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U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

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Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#191

Post by 8note »

vkou wrote: post #110
scarface74 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the next judge -appointed by the President —gets to decide and rubber stamps his decision. Depending on judges with lifetime appointments isn’t a good system. Why could this decision be made in the first place by non elected officials? Why didn’t such a drastic decision have to be passed via the legislative process?

> Why didn’t such a drastic decision have to be passed via the legislative process? The legislature can stop pretty much any form of bad executive overreach, by passing a bill. The problem is that (enough of) the legislature did not want to stop this.

Is the US set up such that the executive can do anything they want unless the legislative branch has put in restrictions?

I'm not that familiar with the structure of the US government, but I thought it was the opposite, and the executive has an approve list of powers rather than a deny list

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#192

Post by rdiddly »

Show of hands, who looks around today at the biggest challenges and problems we face, the ones that affect the greatest numbers of people the most perniciously, and that need swift & decisive solutions at almost any cost, and concludes that they're the ones having to do with foreign students being in the country taking online classes?

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#193

Post by iskander »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #133
LiquidSky wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was election year red meat for Trump's base, which his campaign has explicitly made their sole focus. It lets them tell the true believers that Trump tried to keep the evil foreigners out but the liberal deep state traitors stopped him, that's why they need to keep supporting Trump. That's what's behind all of these absurd attacks on immigrants, queer people, etc that instantly get struck down.

Yeah, in some ways this was the perfect outcome for that kind of posturing. Anecdotally, it seems to me that an actual drop in international student numbers would likely have hurt colleges in Republican-controlled states worse than Democrat-controlled ones. American students armed with student loans would still flock to top universities to make up for the international student shortfall, and I can't think of a top 10…

Setting aside blue states with moderate Republican governors, I see: 1/10 (Duke) 5/20 (Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice, Wash U) 15/45 (Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice, Wash U, Emory, Ann Arbor, Wake Forest, UVa, Georgia Tech, UNC-CH, UF, Case Western, College of William and Mary, Tulane)

I doubt the split would be at the top 10 because they're simply too small to absorb all the domestic demand. I'm not sure how far down the list, however, would be the switch point between benefit and harm (or if it would be determined purely by rankings vs. some other consideration).

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#194

Post by ponker »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #187
filoleg wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so obviously wrong. Source: I went to a public state school less than 10 years ago and I (along with many other students) received federal aid. 90% of the classes I took didn't require attendance, and the ones that did were mostly general studies courses for freshmen (like basic lab sciences or language classes). None of the major-related courses required attendance or had it as a component of the final grade…

You are so obviously wrong. Every single class I took had attendance taken. I went to university a few years ago. https://www.lssu.edu/financial-aid/retaining-aid-eligibility...

You are both wrong because you're making strongly absolutist claims. Why don't you both get it through your heads that different situations can be different.

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#195

Post by tropdrop »

WalterBright wrote: post #188
throwawaygh wrote: post #182

I'm not relieved. Or, only partially relieved. One of the core arguments was that the Feds can't pull funds for their stated purpose, which was to encourage/force schools to open ("The government has provided no reason for its abrupt and unexplained shift. That is unsurprising, since... its purpose—as expressed by Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli—is to 'encourage schools to reopen.' In esse…

The federal government did use the threat of withdrawal of highway funds to get all 50 states to lower the speed limit to 55.

Please cite what you're referencing next time - it was not clear from your comment on a current event if this is something that also happened recently, or in the last century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#196

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rdiddly wrote: post #192

Show of hands, who looks around today at the biggest challenges and problems we face, the ones that affect the greatest numbers of people the most perniciously, and that need swift & decisive solutions at almost any cost, and concludes that they're the ones having to do with foreign students being in the country taking online classes?

Narcissistic populist racists.

"It's not me, it's you."

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#197

Post by avs733 »

protastus wrote: post #97
atonse wrote: post #6

Excellent. The system worked this time. People challenged executive branch action through the judicial system and the executive branch backed down. But this should never have been an issue to begin with, think of all the unnecessary stress and anxiety this has caused for the hundreds of thousands of international students impacted by this.

The backup worked this time. This is akin to a safety system taking over and restoring stability, despite a major component failure. From the outside, things "worked" but backups are designed for extraordinary and rare circumstances, not for continuous use.

government by normalization of deviance?

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#198

Post by threeseed »

rdiddly wrote: post #192

Show of hands, who looks around today at the biggest challenges and problems we face, the ones that affect the greatest numbers of people the most perniciously, and that need swift & decisive solutions at almost any cost, and concludes that they're the ones having to do with foreign students being in the country taking online classes?

a) The government can do more than one thing at a time.

b) Given that so many startups were founded by immigrants who studied here I would consider it a pretty important issue to address.

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#199

Post by scarface74 »

8note wrote: post #191
vkou wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why didn’t such a drastic decision have to be passed via the legislative process? The legislature can stop pretty much any form of bad executive overreach, by passing a bill. The problem is that (enough of) the legislature did not want to stop this.

Is the US set up such that the executive can do anything they want unless the legislative branch has put in restrictions? I'm not that familiar with the structure of the US government, but I thought it was the opposite, and the executive has an approve list of powers rather than a deny list

There are laws and there are regulations. Laws are created by Congress and signed by the President.

Most of the time, laws are very vague and the specifics of the laws - the regulations - are written by government regulatory agencies. The president appoints heads of the regulatory agencies that are approved by the Senate (upper house).

Congress can pass a law that overrides a regulation or it can be struck down by court.

So the President by himself has limited power but he has a lot of influence over regulatory agencies based on who he appoints.

Re: U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

#200

Post by abvdasker »

tomp wrote: post #88
School-Cotton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the senate refuses to do its job It's not really the Senate's fault. Opposition parties almost never vote with government parties in any democratic legislature, so you shouldn't expect them to in the US. The real problem is the outdated system that is set up to (1) only allow two major parties to exist, so a European-style coalition government isn't possible, and (2) require both major parties to agree in order to…

Why outdated? Coronavirus stimulus pckage became law on 27th March in both the US and Germany (Europe’s model democracy). So it’s arguably a good thing, consensual things happen quickly, controversial things take a long time.

Look at the COVID-19 statistics in the US compared to almost every other country in the world and tell me that we have a functional federal government.
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