U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One of the core arguments was that the Feds can't pull funds for their stated purpose, which was to encourage/force schools to open ("The government has provided no reason for its abrupt and unexplained shift. That is unsurprising, since... its purpose—as expressed by Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli—is to 'encourage schools to reopen.' In essence, Defendants are using the vulnerability of international students as leverage to force a broad reopening for reasons wholly disconnected from the underlying statute and regulation... Defendants have thus violated the APA by promulgating a policy based on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.").
I think there's a good chance that the admin backed down here so that there's no pre-existing precedent implying (or explicitly stating) that they can't use purse strings and other extra-congressional-intent mechanisms to force K12 to open in August.
From my quote of the amicus brief: Defendants have thus violated the APA by promulgating a policy based on factors WHICH CONGRESSS DID NOT INTEND IT TO CONSIDER
( the all-caps is for emphasis because I can't see italics well anymore and HN doesn't have bold; I'm not yelling :) )
The important part is maintaining separation of powers... making sure the Executive branch doesn't overstep its authority into the legislative branch territory.
That's because the law that lowered the limit to 55 was repealed in 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law#199...
The Covid-19 National Emergency Declaration is still in force.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump admin is working on an Executive Order. It would get around a lot of the arguments Harvard/MIT were making related to improper administrative rule-making by ICE.
Their case makes arguments very similar to yours.
If was a very tough transition because, of course, both in undergraduate and in professional life lackadaisical attitudes were tolerated, especially so long as you otherwise performed the substantive work.
We all love to rationalize away those things we dislike doing. But there was no wiggle room to rationalize it away in law school. I'm sure the military is similar.
Ironically, Roll Call is a formal concept in the military and rarely used after training. But the concept of accountability certainly exists.
This varies by country, branch of service, and job, but it’s fairly common for young airmen (enlisted troops) in the USAF to be docked pay after showing up late to work a few times. The punishment usually goes something like a stern warning-> light paperwork-> paperwork in your permanent file and formal counseling. The next step is non-judicial punishment (named so because your only option is to accept the harsh punishment or be court martialed), which could mean any combination of confinement, demotion, forfeiture of pay, or several other things. The only things left after that are being discharged or sent to prison. And that’s for being late to work. If you backtalk the wrong person you could be demoted with no warning.
And I know the Air Force Academy takes attendance every class because I had to. The registrar would occasionally audit the attendance system and notify the department chairs of instructors that didn’t log their attendance.
It's taken very seriously.
Military you're trying to teach a hundred things besides just the material, so I think it's really fitting there.
It would be embarrassing to the school and the idea of continued employment of the professors if it was revealed how easy it is to pass the law school classes and the bar without ever attending a lecture.
But I did discover that skipping class was not an option for me.
I did enjoy, however, being treated like an adult for the first time in my life.
Because for some schools, it's all about that FTE (Full Time Equivalent, a measure of how many students are taking how many classes, and how some state schools get their chunk of funding.) And while FTE isn't directly related to attendance more State legislatures/University boards are combining the two and want to make sure that their funds are being spent wisely and students are actually in class.
Also accrediting bodies like to know that students are actually showing up as well.
So while taking attendance is silly for college students, it's not a waste of time or silly for the powers that be.
(I know this because my friends who teach are now being chastised if they don't keep daily attendance records.)
Two CS courses(1st year) had a clicker thing going on where you had to answer questions and it'd be worth 5% of the grade. Some courses also had a key chunk of info taken out of the pdfs so as to incentivize going to class. I definitely wasn't a big fan, but it wasn't hard to learn about the topics from other university's notes available online
If you admit a student from Pakistan in your Santa Clara campus but ICE finds the student working in New Jersey, the student gets deported and University admin might face criminal charges. So any university where this is a risk factor, takes attendance seriously.
In some cases US federal government has setup fraudulent universities themselves, worked actively with Dept. of State to promote these universities in India and to Indian students studying in other universities as "no need to attend" university and then entrapped these students and their employers.
A university whose 90-100% students are foreign students. These are always on the radar of ICE and DHS.
There were plenty courses where at the beginning of each lecture, we were asked to complete a trivial quiz (one question quiz) with iClickr. I believe that it was just a convenient way of taking attendance.
