Australian academics refuse to attend US conferences for fear of being detained

I would surmise it's more fear of wasting money and time on a plane (approx 13 - 16 hours at min cost of $2000 aud for a specific flight time,) only to be turned back at the US border.

I mostly agree with your sentiments, that not much has changed, there's been plenty of horror stories pre 2015 in regard to being pulled aside and sent back, misunderstandings perhaps but ...

Last couple of months I'd say there's a stark difference, there seems to be numerous media stores with a definite focus that it doesn't take much to be knocked back, and a few came down to simply having a record of being critical of Trump. eg. Alvin Gibbs (UK Subs) account of it which IMO sounds pretty straight up.[1]

Of course there's probably more than a few media beat ups where one would guess there's probably a bit more to the story but if so it's pretty quiet and perhaps perceived as an unwillingness for US authorities to comment.

[1] https://dorseteye.com/im-so-proud-to-be-deported-from-the-us...

> As some people point out, what makes the news is the exceptions, not the norms.

There are also the cases that never make the news.

For example: last Friday I went to a friend's PhD defense in Stockholm, during the party/dinner after one of his supervisors was telling us the story where she got detained by CBP in her last visit in March. She is a Finnish professor, with a J1 visa, with a part-time position in an American university, she was detained and deported because the CBP agent didn't like she said she was coming into the US for work-related matters.

This never made the news or anything, she was quietly disposed of after being in "custody" for a few hours.

Her takeaway was simply she would give up this part-time work helping some American PhD students, she didn't need the money and the stress and time wasted was too much.

How many more of these cases exist? We will never know.

Border Patrol Checking US Visitors' Phones, Social Media are a thing and it is quite large escalation over what was happening before. The claim that nothing changed is just not true.

> We don’t believe it is safe for everyone to travel to the US, particularly our trans and diverse colleagues

From the article. So, there are groups that are at more risk and those as less risk. And these people worry about at risk groups.

> The focus on that is really troubling. That, if you legitimately have a different passport than you were given at a young age, you could be detained.

So, despite you not believing it is an issue, per their claims, it is the fear.

In addition to America not being safe anymore, actually, the risk can be small for people to act on it. Americans are constantly scared of low probability events - think child kidnapping. Why would it be different for someone else?

I doubt you can get statistics on that… You may have heard stories about visa applications taking so long that the trip became pointless, e.g. granting visa for travel to a conference on the last day of the conference? That's a "yes" in the statistics, a granted application.

And often there isn't any data at all. I've been questioned by immigration for ten minutes a couple of times. No record was made as far as I could tell. I suspect that if a country wants to, people can be kept for quite a while without any record being made.

So if you want to know whether the US is moving from a top-25% position to something rather worse, I fear you might not be able to get enough reliable data for a comparison.

Thank you for that very logical and level-headed response.

Whenever I try to do this I usually get called out for being some kind of evil sympathizer. "Are you seriously defending <terrible thing>?!"

I guess even if one's response is as neutral as possible, people will still find a way to criticize you.

It's only the US people are particularly afraid of visiting.

More likely international events are just arranged outside the US. I've already seen that starting to happen.