[nocitrek]

My stance is typically anti-immigration, but I do not support this decision of ICE. I am likely missing big chunk of the story, but could anyone explain the motives behind ICE decision? (without blind hateful virtue-signaling please)

[spanktheuser]

The Acting Deputy for Homeland Security admitted on CNN that they’re using the threat of losing international students’ immense tuition to force universities and colleges to fully open in the fall.

https://twitter.com/tcmassie/status/1280569206501789697?s=21

[chvid]

I tried searching for an interview where Ken Cuccinelli says this on CNN but couldn't find it.

However here is Ken Cuccinelli on Fox News Lou Dobbs just half a day ago where he lays out the thinking behind the policy change. Basically hire unemployed americans or let them study instead of the foreigners:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3WQAP0m8qc

[evgen]

Try DeVos fielding softballs from the TV-dinner trust fund baby:

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6170013564001#sp=show-clips

[lordleft]

I really do think this is a cynical ploy to induce universities to open up more aggressively than they would like. That is the only reasoning I can come up with.

[_jal]

Yes, it is a classic wedge. Try to force your opponents into an unpleasant choice, either of which is OK with you.

Have to hand it to the anti-freedom of movement/association folks - this was a fairly clever one.

[magicnubs]

What's the end game in this scenario? It feels like political suicide if it causes coronavirus deaths to spike even more before November, as people already don't care for how the administration has handled it. Although, since it's mostly young people, maybe cases would spike, but deaths wouldn't, making the virus seem less deadly. But maybe deaths are expected to spike either way, so better to both increase cases (with relatively fewer deaths making it seem less deadly, as mentioned above) and also spur the economy somewhat? Or maybe it's pure and simply just a way to energize the base by "scoring a point against the other team", as it is seen as bringing defiant liberal institutions to heel?

[magicnubs]

(continued as I accidently submitted my comment too early)

Or is it simply about making it seem like things have returned to normal? "See business are reopening, schools are reopening, the world is back to the way it was".

[121789]

I think there are many interpretations that are all probably a little true

Generous interpretation: if classes are primarily online, international students do not have a reason to reside in the US except for easier access to the labor market. With 20M Americans out of work, the administration is prioritizing citizens for first access to the labor market.

Skeptical interpretation: This is another anti-immigrant change that uses COVID as a scapegoat for racist/nativist policy.

I generally interpret most of the administration's moves as political gambles. Given current trends in deaths, they may be hoping that daily deaths are near zero with the country mostly opened back up by October. That seems like the only path to reelection given the current gap in approval ratings between the two candidates.

[kec]

F-1 students don't have access to the labor market outside of OPT which is limited and subject to government approval.

[lordleft]

I honestly don't know...it seems the majority of Americans are alive to the dangers of COVID and believe we aren't doing enough, and Trump's approval ratings are plummeting, so this doesn't make sense to me -- but his reaction doesn't have to be rational, it could be a desperate attempt to do exactly what you said, and cultivate the appearance of things being fine.

[pchristensen]

"the majority of Americans are alive to the dangers of COVID and believe we aren't doing enough"

Possibly a majority, but nowhere near all.

[UncleMeat]

Trump just believes in stuff. It doesn’t need to make sense. “It’ll go away by Easter”.

Trump probably believes that if we all just go back to normal that we will be fine and he will be a hero because that’s how his mind works. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense.

[NovemberWhiskey]

As someone who apparently has formed a stance on immigration issues, it comes as a surprise to me that you haven't noticed the continuous pattern of using executive power to restrict both legal and illegal immigration activity during this administration.

[nocitrek]

I have noticed it, do not worry. I would gladly migrate to US. I am from Europe, highly educated and believe I can contribute to the economy of US. I wish your immigration could be merit based - instead of green card lottery (silly concept). Give me ability to migrate to US for 2 years as probation period. After those 2 years had elapsed, determine if I am overall positive for the economy, did I commit any serious crimes, do I have permanent place to live, etc...; and based on that, let me stay permanently in the country, until I get citizenship.

[NovemberWhiskey]

>I wish your immigration could be merit based - instead of green card lottery (silly concept)

The diversity lottery is the smallest category of immigrant visas ('green card') issued. The largest is family-based, followed by employment-based.

[hef19898]

So, you are anti-immigration, as long as it doesn't affect you personally?

[ra7]

Or probably anti-immigration to their own country, but would “gladly migrate” to US if it were convenient.

[hef19898]

Sounds like it. And being frustrated because it is not as easy as hoped for.

[oknaj]

Sorry, should've clarified more. Anti-immigration in the current way it is implemented in US, compared to Canada / Australia, etc...