Some people refuse to accept that laws are administered by humans.
Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward.
Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way.
1. they are beholden to that region,
2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections.
With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district.
But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices.
Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation. A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected.
(Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)
The US uses FPTP for most elections, that's actually central to the problem.
If you mean “a system approximating proportional repreaentation”, that's a valid fix, but problematic, both in terms of choosing the right one and the fact that doing so itself has ideological as well as functional impacts on outcomes, which means that the status quo faction which would ideologically be disadvantaged will be hard to sway no matter what the functional argument is. So you'd need unchallenged control by the opposing faction, which would have to be willing to surrender that control to a multiparty system which might be favorable ideologically, but not organizationally. And even that only is talking about the House. It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate.
Not quite true. It can be changed with consent of the state, so it would require 100% of the states to ratify it.
Something like MMP is probably a better system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...). Baby steps though.
No, it doesn't. FPTP is a synonym for single-member plurality, which enables wins with less than 50% of the popular vote when there are more than two candidates.
You may mean majority-runoff (which the US already uses for a fair number of elections) or instant runoff, instead of FPTP, both of which require a kind of majority, but are otherwise very close to FPTP in their incentives and effects.
In the Netherlands, elections for the lower house (150 seats) are nationwide. The 150 candidates/parties with the highest number of votes get a seat.
The party system makes it a bit more complex, but in the end, there's roughly proportional representation: a party with 10% of the popular vote occupies roughly 10% of the seats.
No superwinning like in the UK (where 30% of the vote can get you more than 30% of the seats), no cut-off except you need at least 1/150th of the votes to get a seat.
Also, the founding fathers famously made it difficult for Congress to change anything, so dysfunction was definitely a feature.
Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
Yes, that's what they said: paralysis is always a feature, because the legislative majority is always hostile to the people.
It is very clear to me that current admin is acting out of malevolence. This is not about protecting American interests or even upholding law. This is about a careful strategy called "attrition through enforcement". Make life difficult of immigrants so they leave voluntarily over time without need for any drastic law, also since the impact of this strategy is felt over time (just like climate change) no big players feel the need to act against it. (E.g. Google might not even realize what is happening by the time it is very late).
There is a reason why most immigration law, processes and regulation exists and not all of them are implemented by "open border" folks in Obama or Bush administration. But the current admin people are operating under that weird assumption. So they look at every immigration benefit as "exploit" and try to close it without understanding its broader impact. Their approach is "lets try and see". They either lose in court or some lobby manages to convince Trump. This is not the first battle this admin has lost in court and it wont be last.
Even though I am pro-immigration, I understand that American people have the 100% right to regulate who comes in, but regulation implies application of law, which must follow due process, should be predictable and in general should honor contract. Otherwise there is simply no incentive to follow law for anyone.
Current admin's "attrition via enforcement" has worked pretty well for students from India.
As of 2020:
Total Indian students in Canada : 172,000 (up from 76,000 in 2016) Indian students enrollment in USA : 64,000 (down from 86,000) [Note this is new students enrolling. Total students is probably 2.5x and 4x if you count students working on OPT]
These institutions receive an abundance of high-quality applications every year and choose only a few; for every admitted international student, several amazing domestic applicants are rejected. The government does not need to bend over backwards for the international students who won the admissions lottery, because they already have a huge advantage. Rather, it might prefer to fight for the interests of its own citizens, whose advancement is in their personal best interest as well as that of the nation.
If an international student follows the established legal processes whereby a foreign person can become an American citizen, he, too, can benefit from a system that protects the interest of American citizens.
This can be especially easy now as the universities target to become 100% online and the number of students whom you can let attend a lecture is virtually unlimited.
They aren't taking away seats from domestic students. They are subsidizing the ability for more domestic students to study there.
I'm digging around online now but my search skills are failing me
I think it would be enlightening to see transcripts of the moments where each side said something convincing to the other.
Like...did Harvard representatives walk in and say "You know that this shit matters, right?" and then did the US representatives say "Oh shit. You're right. We never even thought of that." ? Or was there more to it?
There has to be more to it than that, right? "Struck a deal" implies that both sides gave something. So what did both sides give? Or did the US just walk back a move made without any foresight whatsoever when someone asked if they'd thought about the consequences?
