True, not much data yet, but a cery real day to day factor for conference organizers. We have had two Canadians skip a US conference last month due to the dramatical worse general climate. Zoom instead. This is NOT just about immigration and passport control. It is the new ugly American zeitgeist that changes enthusiasm.
We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
The 2nd, and supposed to be final, term of the current US President is scheduled to end on Jan 20th, 2029.
I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
60/40 feels very pessimistic to me (meaning I think the election is more than 60% likely to occur on Nov 7, 2028 and the results heeded more or less as usual).
In a different comment so people can vote on this idea independently: I am not a Trump supporter, but I have many Trump-supporting people I interact with on a level that I don’t think they’re lying to me.
Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it. I sincerely think screwing with the election terms or dates to prolong Trump’s term is likely to cause immediate and shocking support evaporation. Enough to embolden Congress to do stuff, and he won’t have enough control over any armed agency to do anything to Congress.
I think that a Trump who is trying to avoid prosecution for $crimes is much more likely to throw his weight behind a GOP candidate in early 2028. Vance or whoever. That’s his best chance to stay out of jail (for prosecutions political or legitimate, doesn’t matter). After a few solid months of propping up another GOP candidate, Trump’s base will be even less rabid about him specifically. He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
If Trump doesn’t support another candidate in 2028, then I’d start to worry. I just don’t see it happening - the game theory very obviously says he must support a not-him candidate by early 2028, and doing that will make it even harder to pull off shenanigans.
It's hard to believe that trump will run in 2028 at the age of 82. assuming he's alive then (not implying assassination but just rather natural causes)
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning.
Yeah because it didn't happen (yet). Standard Trump supporter maneuver. If you went back to 2019 and asked them if they'd support someone trying to overthrow the result of a presidential election, you'd get the same visceral negative reaction.
Yeah - I think there’s a very small core of people who genuinely think Trump will win a third term, and a slightly larger core of people who want him to. Then a much larger set of people who are engaging in some very unwise trolling.
I just think it’s telling that all the rabid Trump supporters I know aren’t there. Zero of them want to see him on the ballot a fourth time or otherwise pull shenanigans.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
They said the same thing on Jan 6, 2021. Trump supporters had a very negative visceral reaction to that day.
But on Jan 7, 2021 the propaganda machine started up again and minds began changing one by one. Today, the very people who were running for their lives on Jan 6 are in support of officially teaching in schools that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats -- the very lie that cause the violence of the day, that caused so many to say "I do not support this". Four years later they voted for it again.
So when I hear tales of a Trump voter who is against something Trump has done, I just remember that they voted for him again after he caused an insurrection against the United States in an attempt to illegally overthrow a free and fair election.
If a voter can find their way to excusing that, they will find their way to excusing a third term. Here's how: "Yeah it's not ideal, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a Democrat? They would be worse. We are choosing the lesser of two evils." Works every time.
Sorry neighbours, but it's not about Trump. Trump is one man. The Republican party is effectively captured by that one mans 77,302,580 supporters.
Changing leaders isn't enough to fix it. You all broke it, and until you re-establish norms for democracy, reinforce the checks and balances, and start holding criminals who hold office accountable, it's not going to get better.
He could serve a third term and probably will attempt to do so, the two term limit could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and Trump has a record for doing a lot of unprecedented things.
I think it might take more than a stroke of a pen -- it seems like the easiest legal way would be to bribe the House to elect Trump as Speaker, bribe a pair of Republicans to run and win in 2028 and then in 2029 have each of them resign, promoting Trump back in to office.
The bribing might be costly but people are more than willing to buy Trump's merch.
If such a candidate presents himself then s/he would win. You have pretty much nailed the reason why Trump won. Everyone saw him as the second least competent presidential candidate. Bad leadership is a real problem and it has created a vacuum which Trump has roared in to exploit.
But there's a more fundamental problem, where neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections. Your system needs a bit of a reset. The Democrats have to return to their roots, and the Republicans have to get over the Cult of Trump. But i'm hopeful in time these two problems will resolve themselves in time and not mutually reinforce each other. Trumps Republican Party has a hard expiration date, and the Democrats will eventually have to listen to their voters if they want to win elections.
