The Presidency Comes Home
Today, five days into Donald J Trump’s term, the president managed, with a stroke of a pen, to affect my research life.
I am co-chair of a track of CHI 2017, the Human Factors in Computer Interaction conference. It’s scheduled to be in Denver, in May of this year. Nearly 4000 researchers come to this annual conference from all over the world — it’s one of the biggest sponsored by ACM, and represents the full diversity of the field.
Like researchers from around the world, many of the attendees live in countries far from where they were raised: my graduate adviser was Scottish, and did not become a citizen during time at the school. At Microsoft Research, I work regularly with colleagues from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Last year, I interviewed a student finishing her PhD from Canada who was raised in Iran; several of our interns were from Iran and live overseas.
They won’t be able to attend CHI 2017.
Today, President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that says that it is “detrimental to the interests of the United States” to admit persons from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen. “ In response, American visa offices around the world have stopped issuing visas to people from those countries; people who are in the country have been warned not to leave, because their return might be imperiled.
Update, 3:30 pm: As a side-note, I don’t have a news story referring to the visa office policy. Merely to the self-report of one of those students, commenting on Facebook.
Update: The order was issued on Friday, January 27, 2017. Even permanent US residents were turned back at the border; visitors with visas were sent away; refugees were detained.
CHI 2017 will be in the United States, and so these students will not be able to come to to it. I’m hearing of one person who is arranging a workshop at the conference; she won’t be able to attend. Some people who submitted to the track I run will not be able to present their work.
There’s been some discussion of moving the conference out of the US. Of course, that means that people working in the US would worry about whether they could come back to their jobs.
I will be in a position of standing up before the conference and apologizing that some of our presenters were not allowed to be with us.
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This isn’t big and dramatic; and it’s not brutally oppressive. It’s not on a level as cutting off refugees, or scientific websites, or birth control. It’s not the same as appointing manifestly unqualified cabinet members, or making up false numbers. All things considered, I’m still likely to come out better then most will under a Trump administration.
But I can now say that President Donald J Trump has concretely and specifically and directly affected my life, in a way that another president would not have. My conference experience will be poorer; my scientific progress will be slowed, and an exciting research area has been damaged.
Update, 1/27/2017: Another researcher, Scott Aronson at the University of Texas, has a better written similar view.
