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Comment by _hszs | Hacker News Reader

Such pathetic leadership. International students already in the country must now either attend an in person class and risk their lives, or fly out from the country with the highest number of infections and spread it to their friends and family at home. Not to mention the loss to the research community.

I can’t see anything that is to be gained from this, other than pandering to a xenophobic voter base.

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> or fly out from the country with the highest number of infections

Are there exemptions in place for when it is difficult to actually return to country of origin? (e.g. it remains very difficult to fly into China)

It's difficult, if not impossible, to fly to basically any country from the US.

The EU is currently debating exemptions for spouses who have been separated, so I doubt they have exemptions for students.

And even if the exemptions and all are sorted out, who thinks it's a great idea for a whole bunch of students to have to fly in what will now potentially be crowded planes, and then have to spend at least a couple of weeks in quarantine, for something that was not a choice of theirs at all.

Also, as if the rental/retail market wasn't bad enough, especially in college towns many of which are single industry towns, this is gonna add to even more completely unnecessary and avoidable hardship.

This is disastrous policy in every form, other than if youre someone who gets off on unnecessary cruelty.

In this case, the students would be returning home, and therefore be citizens of the country they are flying to. Generally speaking (including the EU, which you mentioned), citizens are exempt from the travel bans. Even during the quarantine, there were once-a-week flights to China from the US (https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/business/us-china-flights-int...)

Not saying that these changes aren't horrible, they are, but I don't think getting home is impossible. Very difficult, in most cases yes.

> The EU is currently debating exemptions for spouses who have been separated, so I doubt they have exemptions for students.

Presumably, most students kicked out of the US would fly to their home countries where their status isn't "student".

> who thinks it's a great idea [...]

Most of Trump's voter base, sadly. Less immigrants in the U.S. is the only metric they care about.

I haven’t heard of any country turning down their own nationals returning home.

China effectively is by limiting flights.

That's not the same thing at all. There's always been a flight a week from the US to China, so even if it takes a while, it's still possible. Especially so with at least a month's notice.

A month is not enough if all the tickets have been snatched by scalpers and you can't afford the markup they ask for.

Is scalping airline tickets actually something that happens? I’d assume no since you have to provide the name of the passenger when reserving.

I've changed the name in the ticket after the fact and it hasn't been a problem. They do it for national security purposes, not to prevent scalping.

That's very rare on low priced tickets. Are low priced tickets a national security threat?

Yes.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fpdKM1iJBr0as6osJ2e0Tw

李慧早就决定回国，但是她两次订到的“便宜机票”，航班都被取消了。现在，她已经订不到低于4万元价格的机票了，有可能订到的机票，价格几乎都在“6万出头”。当然，这些机票都在一些黄牛手里，她身边不少想回国的中国留学生，都是通过黄牛高价订票。

Li Hui decided to return home long ago, but the "cheap tickets" she had booked twice had their flights cancelled. Now, she can't find any ticket with a price of less than 40,000 yuan. The tickets she might be able to book are almost all from 60,000 upwards. Of course, these tickets are in the hands of some scalpers. Many Chinese students around her who want to return to China are booking high-price tickets through scalpers.

Doesn’t sound correct. If an airline cancels a flight, they will generally reschedule you for the next possible flight.

Airlines don't follow SOP when they are on the verge of bankruptcy and needs $ any way it can.

The article is from June. Those were flights she had booked in February/April for May/June. They got canceled because of the pandemic. Same for the next flight. And all others after that. The airline couldn't reschedule her for the next flight because it wasn't flying.

In the long run, we're all dead. Or perhaps just cured of covid.

There's ~375k Chinese students in the US. At one flight a week, it would take over 20 years for all to return home (to be fair, there's actually 4 flights a week I believe -- so merely 5 years). This is a de-facto blocking of citizens from returning.

And no, you can't just "wait" a month. As a sibling commenter noted, the best they could find were October tickets.

Does that mean that students on invalidated visas will get a free government flight home, or that they won't be deported?

I finally shelled out the $ for the paid version of a flight radar app because I was curious. The friendly skies are mostly empty. 85ish% of all flights in and out of Bay Area is from/to China.

I always had the free version but the paid version will ping me every time a flight goes over me(my phone actually) and for a mere $6.99/month, I can find out the air traffic of the area. It’s an affordable hobby for covid. I highly recommend it.