I ve heard about these problems for many years. In particular, many indian phd students were reluctant to travel to European conferences for fear that there might be complications when returning back to America. The unreliable current administration must have turbocharged these fears
This is bound to happen for a lot of other events besides scientific conferences. I know of a guy that wouldn't go to a retrogaming convention for fears of being detained at the border.
Its not just like you get refused entry and get sent on a return flight, there is risk of incarceration, rummaging through your digital life etc. It could be very disruptive and negative.
The risk of being turned away at the border always existed.
Yes it’s drastically increased now, but that’s a quantitative change which will have a quantitative effect.
What we are seeing now is a qualitative change in traveling behavior and that’s reflecting the qualitative change in the severity of punishment that may occur if there is a problem while trying to enter.
Yes, I run tech conferences and international attendance is dropping rapidly this year (we're shifting to aggressive local marketing, but it's still sad.)
My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.
They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.
So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.
Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
What you need to keep in mind is once enough frogs are boiling things get worse fast.
No logical breakdown from an armchair is going stop parents with hungry kids.
This is the failing to read the room part I mentioned. Our biology is composed of biology not philosophy. It is self selecting. It’s biological imperative is select self.
Ok good you got some sort of Excel sheet breakdown. That’s just words.
This is what I’m talking about; American public is so dissociated due to economics that straight up ignores externalities. 8 billion people are the externality and it’s going to be hard for 300 million to ignore them and live in their narcissistic bubble much longer. Third world countries have rebuilt and don’t see the specialness in Murica or the point in sewing their shirts if they’re going to be so low affect.
Americans have to change not because of some philosophical position but because of physical reality not really caring about the excuses of 300 million; only half of which is cogent, and half of that actually intelligent. It’s not looking good, Bob.
It's important to understand that this has always been the case at any point in history where widespread protests affected change. And that people have won demands in situations with much worse oppression.
The reality is that it's not that hard. It requires learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone, lowering your expectations a bit and not expecting to do one thing and be done. This is how protest movements have always been.
Find something that aligns with one of your values and show up. Learn about more actions, join a chat group or calendar, and find what you can go to. Do not expect there to be one massive action that everyone shows up to first time. Do not burn yourself out.
Humans are social. Just showing up on the street reminds people that things aren't OK and there is something to protest about. Over time this builds people's consciousness and more people practice taking collective action.
Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?
Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.
We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.
Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.
Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content
> Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt.
Presumably they're working there because it's the least-bad option? If so, removing it so they have to go with the next-least-bad option might not be much of a help.
Yeah the usual uncreative answer “copy paste the Newspeak”
This answer is a euphemism for “don’t rock my boat.” Because if they ain’t sewing your shirts, you are. Your freedom from such is due to blowing Vietnam (and elsewhere) to a crater, fostering existing conditions. Not exactly informed consent.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy this analysis. They lived being oppressed by US military. They see Americans as the Taliban, not a great white hope Americans have been propagandized to see themselves as.
Ah yes, a sanctimonious tech bro reducing everything to a Twitter size sound bite.
We know; you’re scared of change because you have seen your lived experience and know you cannot grow a potato.
But you’re just a meat suit and your personal story and literacy aren’t anyone else’s concern. And that’s under the political norm. You prefer no guarantee of healthcare.
Fine, have it your way. Under the American norms I hereby give zero fucks your meat suit exists.
Fortunately for me I have generational wealth thanks to the building and auto booms in the US, and EE degrees. SWEs exist so long as open compute platforms exist and there’s no guarantee governments around the world will forever allow that.
Should you find yourself shut out of employment opportunities, thoughts n prayers.
I went to a protest. I was anxious about being photographed and added to some biometric database to be used for who knows what purposes. My wife and I had a serious discussion about whether to go, the possible risks, the possibility of violence, but I ultimately convinced her to go as our civic responsibility. I left our phones at home as a precaution so as to avoid being geolocated to the site.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
are you ready to die for the principles of your country? if not, then there is no point. things are bad, but they have been way worse in the past (remember, we had legislators getting caned on the floor of congress, citizens locked up en masse without trial, everyone's bank accounts confiscated and held for weeks, biological experiments run on minorities, and underage citizens assassinated by drones). in the face of the injustices that the administration is going to commit, you should have ready for yourself the answer to two questions:
1. given a sober, nonpartisan review of past history, how far is too far for this administration?
