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Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

This isn't xenophobia, it's just understanding what these visas are for. The purpose of a student visa is that you need to be in the country in order to attend the school. If that's not the case, if you are not going to actually be on the campus, then it makes no sense to demand a student visa.

When this crisis is over, and students actually need to show up to the campus, then the student visa will make sense again.

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Cool so what's going to happen after these admitted students do their year or two of online coursework remotely and then need to come to the US to finish in person classes? Are they just fucked if they aren't granted a visa?

The reasonable thing to do if immigration bans are absolutely necessary temporarily would be to issue admitted students visas now but block their use temporarily while instruction was purely online. This would remove the risk of foreign students spending tens of thousands on a program only to be forced to transfer if they can't get a visa later. Of course, the real purpose of this (along with the green card ban, h-1b bans, previous attempts at booting students out, etc) is to be deliberately unreasonable and hostile towards foreigners seeking to enter the US.

Then they will no longer have a 100% online curriculum, making them eligible for the standard F-whatever visa.

The problem is that visas aren't guaranteed so it's very possible that someone could wind up half way through their college career and then not be able to get a visa.

This has been a very real issue ever since 2001. I studied in the US and tried to minimize the number of trips I took abroad because you just never know what could happen once you are outside the country.

And it doesn't just apply to students. The US immigration system is a capricious beast for all.

I was a dependent on an H1B in 2006 when I accompanied my parents to a consulate (outside of the US) to extend the visa. The State Department placed a "security check" on my parents and we ended up living for months on vacation pay and credit cards, with electricity stolen from the nearest power line and no hot water until my mom started going to the consulate every morning to bother anyone within earshot. We had been in the US for over a decade at that point (getting PhDs, paying taxes, etc.) and just like that we almost had to abandon our entire life here - pets, friends, careers, and all.

The ultimate irony was that we couldn't get work permits as illegal immigrants in Mexico to carry us through the ordeal.

Being eligible does not mean that you will get the visa, I had friends rejected even when they have secured a place in a college in USA.

Online lectures in a lot of uni's will still happen in real time. Meaning that some students have to take classes at 3 AM. Being in the same time zone will still make a difference for a lot of them.

Lots of other countries in those timezones. Why go to NYC for online classes when you could be on some paradise island in the Caribbean?

Leaving aside that you actually have to be able to get to and stay on that island, lots of students definitely need the structure of an on-campus life to keep them moving in the right direction. I absolutely did.

The US will suffer if its international students can't get an education here without being told by the government to pack up and head for their favorite Caribbean island because we don't value their desire to contribute to our society.

Some reasons:

1. Not every foreign student can afford a "paradise" on a Caribbean island

2. Not every foreign student has fast, stable internet and reliable electricity for online classes

3. Most of the world doesn't enjoy the free passport access US citizens have to the rest of the world.

Many international students actually come from those paradise climes. It's not a big draw for them.

Some students are from an opposite time zone. Others don't even have a reliable network in their home country. Not allowing the students to come to the country hosting their courses is really silly.

I am sure the privileged kids willing and able to pay 150k USD for university education in US have a very reliable network at home.

You severely misunderstand the realities of international students. You're making sweeping generalization about a lot of people you know nothing about.

The further you get in physical/geopolitical distance from the US the more you invalidate assumptions that many US sites and services make.

I've had sites fail because my local time can be one calendar day _ahead_ of theirs... and how could you be doing something in the future?

Once you get into regions with a combination of censorship on the foreign-side and aggressive 'security' measures on the US-side (blocking/triggering on IP ranges of entire countries, VPN services, could services, etc... 'cause why would a legit user be coming in through anything like that, right?) then it really gets rough.

Generally, to reliably serve a country/region it requires specific expertise, personnel and/or infrastructure.

And BTW when I priced out a "reliable" connection in Beijing years ago it was around $1K USD/mo for 10Mb. Not exactly peanuts.

Fyi, There are parts of the world where money can't buy you steady electricity, safety at home (an especially important point for women and LGBT), reliable internet access.

Fwiw, there are also scholarships.

Err... what about timezones and onsite networking? Internships?

Please take in count that nowadays the most important value universities provide is networking.

The university I work for is unable to employ and pay students that are not in the country. As a result, training students online while they are outside of the country is not possible for graduate students that do not have families to support them. This is especially ridiculous since the first one or two years of a PhD is mostly in class training. Yes, this is xenophobia. The purpose of the visa is to train foreign students, without a visa, training cannot happen (except for the wealthy students).

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