, I did not know that. Thank you. Interesting argument wrt educational dogma in the Middle East. I know it's a problem in Indian higher education.

> First they came for the Iranians

No, first they came for the immigrants, muslims, women, and leftists with this guys good conscience. Then Trump was elected on those premises and came for the Iranians. But somehow he's surprised when it affects him personally?

Following your logic: they literally came before Trump was elected, so they must have done so during Obama's term.

Was Obama the one who came for "immigrants, muslims, women, and leftists with this guys good conscience"?

If the worst happens and students get deported, the universities should find a way to at least allow the students to finish their degrees remotely over the internet. Then they can gift Australia or another country their skills.

I think this is the most troubling part of the draft order, given it seems unlikely the Iranian government would be predisposed to co-operating (especially if the 'requested information' is designed to pander to a xenophobic constituency, rather than protect the US from the communists/terrorists/lizard people):

(d) Immediately upon receipt of the report described in subsection (b) of this section regarding the information needed for adjudications, the Secretary of State shall request all foreign governments that do not supply such information to start providing such information regarding their nationals within 60 days of notiﬁcation.

(e) After the 60-day period described in subsection (d) of this section expires, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall submit to the President a list of countries recommended for inclusion on a Presidential proclamation that would prohibit the entry of foreign nationals (excluding those foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, and C- 2 visas for travel to the United Nations) from countries that do not provide the information requested pursuant to subsection (d) of this order until compliance occurs.

EDIT: In Section 3

It would be healthier for everyone if there was less speculative outrage. This doesn't affect anyone in the country. It just says if you are trying to get a visa from a country where we think there is a terrorism risk, that country needs to be able to provide screening info on the person, or else we won't provide a visa. It is targeting Syrian refugees, not Iranian PhDs.

My brother's fiance is iranian and studying in Italy, this will definitely affect them! Tell this to my brother!

>It is targeting Syrian refugess, not Iranian PhDs.

There are seven countries targeted in this edict. Why the other six if it's actually focused on a single one?

That's a really loose interpretation of what this is.

It must be comfortable not being affected. You get to speak on everybody else's behalf and tell them they're not affected either.

Yeah except that you might not be able to re-enter the country if you leave to visit family or something.

People often need to exit the country they live in and apply for a new visa from outside. It doesn’t make much sense, but many visa/residence permit types can only be applied for from outside.

In case anyone else didn't know, this is what the title references:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Including Iran on that list baffled me, too.

How come this post went from "the top" to "where I cannot find it anymore"!?

Users flagged it heavily, and a moderator downweighted it.

Why flagged it? Something this important!

> This time, it’s taken just five days, since the hostile takeover of the US by its worst elements

Stopped reading there. I don't agree with his immigration policy at all, but we voted and Trump won fair and square.

This is the strength we need. Respect.

"This time, it’s taken just five days, since the hostile takeover of the US by its worst elements"

Really? This is they way you see it?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.[1]

In his 2007 interview[2,3] general Wesley Clark spoke about the plan to take out 7 countries in 5 years (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran). Bush went to war with Iraq. Obama ravaged Libya and Syria. Six of those seven countries are on the Trump's visa ban list. At least he has no plans for new wars, for now I guess.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd6vR1J0_6A

[2] interview transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weigh...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfx2vtq_HDM

The came for science agencies too: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2017/01/25/trump_is...

I can see the point of a broad stroke policy that does not make exceptions, in that it makes enforcement that much easier. Of course whether there's an actual goal here or this is just posturing to make good on the "tough on immigration" campaign talk is anybody's guess.

You make it sound like that goal would be good?

If anything it would shine light on how our laws are for the most part unreasonably strict and don't reflect reality. Like speeding laws (autodriving cars are programmed to break them) or drug laws in some states.

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

This is bad, but the alternative was worse: https://www.reddit.com/r/DNCleaks/comments/5945ho/hillary_ju...

[remember not to vote on Reddit if you land with an external HTTP Referer or you risk being banned for 3 days on the whole site for participating in a "voting brigade"]

Every country is a platform. When it attracts the best users it succeeds. When it doesn't, or even worse rejects them, it's bound to fail.

