Breathtaking mendacity

From ONCE AGAIN, THE MEDIA IS LYING by David Bernstein. Getting really used to the mainstream media deliberately omitting news or falsely portraying news but this seems pretty egregious.

I saw that the Trump administration had issued new guidelines for foreign student's visa requirements barring student visas for students who would be taking only online classes. I am of multiple minds on that as a policy. On the one hand, foreign students on our shores learning our culture and taking back connections to their home countries is almost certainly beneficial to global trade, our global business and to the export of our Age of Enlightenment values.

On the other hand, foreign students are now a huge stopgap measure for universities as they lose revenue from a shrinking national demographic cohort and an eroding value for certificate equation.

On yet another hand, our university leaderships need a sharp wake-up call to steer them away from their repressive totalitarian, authoritarian direction and back to the founding principles of Classical Liberalism. A sharp reduction in revenue, possibly leading to the elimination of all the cesspits of Critical Theory and Social Justice religion such as Student Life, Administration, and Studies type courses, might be just the shock necessary to bring them back into reality.

What I did not question was whether the Trump rules were indeed new. Foolish me. You can't take anything as true from the mainstream media anymore. From Bernstein.

I’ve seen countless stories about ICE’s “new” student visa requirement barring student visas for students who would be taking only online classes. The idea that this is “new” is false. Foreign students are required to take a “full course of study” to fulfill visa requirements. The longstanding rule is that a study may take only one online class per semester as part of the full course of study. ICE *may* allow a student to take more than one online course, but any additional course must be taken in the physical presence of a university instructor. Here is the DHS webpage from 2012, in the Obama years:

An F-1 student may only count one online or distance education course without the physical oversight of a school employee (or the equivalent of three credits) toward a full-course of study per academic term. F-1 students may be eligible to take more than one online class to maintain their status as long as the class is physically proctored or monitored by a school employee.

ICE waived the rule for the Spring and Summer 2020 semesters due the Covid emergency. Given that Congress has now had four months to address the issue but has not, it’s not clear what the “emergency” would be that would allow ICE to ignore a binding regulation.

In any event, given that the regulation is clear that foreign students may not stay in the U.S. on student visas if they are taking online only classes, and given that universities knew they may have to go all online this Fall, why are so many university “leaders” acting like the government actually enforcing the rule once the immediate emergency has passed is a complete surprise?

That is breathtaking mendacity to present as new that which is longstanding law.

Either this was pure press-release journalism where they picked up their talking points from Universities and advocacy groups without ever examining the law and regulations they were reporting on.

Or they knew these were the existing regulations now being enforced once again well after the Covid-19 peak and they chose to deliberately misrepresent.

Seems hard to come up with a third explanation. Either outcome is bad but deliberate lying has to be the worse.