I don’t know what it really means but just an observation.

You may be looking at freight flights. There are 8 (4 until recently) pairs of commercial passenger flights between US and mainland China per week. 2 of those starts/ends Bay Area.

That’s what I thought too. The really tiny number of other flights illustrates how much air traffic has diminished. Fascinating.

Only a visa extension (I-539), which will cost you > 400 bucks. We just went through with this for my mother in law, whose Delta return flight was cancelled a week before she was to go back after an almost 6 month stay. Fortunately, the USCIS is being pretty accommodating on letting people file extensions close to the end of their stays (usually you have to do it 45 days in advance), and she will probably go back before they even decide her case, hopefully (but she will have to carry around her I-539 app/judgement for awhile).

We've got her booked on a flight at the end of October, which is the best we can do right now. There are flights to China that you can get tomorrow through Taiwan or Hong Kong, but neither will allow you to board if you aren't Taiwanese or from Hong Kong (so no mainlanders). The remaining direct flights are in very limited supply and very hard to get and/or very expensive.

It's not leadership.

Only possible good thing I can see from a US student perspective is that it's now more reasonable to go to grad school in US. Many programs in STEM have gotten out of hand with the number of the foreign graduate students--in some programs the number is over 80% [1]. I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues. Also, some of the competition to get in can be considered bogus: near perfect GRE math which measures high school level math skills is hardly germane for research.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

I highly doubt that's what will happen. How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition? These aren't efficient institutions, mind you, so a downturn could lead to collapse of the weakest ones, leading to increase domestic competition at the remaining ones.

How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition?

At least some are. And this is nothing new.

When I went to college decades ago, I and a bunch of my friends got kicked out of our university at the end of the semester because it was over its legislatively-mandated limit for out-of-state students. The university had loaded up on lucrative international students in previous years, and when the ratio was changed, people like me got the heave-ho.

The problem is that we have to remove the greed from the university administrators. But good luck with that.

My comment was only considering graduate students, whom I think, are the group most affected by this change. Graduate students in STEM usually don't pay tuition--their lab pays the fees for them to be enrolled.

International Graduate students, even in STEM, are mostly Masters candidates paying extremely high fees.

https://cgsnet.org/master%E2%80%99s-or-doctorate-internation...

> I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues

I’ve never been to the US but, if this is the problem then wouldn’t it be better to make it easier for people to stay also after they have finished their degrees? If the goal is to have a lot of highly educated people in the US I mean.

USA educates more international students (by far) than any other country. I think the goal of policies like this is to prefer US students. But you're right that it would also be nice if foreign students had an easier time staying in USA after they graduate.

It wouldn't just be nice - it'd be smart. We could probably have more immigrant-owned business and immigrant-developed inventions of we made it easy for foreign born US graduates to stay. Both of which should add jobs to the economy and make the US more economically competitive.

I think everyone would support that kind of policy except where it would have an adverse effect on American students. The goal of policies like this are to promote USA students admission to higher education over foreign students. But the reality is that foreign student tuition is a huge money-maker. So USA students are at a disadvantage in the admissions process.

I agree. I'd like to see more educated foreigners stay in the US through a more sensible immigration policy. But another way to attempt to fix the weird brain-drain is by controlling who is getting the education.

Well yes, of course, international students pay significantly more than in state. Money makes the university go round, that’s how the Confucius Institutes got started.

You may be interested in reading the president's thoughtful policy proposal here: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12802099460853391...

> see anything that is to be gained from this

Cruelty. Being publicly cruel.

Are any universities even offering in person classes? I doubt it. This seems designed/intended to chase away immigrants.

> This seems designed/intended to chase away immigrants.

No, it's designed to chase away non-immigrant student visa holders.

But it's part of a broader set of policies designed to make the US hostile to foreigners, whether current visa holders, non-immigrants visa applicants, or immigrant visa applicants.

Or, it could be designed to encourage universities to hold in person classes.

In particular, to pressure those universities that have business models relying on foreign student tuition.

Many universities are planning to have at least some of their classes be in-person this fall. My daughter was just admitted to Seattle U, and they expect her to be moving into her dorm in about a month. I am mostly expecting this to be cancelled, though.

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