2. what are you willing to do to stop it, how much are you willing to sacrifice.
i suspect that nothing the administration has done to date really clears the first bar. be prepared for the day it will, save your energy till then.
There are various activist movements, groups, interests, communities.
You have to find your people. It can take a while. Change takes time, big social movements were decades into the making in the fringe before they reached the mainstream consciousness.
> I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take.
Get involved with your preferred local political party. Push for policy preferences that won't drive turnout for the opposing party and won't give that party a chance to nominate a clown and then still win.
Honestly it sounds like you just want to give yourself an excuse to stop engaging. This reads like "I ate a salad once and I didn't like it, so I'm done with vegetables entirely, it's hopeless". Then the rest is you complaining that other people are unserious?
Going to protests is usually not much fun. There are all kinds of people there that you might not feel much in common with. People will make signs that focus on things you don't care about. This is normal! Protests can also easily burn a person out, so people try to have fun if they can because it's important to sustain pressure. The fact that someone dresses up, has a joke on their sign, meets a friend and smiles, or takes a selfie is not an indictment of the person or their protest.
Resist the urge to wallow in contempt for those people, particularly when you haven't done anything that has been effective.
Yes your brief firm comment surely establishes truth.
They see weekend warriors focused on their paychecks.
They don’t see coast to coast collective pushback for long term stability. Sure, America is big and pockets of tribal thought.
And so it’s unreliable. A hodge podge of asocial cults flip flopping around the rules every 2-4 years because of its distributed, async social nature, does not make a reliable ally.
Americans are doing stuff. I call my reps and their vms are full. I go to their offices and there are lots of other people there. There's been protests at state capitals, Bernie & AOC have been giving speeches and zoom meetings about organizing and canvasing. Lawyers are suing and judges are trying to use the system despite the supreme court gone mad. It's tough to get a big group photo, but people are doing stuff. I'm as angry and jaded as anybody, but I dislike this defeated "nobody is doing enough so fuck it" thing I keep seeing. It's laying the groundwork a self fulfilling prophecy.
I'm a Canadian who moved to the SF bay area after graduating. A lot of my smartest friends who came with me at the same time are actively taking steps to move back due to the political environment.
It’s fascinating that people still see these things as new or unique to our current administration. This has been an issue for decades that were often ignored or minimized because it only affected smaller more marginalized groups of people. For example conferences involving HIV/AIDS had to contend with these issues for decades due to the blanket ban on HIV+ individuals from entering the country, even for a scientific conference. Often the conferences would continue leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
You know how if you pile lots of flammable things in the corner of your garage and it's fine for years, and then a toddler strolls through with a book of matches, then suddenly you get a new and unique fire?
The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
> leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?
If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
Has anyone done the legwork to demonstrate the degree? The linked article is lists around 6 conferences. Which is not a huge number, in the grand scheme of things, given how anti-Trump the US academy seems to be. More than 5, less than 10 and I assume conferences move around fairly regularly.
It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).
It's far too early to say. You can't move a conference to a different country on a short notice. You can only hold it with whatever audience you can get, postpone it, or cancel it. For larger events, it's already too late to move events scheduled for 2026, and possibly even for 2027. Maybe there will be some data in a couple of years, but until then, anecdotes and informed guesses are the best you can have.
this is on a much larger scale and supported by ~40% of the USA who think Trump can do no wrong, and agree with his racism and unconstitutional imprisonment of brown people who are here to just visit or get an education. Basically now if you're not white, you are a suspect if you are coming/going internationally. I'm pretty sure some heroic person will eventually whistleblow a tape recording/email/memo that cites this as the new operating norm for the current regime.
This, Harvard, WHO, NIH, and NSF changes create that sucking sound you hear, a brain drain, and people deciding not to go to the US or to leave. Such myopic stupidity in the White House weakening America's power and reputation.
Isn't there a history of security researchers and open source programmers being detained or threatened when visiting the US? So the same thing is being done to the US's domestic researchers as well now?
They have one example of a meeting moved. The other one is going to Canada, but most attendees are Canadian students (hmmm), the other one is cancelled because of funding cuts (that's not a fear of coming to the US),
As a scientist, a lot of these conferences are nothing but rackets. Organizers can make a lot of money from them if they can get enough attendees. I've been approached by multiple conference organizers and when you start to look it's clearly a joke (same with many journals).
