ICE Tells Foreign Students to Leave the Country If Their Schools Are Online-Only

I'm not seeing it. Unless Europe suddenly figures out how to pay real wages at the same time that China discovers how to not be horrible people can always be imported at the discretion of whoever is managing the system. People come to the US for the money.

> We are sending our best and brightest into the welcoming arms of the competition.

Seems like an excellent opportunity to test this assertion.

Hopefully colleges will create some sort of "hybrid" programs that is not completely online to allow foreign students to stay in the US.

But yeah, this is very sad.

It was never about any of those things, it certainly was never about what is in the country's interest. It was always blind racism. In the very speech where trump announced his candidacy: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

This is a blanket statement about ALL mexican immigrants, and "you" refers to his entirely white base of supporters. The administration set up deliberately cruel and trauma-inducing family separations out of hatred, just as these policies are born out of hate. When backwards people talk about "illegals," they are never talking about people's legal immigration status, it's shorthand for race.

I think the right interpretation of this is that it's an attack on universities, not an attack on international students.

International students basically are not "stealing" Americans' jobs. They're creating them, in fact. They're high-dollar tourists, basically.

I believe this dates back to 2001 where one of the hijackers was in the US on a student visa despite never attending any classes. Basically you require a babysitter to be allowed to stay.

As for things that are "temporary", it's looking like the pandemic situation isn't changing any time soon unfortunately. I think everyone is just adapting. The govt is saying going totally online cannot become the new normal for internationals.

Students are certainly able to transfer, by the way. I know students who failed and rushed to apply to yet another school (they always find one too) to avoid being sent home as a result.

I used to believe that the sentiment against bad immigrants was justified. There are some really good reasons why you wouldn't want to open up your country to desperate people who are willing to be exploited because their home country is an even worse place. Of course none of those reasons matter when you even kick out the type of immigration that is actively beneficial for your country. At that point it's just plain old xenophobia which is never acceptable.

FYI, Obama administration ICE did plenty of these things. For instance the fake College sting operation was started under Obama administration. as soon as Obama took oath new immigration policies screwed h-1bs. Due to high unemployment Obama administration believed that these people were stealing jobs from Americans and contributing to high unemployment of American citizens. There were no protests at JFK for these people against these policies.

It's simply partisan thinking to believe that your political side favors legal immigration, they don't.

Education is already a big business in Australia, those universities love the foreign student revenue so much that they even lower the bar for English requirements so that more students can come over.

https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/cash-cows/11084858

Ah, optimism and assumptions.

Well, first, some schools are going online only for the latter half of the semester. But my understanding of the current guidance is that this is not enough to meet the in-person requirements, and so students may have to leave anyway and miss that half. Second, intl. travel is highly disrupted already and will continue being so. Some countries will fare worse under covid than others, and so students may get stuck, even after their school states are doing better. No guidance was given on students from travel ban countries, who were already here after the travel bans. Third, student visas expire. Visa politics are very volatile lately. Summing up, many people are now subject to gratuitous uncertainty about whether they'll be able to come back in at all over the next 12 months. Suppose you have to leave, a lot of people have already signed leases, etc.

Finally, the guidance so far is quite ambiguous. It is not clear who is able to remain and who won't, and my department sent an email basically saying they are waiting for extra information to know what's going on. That already is bad in itself.