But given their actions over the past 4 years and the general cruelty of Trump administration, I'm leaning towards "a deal" or rather someone in Trump admin realizing its hurting their voter base.
Universities that are 100% online before Covid should not be able to grant visas as they have no campus.
There is a LOT unregulated, unlegislated here and a lot that needs to be organized now. Many organizations will continue to set unacceptable standards for education and in my opinion need to be reigned in. MIT, Harvard's global relationship, albeit special by influence and money, should have to follow what the government sets. Government should have edified that universities without campuses cannot grant visas as well as a variety of other things.
In short this is a missed opportunity and a waste of time, much like many/all plans of this administration.
By the far the largest group of students effected by the policy are foreign nationals that did not return to their home countries in the spring and would be subject to immediate deportation in the fall depending on their school's form of instruction. This was a purely vindictive and xenophobic move by the administration. I was extremely happy to hear of this policy reversal. It (at least temporarily) removes some pointless stress on millions of students who already have more things to worry about than they should.
This cannot be good for either side. Do we want to live in a system where if you hadn't been paying attention to the news for 1 week, we might have kicked >100,000 people out of the country?
Is this ADD-style, whoever yells the loudest, social and political system working well for anyone? How do we get past this?
It's not really the Senate's fault. Opposition parties almost never vote with government parties in any democratic legislature, so you shouldn't expect them to in the US.
The real problem is the outdated system that is set up to (1) only allow two major parties to exist, so a European-style coalition government isn't possible, and (2) require both major parties to agree in order to pass any legislation.
If we end up in a situation where neither branch can respond quickly and effectively, that may be worse than what we have now.
That isn't to say there isn't "overreach".
Disagree. The political deadlock of the legislative branch is by design. Only things that are truly broadly supported should pass through the legislature.
The overreach of the executive branch is a response to complete and utter inaction by the states to reign in the federal government.
now we are just out of solutions and too divided to get further patches in
Reform the entire election system:
- 4 year term length for House elections instead of 2 so that representatives can get stuff done instead of having to spend every second year in election campaigns
- reform campaign financing to a government funded model like in Germany (and entirely ban PACs) so that the influence of big money on government is eliminated
- if possible, get rid of the Presidential election by the population and have the President elected by Congress to prevent the situation of having a President without his own legislative majority
- get rid of FPTP and introduce proportional voting to reduce polarization and create more diversity in politics
- get rid of voter suppression and gerrymandering, make Sunday a voting day (or alternatively, a federal holiday), enforce universal mail-in voting across states
Four year cycles for the house would mean we would have no way of changing course for four full years (other than impeachment, and we've seen how ineffective of a check that is if the president's party controls the Senate)
As a guy with inattentive-subtype ADHD, I've long suspected there are fairly strong curb-cut benefits[1] to re-structuring organizations to work better for ADHDers. Might this be true of American political life? Initial suspicions:
1. Reduce the interface-complexity of government. Improve encapsulation. This may mean that government does _more_ in certain domains. I moved from the US to the UK in 2016 and the impact that a cross-cutting interface simplification like the NHS's "free at point of care" has just astounding. Income taxes over here are also much more clear, even if you are running a 1-person small business but especially if you are just an employee. I think is worth paying some higher monetary taxes if government can impose a lower tax on Working Memory.
For more on the idea of "Interface Complexity", see A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.
2. Improve baseline health outcomes with some more wholistic (yet still evidence-based) interventions. A broad swath of Americans are stressed and often sleep-deprived. This is not conducive to thoughtful decision-making. Or epistemically-sound interpretation of information.
3. Improve access to mental health care. A whole bunch of Americans are descended from people who...
A. were so excited by the prospect of extravagant wealth that they would abandon their community and kinship group to live and work among strangers.
B. belonged to physically (sometimes sexually) abusive households for multiple generations until 1865. And then they got married to people who grew up in abusive households. (some of my own family history)
C. escaped from abusive & traumatic situations and traveled across an ocean to a land of strangers.
D. were so willing to break with social norms (or join social-norm-breaking subcultures) that they would abandon most of their possessions and travel across an ocean to a land of strangers.