I'd also wonder how many of these conferences were teetering to start with (look how many happened ever 3 years, a good sign they can't get critical mass).
Yes agreed. So much ridiculous hyperbole in this thread that says way more about the political affiliation of the commenter, than it does about any real or imagined threat.
But the interpretation of how to enforce them certainly has changed with this administration, that much is undeniable? I don’t remember prior admins kicking out all foreign Harvard students or sending masked plainclothes ice agents to arrest US citizens protesting outside detention facilities?
This isn’t just my opinion - this administration is actively defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision finding it acted unlawfully, and ordering Noem to return around Mr Garcia no later than April 7th. To say that because “the laws haven’t changed” that it’s all a media invention is crazy to me.
I mean many laws especially regarding the border were simply abandoned under the previous admin. It was basically an open border. So yes we've returned to the norm. That's not a bad thing. If anything it makes people visiting the US safer.
If I grant you that, then at the very least we both agree _something_ has changed then and it isn’t just the media.
But I don’t think it’s just that- what do you have to say about Noem v Garcia then, where the Supreme Court ruled this administration was not following the law?
Can you explain this perspective? I consider an open boarder to be something similar to what we have between states. I can go to New Jersey, and back again to New York, and no one asks any questions, no one checks my papers, I don't need a visa or a reason to be in NJ, and I don't need to declare anything I bought in NJ to NY customs.
By contrast, the US boarder under Biden was enforced with millions of deportations, expulsions, and legal processing. While it's true more migrants were allowed in under parole and asylum programs, and some Trump-era restrictions were lifted, the US-Mexico boarder did not resemble the open NY-NJ boarder.
So given the the checkpoints, border patrol agents, deportations, surveillance systems, legal entry requirements, physical barriers, detention facilities, visa controls, asylum processing, and international boarder agreements, I can't see how it was "basically open".
A friend's relative was detained at the border and had their phone searched on political grounds. There are multiple videos of people being whisked away by masked police and government. Not to mention all the other screws that have been turned on academia that I've heard in countless stories from people in my circle.
The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
It’s really amazing how ignorant people can be despite the evidence. No laws needed to change for the risk of abuse by the border authority to go up. Tell me about your opinions on civil asset forfeiture.
> There is no risk for people visiting the US and not doing criminal behavior.
There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies. The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners. They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
How many examples do you need? Mahmoud Khalil remains jailed in perpetuity without charge. In any reasonable world that should be enough. We can keep going.
(Just to head this off: I know you're going to say he's a criminal. That's how the scam works. But if the government could show he's a criminal they'd charge him with a crime. They don't want to, they just want to jail him, LITERALLY because they don't like what he was saying.)
What would help me get an accurate picture is how many conferences are typically held per month in the US and how has that number changed but instead we get fluff like:
"Some meetings have been put on hold" - which meetings?
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere" - Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
"Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance." - Which organizers?
EDIT2: there are some specific anecdotal examples towards the bottom of the paywalled article. This is still not meeting what I would consider accurate non-opinionated reporting.
Would you mind explaining where in the article the author gives an opinion, as opposed to stating uncontested facts that would be newsworthy to scientists?
Or would you mind sharing a snippet that expressed any political belief of the authors?
I could not find either
As for your specific questions, they are answered even in the paywalled version. Just keep reading past the first sentence
So no acknowledgement of the fact that your questions are answered even before the paywall? The conferences (and organizers thereof) listed also include International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), the International Conference on Comparative Cognition, and then the article goes on to add
"The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”. The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032. The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year. “
Your argument that there is an agenda is not compelling.
Yes there are a couple of examples closer to the bottom. I admit to getting stuck in the fluff.
FWIW e.g. the IACBT conference was cancelled more than 2 months ago. 2026 Cities on Volcanoes (COV13) was cancelled almost 3 months ago. Having that information would also have been helpful.
EDIT: I misread the cancellation date of the COV event, it was last month and not 3 months ago. I still want to know and it wasn't mentioned.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for more data to see if something makes me change my mind. I looked at how many conferences are happening in the US. I looked at the agenda to see how many foreign speakers participated. I tried to use AI to help me spot trends.
