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...
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
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 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.
Don't get me wrong but do you always look at historical numbers to predict the future?
> 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...
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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-...
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.