>not Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Wahhabist terrorism.

I read it and it seems Author was OK with it if KSA was banned by Trump.

Author is biased or innocent as he has no idea of terrorism promoted by Iran in Syria and Iraq.

Cheap strawmen

<sarcasm>Those PhD's should be for 'mericans, not furners.</sarcasm>

Such a cynical yet poorly thought out policy.

Firstly, many people involved in terrorist incidents are natural born citizens of allied countries. So are we going to ban all French or Belgium citizens given they have been shown to harbor terrorists ? It's clear that Trump/Bannon desperately want a Muslim ban as opposed to a Iran/Iraq/etc ban.

Secondly, this is going to alienate moderate Muslims who Western intelligence agencies have unanimously and categorically stated are the only people capable of solving this problem of radicalisation. It's often their children or friends or community members who are being radicalised. Why should they help the US government when they are encouraging the public to hate them purely based on their religion ?

Who says they want to solve the problem of radicalization?. After the cold war now we have the new crusade and for that to last the best it to radicalize both sides. It's easier to manipulate people when there's a war , fictional or real , going on.

> many terrorists involved in incidents are natural born citizens of allied countries.

Stated differently, the majority are made up of muslims that have been in the western world for more than one generation and have still not assimilated. If feel that you're making a stronger case for limiting muslim immigration.

> this is going to alienate moderate Muslims who Western intelligence agencies have unanimously and categorically stated are the only people capable of solving this problem of radicalization.

Would it not be wise for the west to wait until moderate muslims get their house in order before opening their borders?

All that being said, I don't support a unilateral ban on muslims, I think it's stupid. What I think is even more stupid though is how the left is trying to compare Trump to Hitler. Especially considering that we wants to give greater access to the press of diverging viewpoints and is building a larger building to accommodate those people, while Obama only gave media access to outlets that presented him in favorable light and severely limited access to the only conservative news station (FOX). He wants the average citizen to have greater access to firearms which is our final defense against a tyrannical government, while the left have been fighting to take away peoples 2nd amendments rights. He wants to de-regulated the economy by quote "75%", while the left want to take greater and greater control.

I'm not saying that leftists are like Hitler, because I don't resort to school yard name calling, but saying that Trump is like Hitler is just the left going absolutely bonkers when it comes to losing the election, and seeing public opinion shifting away from the politically correct non-sense that's been pluaging public discourse.

I use to be a leftist, but I hate what the left have become, I don't even know what they stand for anymore, and behavior like this just pushes me further and further away.

>What I think is even more stupid though is how the left is trying to compare Trump to Hitler

Right, you're going to get those comparisons if you praise China for the Tiananmen Square massacre, praise dictators like Kim Jong Un and Putin, suggest a national registry for everyone of a particular religion, suggest banning people from entering based on their religion(which is what he initially said, before tracking back after criticism), develop a culture of anti-intellectualism, frequently boast about IQ and genes, and deny statements you made when there is undeniable proof that you made them.

Let's not forget the only major politician to bring up Nazi comparisons- Trump, when he compared US intelligence to Nazi Germany.

>we wants to give greater access to the press of diverging viewpoints

The only new "news" outlet he wants to give access to is breitbart, a site which has had headlines like "Would you rather your daughter have Cancer or Feminism" and "Gay rights have made us dumber, it's time to get back in the close". These are not diverging viewpoints. These are the only piles of rubbish that actually support Trump, which is why he is more comfortable with them than the New York Times. What left leaning news outlet has he given more precedence to?

> He wants the average citizen to have greater access to firearms which is our final defense against a tyrannical government, while the left have been fighting to take away peoples 2nd amendments rights

I'm not sure how background checks take away the right to own guns, nobody on any side can take away the people's right to own guns without a judiciary decision. The only way a politician can take away the guns of citizens is by pushing forward something unconstitutional like Stop and Frisk, which Trump supports.

In the age of nuclear weapons, guns are not useful in overthrowing a tyrannical government. Nothing is, but what comes closest are modes of unsupervised communication to organise people. Of course, Trump is a supporter of mass surveillance.

