Re: [73attendees] Is USA qualified for 2.3ofdraft-palet-ietf-meeting-venue-selection-criteria?

On Nov 18, 2008, at 9:59 AM, qdang@nist.gov wrote:
> I believe our US government would like to grant visas to as many
> people as they can. However, if anyone wants to attend a meeting in
> the US is granted a visa to come here, then I can imagine there will
> be 100 million visa applications for the IETF meeting in CA next year
> alone.

A tourist visa isn't that useful, and the criteria for getting it are  
fairly restrictive.   The criteria should allow anybody who is  
traveling to the U.S. on business to get one, and ought to exclude  
people who don't have visible means of support and a reason to return  
(I am not making a value judgment here, since I actually don't agree  
with U.S. policy on this, but simply stating what I understand the  
policy to be).

However unfortunately we have had increasing problems with the U.S.  
government being skeptical about visa applicants - several good  
friends of mine have been repeatedly denied entry to the U.S. because  
the person responsible for admitting them decided that they were at  
risk of overstaying their visa.   This is new, in the last year, and  
is the case even though these same people have a track record of /not/  
overstaying their visas based on past visits.   We recently tried to  
get a Tao master from China to come teach for a week, and despite  
repeated attempts, accompanied with excellent documentation, we were  
unable to get him a visa.

I don't think we can safely assume that the new administration will  
fix this problem quickly, because I think it's the result of an  
attitude shift at the department of state.   Shifting the attitude  
back in the right direction may be difficult.

So I think that the people here who are expressing concern about the  
ability to get across the border are talking about a real problem that  
probably will persist for a while, and I think the proposed solution-- 
having IETF conferences in Canada in preference to the U.S.--is  
probably a good one.   There are other North American locations that  
might work as well - Mexico City, for example.

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