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[Thank you Lucy Tweed for bringing this to my attention]
Talking to my friend the other day, she shared her concerns with me about the new ICE policy about international students in the US.
Let's say you are an international graduate student in a US university, currently stuck in the UK or any other country with a travel ban (e.g China amhhhm ahhhm).
Your Visa expires, say in three weeks.
No visas are issued by the US embassies at the moment.
However, you can't go back to US the because there is a travel ban.
Now comes the fun part:
As part of the pre-Corona F1 visa requirements, international students need to be physically on campus or in the US territory for a decent chunk of the year, not sure about numbers, but you can check and figure out yourselves. The US government made e temporary exemption on that because of pandemic crisis. Many of my friend and I'm sure, other international students left the US when the crisis started. BUT NOW, the new ICE policy rolled that exemption back and said that people have to physically attend classes.
The consequences, let me try and put it mathematically:
1) Grad students who are stuck and who cannot renew their visa might lose their eligibility to get a stipend and that is COMPLETELY legal with the older immigration law that was in place before the crisis started (!)
2) International students who haven't said so yet will say: "what's the point of going back? I'll look for an easier option in my home country".
3) Unis in the US are practically businesses.
International students == Revenue into the economy.
The US government is giving them nothing but they moved to the US, are paying taxes and tens of thousands of dollars yearly tuition (if not more).
The result: Unis are screwed == fascism is winning
Did I mention who ever thought about this step is brilliant?
Let me know if I'm missing something.