>He wants to de-regulated the economy by quote "75%"

I'm not sure what you mean, but the biggest problem with the economy today is the unparalleled levels of inequality. Trump of course wants to drastically cut taxes for the rich.

It's understandable to dislike Obama or Clinton. I don't like a lot of their policies either. But Trump carries over everything that is bad about them and adds a whole lot more. He is not a reasonable alternative.

> you're going to get those comparisons

Comparisons are one thing. There are a lot of leftists who truly believe that he's a Hitler figure, and as I've shown in my last comment, that's hardly the case.

> The only new "news" outlet he wants to give access to is Breitbart

[Citation Needed] It's clear that it's more than just that one outlet, which is a great reversal from the policy of the last 8 years.

> I'm not sure how background checks [etc]

Don't be coy. The left have been clamping down on guns for years, and many of them would like them to be outright banned. Hillary Clinton wanted to make gun manufacturers liable for anything that happens when using their guns, essentially destroying the civilian gun industry. The candidates also fought over which candidate was most hated by the NRA.

> the biggest problem with the economy today is the unparalleled levels of inequality

I love that the left like to accuse everyone else of being unscientific, but that they've become the greatest deniers of all. But even if it were true, what's the left's proposal? That we give all that money and power over to the government, the same one that they complain (rightfully so) is in an unholy alliance with corporations and special interests? What do you think the incentives are for those people in power are?

> In the age of nuclear weapons, guns are not useful in overthrowing a tyrannical government.

Hopefully gun owners will be willing to depose of a government before it gets to the point where they've become so evil that they're willing to nuke their own people.

This is part of the game that must be played to win against the government of Iran, people of that country have been treated like pawns in a chess game for long, certainly this is not something new. While the outrage is understandable, policy should not be made based on how it makes people feel. Iran is a country that deserves so much more, but it is seized by a ruling elite that does not share its values. I wish people who show so much outrage against Trump would acknowledge the above and in that new light instead show their support for the people of Iran in this unfortunate situation that they find themselves in.

What exactly is being won here?

The Iranians right to freedom and the control of the region and its resources.

Just how does this weaken the Iranian government?

They used to have a democracy until they tried to nationalize their oil industry. Then the CIA and British intelligence engineered a coup and installed a Shah that gave good oil prices.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution

Yes, but we find ourselves in this situation now, the current U.S. administration certainly had nothing to do with the coup. Bad decisions maybe were made but we cannot continue to blame U.S. policy as a whole over those mistakes.

Jesus Christ. This comes up every time. Read up on Mossadegh. He would have been overthrown regardless of what the UK or US did. He was seriously unpopular at the time.

"Engineered a coup" was more like Diem in Vietnam. Tacit approval more than orchestrating something that would otherwise never would have happened.

> Jesus Christ. This comes up every time. Read up on Mossadegh. He would have been overthrown regardless of what the UK or US did. He was seriously unpopular at the time.

Just like the leader of Congo was unpopular before the CIA decided to overthrow him? just like the leader of Guatemala was unpopular before the CIA decided to overthrow him? just like many many more? Read up all these :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castillo_Armas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko

All these creeps came into power thank to the CIA, and so did Pahlavi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi

Yes, indeed, "Jesus Christ"...

Prove that Mossadergh wasn't popular! Mossadegh enjoyed massive popularity at different times during his political career, but his position as Prime Minister was never due to a nationwide poll (he was PM on two separate occasions). Please show however that he "would have been overthrown without the CIA engineered coup" LOL.

Also show me when a popular government was able to successfully nationalize a resource where Britain or USA had favorable terms or interests, and nothing bad happened. Even Britain's own declassified documents show that this coup was an alternative to military action.

Even when China tried to block the opium trade they got the opium wars.

Or show me where they were able to successfully take away a foreign corporation's ability to enjoy unfair tax breaks like the United Fruit Company did, leading to an overthrow of Guatemala's government.

That's what state capitalism does. Read Smedley Butler

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/115545.Smedley_D_But...

They did horrible things: "The new administration introduced a wide range of social reforms: unemployment compensation was introduced, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and peasants were freed from forced labor in their landlords' estates"

One shudders at the thought. Good thing UK and US could put an end to suchlike. A king is better.

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