E. were so fearful about the prospect of a government, regional, or neighborhood conspiracy that they decided to move across an ocean -- before there was sufficient evidence for most people around them to try to flee!
4. Reduce the social norms that promote catastrophizing. Currently, those who seek a return to specificity, clarity, or ask "is this reflected by the observable facts" in political discussions are often told they are pedantic, privileged, or tone-policing. We need a culturally-accepted way to return to a calm, measured way of thinking about policy -- not because policy is some intellectual game that doesn't matter. The stakes are genuinely life-or-death, because the stakes are life-or-death and that requires a calm mind with an eye seeking a clear understanding of a possibly-horrifying reality. It is good to be willing to say whatever will return to clarity and fact-focus with conviction and counter those who shame people for saying it.
5. Reduce the incentives to nuisance alarms in the news. Not sure how to do this.
6. Improve the number and quality of resources available for people of many professions to learn honest rhetoric and in particular to learn the how to clearly describe the "why" of their profession's policy recommendations. "Start with why" is the interpersonal version of well-regulated dopamine signals.
[1] https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma...
I interpreted this as mostly driven by the nativism of Trump et al.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/fedgov.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_...
That list is "executive branch officials who have been described by the media as a czar of some kind", not anything official or affecting the duties of that person in any particular way.
But this should never have been an issue to begin with, think of all the unnecessary stress and anxiety this has caused for the hundreds of thousands of international students impacted by this.
I view the phrase "the system worked" as a red flag indicating that things went wrong in a way they shouldn't, not a positive thing. A successful outcome doesn't necessarily indicate things are fine.
A canonical example is the Space Shuttle boosters. The O-rings were supposed to block all the hot gases, but there was some gas leakage and erosion of the O-rings. Nothing bad happened and officials said this showed there was a sufficient safety factor. In other words, the system worked. They kept launching shuttles until an O-ring eroded all the way through and Challenger blew up. They should have recognized that erosion shouldn't have happened at all; successful launches despite erosion were an indication that things were dangerously wrong, not an indication that the system was working.
(I hope I haven't gone too far on a metaphorical tangent here.)
Reference: Feynman's report on Challenger: https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...
Apparently, all of the engineers knew intuitively that the problem was real and critical, but weren’t able to communicate it to their superiors, who lacked the same intuitive grounding. They failed to visualize the data convincingly, and the launch went as planned.
It was an example of the system working, until people ignored the warnings about the O-rings. That decision to move on, rather than to investigate critically, was the moment when the system shifted from working to failing.
Edward Tufte wrote a really convincing treatment of this in “The Visual Design of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information“, to motivate the importance of proper visualizations.
You can read a blog with the visualizations here [1] but I really recommend the book!
This was actually observed by engineers at the time, who tried (unsuccessfully) to raise the observation to their superiors. The launch went on anyway, and the rest is history.
This has more details, along with my cousin comment: https://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf
This is akin to a safety system taking over and restoring stability, despite a major component failure. From the outside, things "worked" but backups are designed for extraordinary and rare circumstances, not for continuous use.
Not something you want to be triggering as a matter of course or to be proud of having done so, ever.
"Well, the driver was drunk, we couldn't get him to stop despite our attempts, he drove us into a ditch, but the airbags worked!"
More importantly, the long term damage is done. The noise was heard loud and clear that America is only as competent as its leader. Prospective future students are likely going to be ultra careful before choosing this country.
Confidence is definitely a thing.
Most of the students probably don't appreciate this self-inflicted drama in the first place.
No one really wins here.
The courts proved exactly the opposite. The system of checks and balances worked. I don't follow your assertion.
And even when they do, the fear and confusion caused in the meantime in a case like this is devastating to many thousands of people.
It is not normal nor good for an administration to be floating so many terrible and illegal ideas so regularly.
Depending on judges with lifetime appointments isn’t a good system.
Why could this decision be made in the first place by non elected officials? Why didn’t such a drastic decision have to be passed via the legislative process?
The legislature can stop pretty much any form of bad executive overreach, by passing a bill.
The problem is that (enough of) the legislature did not want to stop this.
