[IP] Another take on "Welcome to the U.S."
Let me assure you this is not a insignificant organization Dave
From:
Dave,
Please either delete my identifying information or just delete this email
as my organization could easily be identified and I have not discussed this
with other members of our Board
I am an officer of an academic organization which began as a U.S. based
group but is now very global. Only slightly more than half of our members
are from North American universities. The rest are in a very large number
of countries on every continent. In the past, we have tried to hold our
annual meeting in North America roughly two out of three years. Our
non-U.S. meetings have been held in a variety of European and Asian countries.
At this point, I am seriously concerned that holding meetings in the U.S.
would not be fair to our non-North American members and that if we did so,
we could end up with sharply reduced attendance. There are two issues. One
is the difficulty of getting visas to travel to the U.S.: it is all too
often a demeaning, time-consuming and very uncertain process. The second
is the treatment that our non-American members might receive at
immigration. I have heard stories similar to those posted on the list over
the last few days, and worse. I suspect all of us have. I will propose
that all of our upcoming North American meetings be held in Canadian cities
at our next Board meeting.
One of the great strengths of American universities has been our
international reach -- the fact that we attract the best students and
faculty from all over the world. Surely a way can be found to provide a
reasonable degree of protection against terrorism without severly
restricting cross-border flows of faculty and students. If I am right and
border controls now make it difficult to hold international academic
meetings in the U.S., we have a problem.
Let me add another issue. One of our Canadian graduate students was
fingerprinted and photographed at immigration when he returned from a
European trip.
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