[oblio]

Hi there, I think you logged into your other account by mistake, oknaj aka nocitrek.

[screye]

I don't get it, so you would actually immigrate and think it can be done in win-win manner but are anti-immigration ?

[chrchang523]

I'm guessing that they are, like much of the public, primarily against unrestricted low-skill immigration. (edit: it appears that they also object to some skilled-immigration restrictions present in the US and not present in Canada/Australia/etc.; I can certainly sympathize with that as well.) Probably for the same reason that, if one had the skills to have a good chance of being hired at a top tech company, one would want those companies to maintain a high hiring bar even though that makes it more difficult for them to get hired: it greatly increases the chance that, if they do get in the door, it's actually worthwhile.

Note that all the other major British settler colonies (Canada, Australia, you could also count NZ) switched to race-blind points-based systems decades ago, and since then have provided at least as much per capita opportunity to foreigners as the US has with much less internal political strife. The US is the corrupted outlier.

[oblio]

The US immigration problems are just virtue of having huge borders, especially land borders, with developing countries.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand are all quite far away from developing countries and access is much harder and much more expensive. Australia, which is somewhat close to Indonesia has adopted some... unsavory methods to mitigate this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...

So it's not purely the points based immigration system that differentiates between the 2 situations.

[chrchang523]

Yes, like most other countries, Australia does a reasonable job of enforcing its immigration laws. As you note, Australia actually isn't so geographically isolated that this is a trivial problem; and just like other forms of high-stakes law enforcement, some implementation details look unpleasant, especially when one ignores the downsides of the alternatives.

But Australia is ultimately near the top when it comes to how much sustainable opportunity it offers per capita to foreigners (and nonwhite foreigners in particular, despite past "White Australia" history, if you care about that). It is reasonable to try to do better, but that's pretty much impossible for the US until the people can again trust the government to adequately enforce whatever laws are ultimately decided on.

(I think Canada is the country in the best position to try to do significantly better today. And not coincidentally, it is a country I plausibly may emigrate to if things unravel further in the US.)

[oknaj]

I would gladly immigrate, but not with the current state of things. I do not want to come to US with H1B1 (or equivalent visa) where my employer owns me - deciding my faith.

[pandaman]

If more people were like you and stopped playing pretend immigration while coming in on very restricted temporary visas it would be much better for everyone, and themselves the most.

Unfortunately, it seems to be a very contested political statement to recognize the temporary and restrictive nature of their status to the point that I honestly believe that a significant number of them are unaware of the fact that their visas do not grant them a permanent status and there is no [legal] way to become an immigrant by staying in the country for a certain time in a non-immigrant status. Their only real hope to become actual immigrants is to find an employer who will sponsor an EB immigration or marry a citizen/permanent resident. Or wait for an amnesty, last of which happened in 1986.

One can, however, get the same EB immigrant visa abroad and come to the country as an immigrant (a lawful permanent resident) with very few restrictions compared to a citizen and with a clear path to citizenship.

[NovemberWhiskey]

That's notionally true, but completely impracticable.

First, the current numbers. More than 80% of all EB status is achieved by adjustment, rather than application for visa overseas. Why is this?

In order to be issued an EB visa in most categories, the job for which the candidate is being hired must have labor certification (aka PERM). This is (at minimum) a six to nine month process, extending up to a year and half if there is an audit of the company's application.

This contrasts with the labor condition application (LCA) for H-1B which takes a couple of weeks.

After PERM is complete, the candidate would then enter the queue for available visas. Since applications are adjudicated in strict date order, and there is an annual limit in most categories, the backlogs can be long.

For example, the July 2020 visa bulletin indicates that, at best, applicants who started the PERM process for EB-3 visas before 01 APR 2019 can now begin the application process.

I say "at best" because the priority date for China mainland applications is 01 MAR 2017, and that for Indian applications is 01 FEB 2010!

[Aunche]

My charitable interpretation is that giving visas to online students is open to abuse. If you're an undocumented worker, you can pay a few thousand dollars to stay in the US legally. You'd still be working illegally, but that would be much more difficult to prove.

[andrewla]

This is a reversion to the previous practice of not allowing student visas if the student is not attending in-person classes. That rule was suspended back in March for COVID, but is now reinstated.

Presumably this was traditionally implemented to prevent fake schools from enrolling students strictly for the purpose of allowing them entry into the country on a student visa.

[UncleMeat]

The original policy is not unreasonable. The exception is extremely reasonable. Suddenly undoing the exception is so unreasonable that it can really only be read as malicious.

It would be so easy to write a policy that both prevents fake universities from existing to give visas while also not suddenly deporting hundreds of thousands of students.