I'm not that familiar with the structure of the US government, but I thought it was the opposite, and the executive has an approve list of powers rather than a deny list
Most of the time, laws are very vague and the specifics of the laws - the regulations - are written by government regulatory agencies. The president appoints heads of the regulatory agencies that are approved by the Senate (upper house).
Congress can pass a law that overrides a regulation or it can be struck down by court.
So the President by himself has limited power but he has a lot of influence over regulatory agencies based on who he appoints.
That's why it's not necessarily an overreach, but instead just an inhumane choice to not take special circumstances into account when choosing to execute a particular regulation.
The courts worked as a balance. But they can only do as much as the laws allow. The tendency of the executive is heard loud and clear. No serious student would want to jeopardize their lives in an environment and society that displays xenophobia.
I cannot explain it much better than this https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-international-student-...
> The number of international students enrolled in U.S. universities declined again in 2018-19, extending the slide in enrolled international students to a second year in a row.
> That’s one of the main takeaways from the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, which was released today by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2019/11/18/inte...
---
However, the linked report starts out:
> The number of international students in the United States set an all-time high in the 2018/19 academic year, the fourth consecutive year with more than one million international students.
> The total number of international students, 1,095,299, is a 0.05 percent increase over last year, according to the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
From: https://www.iie.org/en/Why-IIE/Announcements/2019/11/Number-...
Don't get me wrong but do you always look at historical numbers to predict the future?
Honest question because I'm not a student of world politics: what countries have had consistently better governance over the last 20 years?
Every time some possibility comes to mind, I quickly recall a reason to cross it off the list.
Germany has a huge self-inflicted migrant crisis. New Zealand seems to be heading down that path.
The only Germans who worry about this so-called "migrant crisis" are those who make a living writing schadenfreude pieces for conservative American websites. You have been misled.
Besides, don't change the subject. We are talking about USA's massive failure. All three of these other nations have succeeded in dealing with this problem that has totally beaten us. Observing that they aren't sufficiently cruel to immigrants for your tastes doesn't change that fact.
If they added a clause that the rule only applied to colleges with an endowment of less than $1 billion it would continue along just fine.
> 20.Plaintiffs also have standing to assert claims on behalf of their F-1 visa-holding students, who face the imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk of harm to themselves, their families, their educations, their short-term and long-term health, and their future education and employment prospects if Defendants’ actions are not halted by this Court.
[0]: https://www.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/content/sevp_fil...
I tend to think that it was premature to rescind the temporary waiving of the oversight regulations, but that isn't the same thing as saying the underlying regulations don't have a rationale basis.
> 19. Plaintiffs have standing to bring this case. Defendants’ actions will cause an imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk to Plaintiffs’ ability to achieve their educational missions unless halted by this Court.
> 20.Plaintiffs also have standing to assert claims on behalf of their F-1 visa-holding students, who face the imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk of harm to themselves, their families, their educations, their short-term and long-term health, and their future education and employment prospects if Defendants’ actions are not halted by this Court.
[0]: https://www.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/content/sevp_fil...
What you're missing is universities are making their classes online not because they're offering online education, but because they're forced to do so in order to protect students and faculty (including F1 students) from a pandemic. F1 visa specifically gives students right to protect themselves from such risks.
If universities switched to remote education e.g. to cut cost or to experiment with online education methods, then you'd be right. But the argument here is that universities do this because students and faculty face irreparable damage or death, and therefore there is no basis to deport to F1 students.
It kind of makes sense - if everything is online courses, it doesn't matter to Harvard whether the students are at an apartment in Cambridge St or in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, as long as you have internet access.
On the other hand, if students are deciding to attend some other university(say, one in their home country) and Harvard can show that harms them, then they would have standing
It makes a massive difference.
1. Students need good internet access, which a lot of them don't have in third world countries.
2. Students can't be expected to attend lectures and participate in class when they are in an opposite timezone (i.e. all of India and China).
It's a pretty easy decision for all of these students to just skip a semester rather than pay ridiculous tuition and not even be allowed to stay on campus, hence causing problems for the university.
Are you saying that allowing purely online learning for students with visas is a blunder, or am I misinformed about this?
The pandemic is far from over, especially in the US, a fact which is obvious to everyone. The retraction is pure stupidity. Of course it would be unreasonable to ask int students to attend in person classes given the situation.