So far I'm still ok with my initial judgement that the story serves an agenda and is not real news. Or if it's news then it's low quality/poor journalistic excuse for news. Real news should give the facts, it should give the relevant background, it should do so in a way that attempts to be as unbiased as possible, not push a view point, and it should provide enough information that intelligent readers can make up their minds based on evidence. The opposite of news is coming in with an agenda or a thesis and then cherry picking things to support your viewpoint while not providing any information that can serve to falsify your viewpoint.
Maybe if I saw the article in its entirety I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. It seems the journal has an editorial position/agenda here and is seeking to drive that forward. The journal has run many "news" articles on these topics which this article prominently links to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00859-w "‘Anxiety is palpable’: detention of researchers at US border spurs travel worries" (also worth noting that afaik those "detentions" didn't happen, people were refused entry)
This also doesn't mean that the assertion is false. I don't have enough data to say one way or the other. It is possible that many people are worried to travel to the US. Maybe they're Nature readers. So it is possible that many conferences are cancelled and moved and that is significant. But this is still a political opinion piece and not a news story.
> From the article would you say the author is a supporter of US Republicans and Trump or not?
Having a stance is not disqualifying, or else there wouldn't be anyone left to do journalism. "Agenda" has uselessly become code for "I don't like what I'm reading."
Analysis has always been a part of journalism, that's not a new or subtle point, nothing is new about this, I don't understand where this sentiment would come from other than being offended by the words you're seeing.
Everyone has some sort of stance. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is masquerading as "news" while pushing your world view. Creating a narrative and manipulating the reader's emotion is not reporting news. If you have a position as a journalist the honest thing is also to disclose that position.
News should be objective or as objective as possible. This is what happened. Report on that. This article could have been rewritten along those lines/principles:
- Report/lead with what actually happened. (these conferences/these dates/information about the conferences/their decisions)
- You can interview the organizers and quote them.
- Ideally you give a broader context (e.g. yearly we have 10k meetings/conferences and these 4 have been cancelled) even if it doesn't support your narrative because that's what an educated reader needs to have to be able to form their own opionions.
An analysis is not "news". If you're analyzing some trends then make clear that's what you're doing. An opinion is also not news.
NOWCAM 2025 meeting was held in Victoria, BC, Canada, from May 8–10 on the UVic campus. I can't even find a reference to it being moved. I mean maybe it was.
Years ago, I would have found this deeply dismaying. Today, I still see it as a negative development, but far less so, because my regard for the sciences has declined with the growing ideological capture of many disciplines. It’s become typical for political narratives to take center stage at scientific conferences. For example:
There seems to be more fear mongering than reality here. Why would a scientist coming to the US for a conference be picked up and sent to El Salvador (or some such)? Do they really believe these things are happening to everyone? Are they spending too much time on Reddit instead of doing research?
I think a more common legit fear is paying for flights, accommodation, conference etc then getting turned back (maybe after a short detention) because of some social media post in your past or your name was on some misidentified "woke" science.
Its not fear mongering to acknowledge that this administration is anti-science, or at least less pro-science than previous administrations. Hundreds of grants are frozen due to the Harvard shenanigans - its not just Harvard, as many grants flow through there on their way to other universities.
Are the chances of getting deported high? No of course not, but America is certainly not rolling out the red carpet for international scientists right now.
There were a few other stories that made the news like a British citizen that was prevented entry to Canada and then arrested trying to return to the US (who wanted to work illegally in Canada but admittedly treated very badly by the Americans).
"Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security."
"Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled:
4.541 million in March 2025, down 9.7 percent compared to March 2024.
This represents 87.3 percent of pre-pandemic March 2019 volume."
It's true that there is real confusion and fear. I have coworkers (I work for a large US company with offices all over the world) that share worries. This includes people with green cards, other working visas, and foreign visitors. There's plenty of travel and zero issues. People are worried is true.
In Canada there we also have a lot of people with strong feelings/emotional response to Trump's 51st state nonsense and tariffs. There is a real feeling of betrayal. There are practically zero issues with Canadians traveling to the US.
"In March, Canadian residents returned from 2.7 million trips to the United States, representing a 24.0% decrease from March 2024 and accounting for 63.9% of all trips taken by Canadian residents in March 2025.
