Another take on "Welcome to the U.S."

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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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