On the one hand, it seems overtly xenophobic and anti-intellectual. On the other hand, I don't see why an international student needs to be in the United States in order to participate exclusively in online classes.
Even if the issue is a lack of human welfare (eg unsafe neighborhood) or necessary infrastructure (eg slow/inconsistent internet) back home, an international student could live somewhere else and probably save a ton of money in the process.
What am I missing?
I wouldn't want to expect a student in Sydney to stay awake at 3AM to follow a lecture at Harvard at 1PM.
The same is true for office hours with professors and TAs. You have a huge disadvantage in getting information if you are in a bad time zone.
People have year long leases. People have commitments. Even if they choose to leave, no doubt they would prefer to do it on their time, not with ICE breathing down their neck.
Airplane tickets are expensive and rare. It's fucking hard to just uproot yourself in 10 days if your school becomes online only.
Also, having your visa revoked ducks the OPT process, in case you ever wanted to work in the US in the near future.
The problem was also the timing. Students under an F1 visa must remain enrolled in an eligible program. If they are not, they have 60 days to leave the country. College semesters often end around mid-May, we're in mid-July, meaning as of the date of this announcement last week, students in online courses had already failed to be enrolled in an applicable program for nearly 60 days and would have a week or three to pack their bags and leave the country.
Before that, they could try to figure out if their mix of online or hybrid courses qualified as sufficiently "in person". This was without formal definitions from the administration of what constituted a sufficiently "in-person" course with respect to hybrid courses: The general policy was announced but there was never any official posting to the Federal Register that detailed the definitions, limits, exceptions, etc. In the announcement, such details were promised, but never materialized.
So, students had 1-2 weeks to panic and determine if their schools:
1) had any in-person courses
2) if so, determine if any applied to their program
3) If 1 & 2 were a "no", find, apply, get accepted, and register at an alternate school with applicable in-person courses
4) Having spent time on 1,2 & 3, vacate the country within a handful of days.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that an actual drop in international student numbers would likely have hurt colleges in Republican-controlled states worse than Democrat-controlled ones. American students armed with student loans would still flock to top universities to make up for the international student shortfall, and I can't think of a top 10 [1] university off the top of my head that's in a state with a Republican governor.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...
I doubt the split would be at the top 10 because they're simply too small to absorb all the domestic demand. I'm not sure how far down the list, however, would be the switch point between benefit and harm (or if it would be determined purely by rankings vs. some other consideration).
I think the above poster's point is states like Massachusetts (Deval Patrick->Charlie Baker) or Illinois tend to zigzag between blue governors and red governors, which shows they aren't "Republican controlled" like truly red states.
Yeah, that's dead on, clearly I have a lot to learn about US politics :) I didn't even think of checking, how does Massachusetts elect a Republican Governor?
See: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/post-poli...
So it’s probably winning if you don’t ever hear about the loss.
b) Given that so many startups were founded by immigrants who studied here I would consider it a pretty important issue to address.
b) They addressed it by trying to make them go home, get it now?
> ICE also contends that a full slate of virtual coursework compromises national security by giving foreign students free rein within the U.S., and says a freeze would undermine “the deference afforded administrative agencies in complex and interrelated fields like immigration enforcement.”
The argument is essentially that by allowing students to take online classes, they are free to travel anywhere within the united states. With mandatory in person classes, they would be restricted to being near campus.
The federal government would have a harder time keeping track of students, as their schools would no longer really have an idea if the students are nearby or not.
Which as others have pointed out, really grasping at straws, and if there is a a legitimate concern here, I'm certain that schools could come up with a system to keep tabs on their students visa holders.
Theoretically that's true for on-campus courses too. Most (at least that I know of) universities don't track attendance. So the students are still free to travel anywhere as long as they keep submitting online assignments and are physically present for any exams.
90% of the classes I took didn't require attendance, and the ones that did were mostly general studies courses for freshmen (like basic lab sciences or language classes). None of the major-related courses required attendance or had it as a component of the final grade (which in my case would be maths and CS classes). Obviously, you still had to attend midterms and final exams. And each of those classes would have a couple of prodigies who would attend zero lectures and still end up doing very well in the class (with many more who attempted that and failed massively, but still).
