You have thousands of foreigners, a large portion of which might not be in the country, waiting to return to the US to continue their studies. Many of those countries don't even allow US travelers to arrive at this time. Everybody is urging for caution, but that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals preparing to arrive back here, with possible infections, is something an agency might be concerned about. So naturally, why not prevent this travel from happening in the first place with a policy like that?

Of course it's a heavy handed approach, but so are the lock-downs and closed schools. So we go to great length trying to prevent the spread, we close schools for over 4 month, and some don't even want schools open in the fall, but somehow an influx of half a million students is something nobody should be concerned about?

Those are valid discussions to be had. Assuming right away that this is a way to force universities to open is not a very genuine way of thinking. You cannot encourage full online classes for health reasons, and applaud that on Monday, and on Tuesday complain we don't allow students from all over the world to return just to sit in front of a computer.

Everybody is laser focused on these case numbers, and some states will close schools due to high case counts in the fall, impacting millions of families. If you support that, you should probably also support any measures possible to keep case counts low, including discouraging international travel.

No they wouldn't. I've held various (small scale) public facing offices before and this isn't how I would think.

Thinking of the consequences of your actions is a very important thing.

> If you make an exemption for people who are currently already in the country, what would that solve?

Decrease the damage done?

> So you have to craft such a "heavy handed" rule in such a way that it doesn't have loop holes that can be exploited. Don't think lawyers didn't review this exemption for weeks.

They probably didn't. We've seen this administration do bullshit orders before. This isn't a new one. Remember when they banned green card holders from coming to the US and there was chaos for 12-24 hours until they came and said whoops those are exempted?

> And my earlier points still stand.

Your wrong points do stand, yes.

> But understand where it comes from

I do. It's bullshit.

Isolationism and enforcing an extra set of standards on __others__ is always disgusting to me. Especially when we've been failing at every step of the way of this pandemic.

And again, we are negatively impacting the entire population with very draconian rules and lock downs. Heavy handedness all around. But somehow none essential foreign influx is just fine? They can come if they have to, clearly.

People are really measuring all this by two standards. If you think it's okay for citizens to be impacted by necessary lock downs, parents not working due to young children staying home, but foreign students are cozy in their home office?

> Do you have any sources for those students typically paying through their teeth?

Not at the moment. I encourage you to read up on where funding for US universities typically comes from. I also would encourage you to try to be empathetic towards an immigrant student in this country.

> We have a gravy train setup for higher education, with students paying full tuition, often displacing the local population.

This is conveniently `othering` framing. Displacing the local population? The ones whose jobs and livelihoods depend entirely on the college towns economy? I'm afraid you're picking and choosing facts and painting a narrative that either assuages your discomfort with what's happening, or worse, betrays a complete lack of empathy.

> If there is just one student saved from coming here, that would've caused an elementary school to go into a month long covid19 shutdown in September, then this by-the-book enforcement is worth it to me. I would never assume a University would adjust their attendance plans for a semester just for foreign students alone. That wouldn't be very rational, or would it be?

I'm sorry, it's hard to engage with this sort of reductive black and white thinking while the same administration still doesn't have a national mask mandate and is still planning to have the RNC convention in a place like Florida. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation, far more consistent with the administration's past actions on DACA, asylum seekers, and recently, skilled immigrant workers -- xenophobia. You really have to cherry pick a convoluted narrative to avoid seeing this.

I think you're being nakedly disingenuous considering your past comments such as this:

> For 2.5 month now we are always two weeks away from a catastrophe with mass graves and hospital parking lots full of dead people. And then two weeks pass and nothing really happens. Reality just doesn't seem to square up with the fearmongering.

And now, even if one person might have caused a chain event you want to shut out potentially close to a million kids looking to educate themselves?

In particular, to pressure those universities that have business models relying on foreign student tuition.

1. The health needs of students and professors, some part of them are vulnerable, plus the normal health considerations of covid-19

2. The learning needs of students, plenty may struggle to succeed in an entirely online world. It might be required by reality, but there will be new difficulties for people.

3. Financial needs of the school - they still have to pay for classrooms, office space, dorms, the campus, even if they aren't using it right then

4. Financial needs of the student - they might have financial aid from the school or other sources, how does it apply when the school is remote or unclear, what if things change, what do you pay, what does your scholarship cover?

5. And now immigration clarity. That student might need to be in the us for other reasons - if it's grad school, your relationship with your advisor used to be crucial. Now you'll never have a chance to see them in person. No one wants to be terrified of being deported for violating a rule or the govt confused about their status. The school might close down with little notice, what happens to that person who can't afford to fly back overseas?

All the research and industry in the US is shattered. Even if it isn't, the administration is making sure it won't be accessible to you.

Don't have a view a America with rose tinted eyes. The America of the past is gone, all vanished in the last 4 years.

At least some are. And this is nothing new.

When I went to college decades ago, I and a bunch of my friends got kicked out of our university at the end of the semester because it was over its legislatively-mandated limit for out-of-state students. The university had loaded up on lucrative international students in previous years, and when the ratio was changed, people like me got the heave-ho.

The problem is that we have to remove the greed from the university administrators. But good luck with that.

Not saying that these changes aren't horrible, they are, but I don't think getting home is impossible. Very difficult, in most cases yes.

Presumably, most students kicked out of the US would fly to their home countries where their status isn't "student".

> who thinks it's a great idea [...]

Most of Trump's voter base, sadly. Less immigrants in the U.S. is the only metric they care about.

Why do so few people actually charged with making this decision agree with you?

And US college is about a lot more than classes.

For F-1 students enrolled in classes for credit or classroom hours, no more than the equivalent of one class or three credits per session, term, semester, trimester, or quarter may be counted toward the full course of study requirement if the class is taken on-line or through distance education and does not require the student's physical attendance for classes, examination or other purposes integral to completion of the class. An on-line or distance education course is a course that is offered principally through the use of television, audio, or computer transmission including open broadcast, closed circuit, cable, microwave, or satellite, audio conferencing, or computer conferencing. If the F-1 student's course of study is in a language study program, no on-line or distance education classes may be considered to count toward a student's full course of study requirement.

1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/214.2

Define that how would wish to.

Now a good question is whether there will be unemployment among highly educated people with STEM degrees, who were in hot demand only a few weeks ago, and if not this is counterproductive. But every economic indicator seems to point at a major recession (beyond a technical recession during the lockdown). I would assume everyone will be impacted.

I don't think that's bad for any party - the US gets access to very smart and enterprising young people (and can grow the edu market), and those people get access to the US.

Making studying and converting F1=H1b->green card process harder is going to have significant drawbacks, such as

* shrinking edu market will itself negatively affect the economy. * Now that FAANG etc have seen that work-from-home can really work out, I expect ever more hiring outside of the US in the future. That doesn't mean that jobs will be opening up in the US. * Harder to find qualified people in the US. [Remaining US workers in STEM can anticipate ever higher wages?]

These drawbacks will take some time to materialize, so it's possible to use this argument (less immigration == more work) during campaigning and deal with the fallout later (or pawn it off to the democrats. Or silently walk back the rules after the election).

Maybe one good thing to come out of this change would be the need to press for domestic STEM education more and earlier.

There's ~375k Chinese students in the US. At one flight a week, it would take over 20 years for all to return home (to be fair, there's actually 4 flights a week I believe -- so merely 5 years). This is a de-facto blocking of citizens from returning.

And no, you can't just "wait" a month. As a sibling commenter noted, the best they could find were October tickets.