[sheeshkebab]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-u-s-rules-on-foreign-studen...

If understand the rules have always been there (on limit for online classes)

[apcragg]

The rules have always been there, but as the filing mentions, ICE said in March that the rule would be suspended for the duration of the emergency. They are now going-back on that statement which given the timing of the announcement is causing chaos.

[UncleMeat]

Steven Miller doesn’t like immigrants.

The broader Trump administration doesn’t like universities, and especially doesn’t like universities that are taking covid seriously. They can use this as leverage to try to force universities to have in person classes.

This isn’t “blind hateful virtue-signalling”. It is the only reasonable explanation for a policy that provides no benefit to anybody, causes tremendous and sudden harm to legal immigrants, and causes tremendous and sudden harm to higher education institutions.

What actual benefit comes from this? The universities have still admitted the students. There isn’t more room for Americans, and if there was it is way too late.

The only thing I can see is that this messes with all of the students ability to get OPT visas, ensuring that they have a difficult time getting a job in the US after graduating even if they are highly skilled. But the h1b cap is filled every year anyway so this wouldn’t reduce the number of jobs “taken” by immigrants.

[devalgo]

>Steven Miller doesn’t like immigrants.

Sure he does, just not Brown ones. Trump has come out and said they want immigrants from places like Norway. Of course your average Norwegian would have to be insane to move to the US.

[jhpriestley]

it's weird, this administration has been almost vindictive against some groups, like non white asylum seekers, non white students, non white Puerto Ricans, non white athletes, and non white protesters, but it is very supportive of other groups like white protesters, white farmers, white business owners ... where is the common thread? It's a complete mystery and impossible to figure out.

[WillPostForFood]

>non white students

I didn't see the exemption for white students in this. Because there isn't one?

[hef19898]

It targets a group, foreign students, that is mostly non-white. I guess some colleteral amage is OK when it makes discrimination a little less obvious.

[Konnstann]

"White" people are a minority worldwide, any blanket foreign policy will disproportionately target non-white people.

[jhpriestley]

You're right, I think Trump had a real Kumbaya moment and renounced racism after the courts struck down his Muslim ban for targeting an ethnic or religious group. Ever since then his orders have only happened to consistently target minorities.

[WillPostForFood]

First, the courts upheld the travel ban:

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/394143-supreme-...

Second, the largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, and it wasn't on the travel ban list, so I wouldn't call it a Muslim ban. India has the second largest muslim population, and it wasn't on the list. Pakistan has the third largest Muslim population and wasn't on the list.

[gfodor]

It actually possible to figure it out. Explaining is assumed to be agreement in 2020, so you’ll have to go somewhere else to get the heuristics one can use to predict how Trump will bucket a specific group or individual. The inability to understand Trump will lead to his continued presence in politics, even after he leaves office. My intuition is that smart people who try to analyze him (eg Sam Harris) are so unwilling to try to ascribe anything other than cartoon-villain-like character traits to explain his behavior because doing so could somehow let them slip into having anything other than complete rejection of his entire being, which their morals disallow as an axiom.

[nine_zeros]

Let's call it what it is: Racism

[standardUser]

It would be extremely unusual for a federal agency to make such a radical decision independently. This almost certainly came from higher up.

[NovemberWhiskey]

No policy decisions on immigration matters in this administration are made without going through Stephen Miller.

[mhh__]

Political Extremism/Pandering.

[dathinab]

Just guessing, but the place most foreign students come from is China.

There have been multiple claims that China is using oversees students to steal knowledge or that University have become to dependent on the money from Chinese students and cooperations. Be aware that I'm just saying such claims did happen not that they are true.

The fact that many countries also doesn't want to open border to the US again for now might also play a role.

[somurzakov]

I think you got it backwards. Chinese students are not stealing the knowledge, they are creating the knowledge. They do research, the hard work and publish papers. A lot of them want to stay here, but anti-immigration policies leave them with no other choice other than go back to their home countries and work for CCP.

It almost looks like Trump is forcing top students to leave US and bring their knowledge back to China to benefit CCP.

[hef19898]

Works kind of imilar in Germany. Stay for your studies, which are basically free for everyone who enrolled at a university. Be forced to leave if earn under a certain threshold. That threshold was roughly double of my first salary right after graduation, and I was on the higher end of my semester. Having applied this threshold to my semester, we would have all been forced to leave. Kind of cracy, if you ask me.

[dathinab]

> I think you got it backwards. Chinese students are not stealing the knowledge [..]

No this are not thinks I believe. This are claims which came up one different articles in the recent year(s) on hackernews and are things you might hear from people which are strongly anti-foreigen students or people like Trump.