The only way of legitimately interpreting the meaning of your reply is that universities receiving federal aid are required to submit the list of students registered for each course. That has nothing to do with attendance though.
But there is disruption caused due to the health emergency.
> why would foreign students (or any students) want to pay the regular tuition for 100% online instruction
They wouldn't and embassies are closed, so no new students are coming to attend the online courses. The students we are talking about are already in the US. The choice they have is drop out or continue with online courses. Whether they should pay 100% tuition or not is a separate argument.
> and why would that require them to be physically in the US (i.e. to have a visa)
They are already in the US. Would the US government be willing to cancel their home leases, car loans or leases, so on and so forth? If not I don't see any reason to kick them out. Educational programs are typically between 2-6 years. These people have their life in the US right now. I don't see any reason to kick them out.
> And why would a educational institution want to have the responsibility for keeping track of the physical location of students taking a 100% online instruction?
They don't have to is what my previous comment you replied to is implying.
The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president authority to do whatever he wants:
> "Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants..."
If they rescinded the order, means they:
1) Didn't think through the consequences, or the legality of the order.
2) They just wanted to crate some chaos, and mess up with the foreign kids, while posturing to their base
3) Force universities to stay open in the middle of the pandemic in order to help Trump's reelection bid... (not sure how breakouts of covid infections at colleges will help him)
This is good for the world. Part of me sees this as a cynical ploy to tear down others' futures to support the base. I do think the US needs massive education reform, costs are through the roof and large universities are farming foreign students but this isn't the way to do it.
I wonder how they'll compare tuition wise and whether that would incentivize foreign students to stay home. New York is a very expensive city but it is also a different experience.
Here, ICE attempted to rollback the current emergency rule and put in place a new rule that was broader and more flexible than the pre-covid-19 rule. They have pulled that back now.
But, as soon as the Covid-19 national emergency order expires, the current emergency rule can be easily reverted to the stricter pre-covid-19 rule if that's what the Admin wants. Otherwise, a new rule (following administrative law rule-making requirements) can be made to implement the broader/flexible policy ICE was seeking here.
edit-to-add: Trump could probably issue an Executive Order directing ICE to change its rules.
https://fair.org/home/in-russian-bounty-story-evidence-free-...
This is a theme of the media: use unnamed sources with no ability for stories to be independently verified and then create an anti-Trump scandal over it. Over and over we go through this.
Hamfisted malice.
No one is talking about Russian Bounties on US troops. Crisis averted.
He just keeps on winning!
To me this adds to the picture of an administration who is about to loose the forthcoming election and is acting more and more eratic.
But I am not American so I cannot tell whether this is actually convincing to the broader electorate?
I wouldn't be so sure, there is still a lot of time before now and the election. We saw the lengths the administration is willing to go to in order to win. Blackmailing the Ukraine to make up lies about their political opponents is just the worst thing we know about, and as disgusting as it was, the aftermath of that shows that half the country supports this type of behavior as a means to an end. I seriously doubt we'll see a transition of power during this election.
The thing is, sitting Presidents usually get re-elected.
Last election seemed like there was a Trump-related controversy every week, and he still managed to win.
They say cats hit terminal velocity after falling only about 3 stories, so they are just as likely to survive a 10 storey fall. If Trump can get elected after dozens of questionable statements and actions, why not hundreds?
I use quotes because I've stopped believing he has tactics. At most, he does things impulsively, hears how it's spun by lackeys, then adopts their rationalization himself. Maybe he'll keep it in mind the next time he decides something.
I'm pessimistic that even if a change in administration occurs early next year (and that is a major if), there would be anything any administration can do before the next Donald Trump takes office 4 or 8 years from now. I'm betting that the next "Trump" will be far smarter and won't make this one's mistakes. And if the Republic falls, no place on Earth will be safe.
That's not a reason to lie down and die. It's a reason to fight back with the frenzy of despair. I hope a quarter million dead by December will be enough. Enough for folks to remember that elections have consequences.
It's likely they knew this would never go through and didn't want a knockdown drag-out fight in the courts. However, they still capitalized on a situation and should be congratulated for that, regardless of whether or not you agree with the politics.
I would hope that the DNC would learn this tactic and employ it equally as well in the future.