I think grad schools should accept the best students for their programs. I think taking less qualified students because by random accident they were born in the country, instead of people who are actively choosing to spend their lives in this country, does not strengthen the country, it weakens it.
And I think that the costs imposed by suddenly yanking the rug out from under someone who has been here five years are unacceptably high, and that if we decided to go full racist xenophobes we should at least be racist xenophobes with some semblance of trustworthiness and integrity by making the ban one on evaluating or accepting future students, instead of stranding people who have already built lives here.
Doing it this way is not just horrible, it is demonstrating a willingness to be gratuitously horrible on a whim, and one of its consequences is that no one should ever again expect that the U.S. government will behave consistently or make it possible to make long-term plans that involve travel into or out of the country. And the cost imposed by that expectation is extraordinarily high. If you care about financial outlooks more than the lives of people stranded in foreign countries away from their newborn children (yes, I personally know of a case of that), you might care that lots of companies have frantically recalled departments of overseas workers lest they later not be able to return to the country, and that they’ve said research and development and their success as businesses will be damaged by the necessity of coping with an immigration system that is suddenly bucking wildly at the whims of an appallingly ignorant corrupt cronyist.
But mostly it’s just that if you think where people are born should decide what rights they have, then we’re fundamentally on a very different page about everything.
I expect that “this should have been handled a lot better” is something I’m going to be saying a lot in regards to even those Trump policies whose goals I basically agree with.
Well, that’s a big part of the reason I didn’t vote for Orange Capitalism Man even though I’m an unironic Nationalist. (I still haven’t got ‘round to writing that post on Nationalism.)
I do follow TUoC even though we are on different pages on a lot of things, because she is insightful and ideologically consistent, and would be willing to bear the burdens of her preferred policies rather than blanket denouncing everyone that opposes them as Xist.