Meanwhile, US residents took 1.2 million trips to Canada in March, down 6.6% from March 2024 and representing 81.3% of all non-resident trips to Canada in March 2025. "
Basically the worries are real, fueled to a large extent by these sorts of articles, and in my opinion politically motivated (and I don't like Trump either) but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
> Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security.
I'm sure the CBP would never dare to lie about such things in a way that potentially puts their egomaniacal boss in a more favorable light than he deserves.
In these sorts of situations you need to consider what is the more likely reality based on whatever limited data you have.
A few things to consider:
- Organizations take a while to change. Is it more likely that the CBP is operating more or less as it has been or that it had some dramatic changes?
- Searching phones takes time and effort. To scale up this in a significant way while still supporting similar amount of traffic would require more people? extended waiting times?
- Do you know people who travel to the US? Have they had their electronic devices searched? Have we seen a surge of stories about electronic devices being searched? The numbers they claim are less than ~450 a month (0.01% * 4.5M). Do we have evidence to suggest the scale is significantly different?
- The CBP could simply have said nothing. What would be their reason for explicitly addressing this question? If it's a lie wouldn't they be concerned e.g. with needing to deal with this down the line? Do you think Trump reads these reports and rewards some person in the CBP for this? Feels very unlikely.
- CBP is a huge org. 65k people or so. If there was some major change or lie then presumably it'd leak somehow?
Half of politics can be explained by framing it around the idea that for a sizable chunk of the population the last 50 years have inflicted a wound to status. The civil rights era changes, demographic changes, and the consequences of the Triffin dilemma leave a large group of people with the living memory that they had more status in the past than they do now.
The natural urge to find a cause results in externalizing blame, elites being one targeted group. It makes sense that lashing out at them is an attempt to heal the status wound, even though the chance that this succeeds is zero.
Mate, not everything in the world is some 4D chess conspiracy. I think it's more likely they just don't want to get send to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador tbh.
If I'm reading the user right, and I'm not positive I am, they're more framing the people who support the administration's (reprehensible) agenda as being on a revenge kick for losing a small amount of their original privileged status.
I think it's a fine argument to make, and I'd even agree -- it's just put really obliquely.
You read it correctly. In an attempt to appear less partisan, I made the writing too oblique. My apologies.
A revised version would read:
Over the past half-century, shaped by civil-rights gains, demographic shifts, and the dollar’s reserve-currency burdens, one once-dominant segment of the population has felt its social standing erode. Its members still remember when the political, social, and economic order tilted decisively in their favor.
Politics now orbits the "status wound" this group carries. To soothe it, they cast blame outward, at elites, newcomers, or any symbol of the new order. Each target offers momentary relief, but none can restore what was lost.
These status-injured people don't realize that status isn't a zero sum game. You can give people who have previously been discriminated against civil rights and it doesn't take status away from the previous in-group.
He's not referring to the scientists. He's referring to a large subset of supporters of the present administration, stereotypically lower middle class white men. They have seen other groups (women, black people, Hispanics, gay people, etc) gaining rights over the last half century or so, while they are no better off and often worse off.
This group also has a grievance against scientists, whom they see as complicit because of their campaign against climate change, among other things.
The present administration is heavily weighted towards supporting the backlash from this group. This weighs heavily on scientists, and is seen as a win for the former group.
The parent is saying the status wound is being experienced by those doing the firing and detaining.
Another way to state this is that those in power today are out for revenge because they feel as though the past ~50 years has been punishing to them. So they are lashing out against those who’ve gained in that period of time. Science and intellectualism in general is one of those gains.
This doesn't really work when you're trafficking in "explanations" about how Group A thinks invented by Group B for the purpose of delegitimizing Group A's disagreements with them.
Though just to be very clear here, at every step of the way this group has voted for and voraciously supported the very same elites that have been pushing hardest on the accelerator pedal for some of their problems. The Dollar's status as a reserve currency was not itself a burden. The problem was caused by the Republican Party's continually trumpeted fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the surplus was still centralized (monetary inflation), but the proceeds were handed to Wall Street to bid up asset bubbles instead of being spent on policies that would have helped Main Street.
You’re displaying a form of racism by portraying this as about “lost status” rather than the decreasing material well-being of the public and the collapse of technocratic systems benefitting people in a regime of inflated credentials.
Your theory doesn’t explain, eg, why Trump is more popular than a typical Republican with minorities. