Visa Casualties

For the Chicago 2005 machine learning summer school we are organizing, at least 5 international students can not come due to visa issues. There seem to be two aspects to visa issues:

1. Inefficiency. The system rejected the student simply by being incapable of even starting to evaluate their visa in less than 1 month of time.
2. Politics. Border controls became much tighter after the September 11 attack. Losing a big chunk of downtown of the largest city in a country will do that.

What I (and the students) learned is that (1) is a much larger problem than (2). Only 1 prospective student seems to have achieved an explicit visa rejection. Fixing problem (1) should be a no-brainer, because the lag time almost surely indicates overload, and overload on border controls should worry even people concerned with (2). The obvious fixes to overload are “spend more money” and “make the system more efficient”.

With respect to (2), (which is a more minor issue by the numbers) it is unclear that the political calculus was done right. There is an obvious demonstrated risk that letting the wrong people through border controls means large buildings can be destroyed. However there is a subtle risk in making acquiring a visa a more uncertain process: it contributes towards shifting science, (human) learning, and technology outside of the US. This shift is economically detrimental to the US. For some anecdotal evidence of this effect, note that this is the first machine learning summer school in the US but the 6th in the series. Less striking, but perhaps a surer measurement is to notice that many of the machine learning related summer conferences are in Europe this year.