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Two Harvard students barred from entering country - even after court order

The Crimson reports two Iranian sisters, one headed to do mathematical work, the other to study philosophy, were barred from a flight from London on Sunday despite having visas. They were denied seats on three other flights as well. The two have a sister who is already in Cambridge, working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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Comments

These are not isolated incidents.

And their claim that "only 160 people were affected" is frightening in its complete disregard for reality.

Something needs to happen and quickly before our planets best and brightest decide to head to Toronto, Singapore, or GYNA.

Our intel agencies say Russia interfered, we have a self-proclaimed Leninist controlling our "president", and the soon to be heads of our most vital agencies will be led by people who have zero business being there (aside from Mattis).

Not sure about you guys but I don't think I can wait until Tax Day to take to the streets again.

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After the "Alternative Facts" comment, the only thing believable is that everything said at official press conferences is a lie.

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Not sure about you guys but I don't think I can wait until Tax Day to take to the streets again.

In other years, running the marathon ought to help take your mind off things. But this year, expect to see lots of Trump-related shirts and signs.

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Who knows if all of the qualified marathoners will be admitted to the US? For similar reasons, LA's 2024 Olympic bid chances are very shaky.

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...in the shit pit that this country has just become?

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Some citations please.

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There are additional protests happening before then. There's a pro-immigration rally at Somerville High this weekend, for example.

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is officially sponsored by the city and will take place from 10 am to noon in front of Somerville High School. In case of inclement weather, it will move inside the high school.

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So basically a DHS employee in London didn't get the memo?

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Whole agencies are refusing to comply with the judiciary's orders. It's pretty scary.

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The only changes made have been for Green Card holders, some special visa holders and dual citizens with some other countries like the UK.

Student visas are not exempt from the current travel ban.

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Though I am mistaken and the recent court order should have addressed this visa category as well. Seems there is some major government stonewalling going on.

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on a yearly basis of any country on earth. It is not 'anti-immigrant'. We do have problems with:

ILLEGAL immigrations (MILLIONS, and millions more would do anything to get here).

Insufficient vetting. I spoke a few months ago with an immigrant (legal) from Africa. His country is a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. I asked why didn't he try the UK, or even Canada; his answer: Once you get into the U.S., it's extremely unlikely you'll get kicked out, even if you're illegal. Euro countries, UK, even Canada are more strict.

The U.S. DOES NOT REQUIRE LARGE SCALE IMMIGRATION at the time and place we are now. We are not a developing nation, we are post-industrial, with anemic economic growth. Such massive levels of immigration, legal and especially illegal, depress wages, create a tight labor market making finding gainful employment very difficult for millions, and is a tremendous drain on our welfare state (entitlements).

Many also believe these problems only apply to low skill workers; untrue, white collar professionals are also hit hard, the most egregious example being the gross misuse of visas for skilled, even semi-skilled workers, and outsourcing by corporations jobs to foreigners, even often forcing American workers to train their foreign outsourced replacements prior to being fired.

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These are two women with visas - issued by the United States government - being refused entry.

But, sure, keeping five-year-olds from their mothers, even younger burn victims from hospitals that could save their lives, researchers and doctors, people who WORKED FOR THE UNITED STATES IN A WAR, is in the national interest. Yeppers.

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Should find their bootstraps...

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even if one were to agree with all of your points, these are reasons to restructure the processing of applications for legal immigration to this country, not reasons to ban all immigrants from 7 randomly picked Muslim-majority countries on a Friday afternoon without the approval of congress, the senate, or the judicial system.

There are a lot of things that could be improved with the immigration process. Specifically, we could make a better system for the laborers who come over the border with Mexico to do so in a legally and well-documented way. As it is, US companies rely on that labor and would crumble without it, but because there is no good system in place, the laborers themselves have to come over illegally and hope that they don't get caught, and they have no legal recourse to get healthcare through proper channels, so they put a huge strain on the emergency rooms, rather than getting preventive medicine early (also, incidentally, they pay taxes that go into our Welfare system without any way to draw benefits in the future, so I have to disagree with your idea that they're a drain on it). But the only fix to this issue Trump has proposed is to build a wall...that won't keep them out anyway.

The process to get a greencard is already extensive, thorough, expensive, and very long. You get vetted into the ground, even if you're from a predominantly white, predominantly Christian nation. If you come here from the Middle East post-9/11, it certainly isn't any easier.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things in our immigration policy that can be improved. But it's delicate work that requires a lot of sense, discussion, and forethought. And the people who are coming here to study science at our top universities are not the ones we need to worry about. They are the ones who will be creating jobs and improving American industry when they graduate.

Trump's policy is so misguided, so overreaching, and so unnecessary, and he did it in a way that made it so even the DHS didn't know what was going on--the agency specifically tasked with keeping our homeland safe.

It was stupid policy stupidly done with real and irreversible impacts on the lives of people who are here legally and on the US citizens who love them. And to pretend that it's valid because there are issues with our current immigration system is like saying that burning down your house is justified because you don't like the color of the drapes.

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Actually, immigration from Mexico to the US is down:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016/01/05/more-mexicans-leave-the-u...

(Someone should tell el Trumpo)

If the Republicans in Congress want to solve the illegal immigrant problem they should just tell their business friends to stop hiring illegal immigrants. It is not rocket science. No need for messy executive orders that harm many non illegal immigrant people and their families.

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Yes, it's a little easier to hide in plain sight in the US and that's partially because we don't have a national ID card. Those other countries also specifically go looking for people there illegally.

The US still does remove at least 250k people here illegally a year, but there is a huge cost.

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Can you imagine not being able to get to your sibling on the other side of the (expletive) ocean? I have a brother in London. The prospect of these non-criminals being barred from flights scares the hell out of me.

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Their lives are here - their beds, clothes, pets, bank accounts, etc are there. They have been vetted and given legal access to live here and trusted that. My parents moved here when I was a kid and I had a green card for years before being naturalized so I've had an FBI file on me since I was at least 16. I have been fingerprinted and photographed and investigated. If I'd been kept at the border with a legal green card because of racist edict, my life would be ruined. I would have been able to find shelter with friends with the clothes in my luggage but my job would be lost, I would be evicted, my belongings seized, my pets would die before I could get back (under the recent enforcement "rules") and that would only happen IF they didn't force me to permanently "voluntarily" relinquish my green card status, as they did to two TEENAGERS while denying them counsel before deporting them. Shameful!!

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These types of newsworthy events, where an executive branch department is blatantly defying a court order, despite assurances by the White House that it would follow all judicial orders, will continue to be buried in the deliberate chaos that is being organized to obscure such things. For example, if it were a normal presidency the most newsworthy item of inauguration day would have been a policy discussion of whether the executive order to rescind the mortgage fee reduction was necessary to protect the financial stability of the federal mortgage program. Instead the majority of the day was spent discussing crowd sizes and the wasteland of rusted-out factories.

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I feel so much safer! Thank you Herr Trump.

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Trump: This order will mean a lot less brown people can get into the country.
Pence: Fewer.
Trump: Shh, not in public yet

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The Missippi will run backwards, and wheat will stop growing in Kansas. And of course, dogs and cats will live together. Oh, the humanity!

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...is your point, Pepe?

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