Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

"Which hotel are you staying at?"

"Do you have an itinerary? Can I see it?"

"Why are you coming here?" (With a weird intonation of something like, why would anyone come here to vacation? It's so boring here!")

"What do you plan on doing while you're here?"

"Are you meeting anyone?"

"How do you plan to get back?"

Etc.

I think more often than not, the people asking probably don't even care about what your actual answer is, but want to see how you react to those questions, and if the answers make basic logical sense. I.e. "I'm vacationing for 2 weeks, but don't have a hotel.", or "I'm meeting friends and family at my vacation house, but I have never been here before."

A person might not remember the address of their hotel for example, but they'll be able to give a general description without freaking out, "It's a Hilton in Albany, I don't remember which." I would imagine that they're trying to distinguish between the natural nervousness that people have with interacting with border guards, vs people who are trying to do various illegal activities.

As a fun little sidenote:

I actually got tripped up by a guard one time because he asked a weirdly phrased question, "Is this your vehicle?" I took that to mean, "Is this vehicle stolen?", so I told him "Yes, it is mine." (...because I had paid to rent it). He asked why the plates didn't match my drivers license. I explained that it was a rental, and he got very angry and said, "Well I guess it isn't YOURS then, huh!?"

I didn't realize you could answer "Rental" to strictly Yes or No question! It was such a weird way of phrasing the question, because if I were to say, "No, this isn't my vehicle." the logical follow-up question would have been, "Why are you driving someone else's vehicle? Where are they? Why aren't they driving it!?"

We shouldn’t throw out something beneficial because it’s not perfect — and doing so has already drastically degraded our societies.

Edit:

Personal anecdote — smaller academic conferences being cheap means that you actually get a mix of people. Most of the cost is travel and lodging ($150 for a week conference ticket). So you get a few more corporate people at them than you’d expect.

You can argue it’s classist, and it is, but society will always have a class system (eg, check out Russia and China at any point in time) — our question should then be “what is the most egalitarian system of classes we can have?”

I would suggest you get that with two ideas:

- your class is the log of your net worth

- there are affordable tickets to the structures of cultural power, eg conferences

I know that soil ecology and human sociology aren’t identical, but it might be worth considering why we don’t want to till soil too often [1] and why people might therefore prefer systems where there’s some cultural continuity — even at the expense of perfect meritocracy.

[1] - https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-ti...

Logistically, it's a _lot_ harder for a person/team to organise a conference in a location they don't live in. There's logistics of venue, payments to vendors if you're organising food/travel/hotels, you might have volunteers for registration, information, etc. and it's easiest to find those in your local community. And finances across borders are anothe huge wrinkle.

It's not impossible, but certainly adds significant complexity.

The U.S. makes it extremely difficult to visit, routinely denying visas to all kinds of people with no explanation.

I should probably have made it clear that I'm talking about conferences without registration fees.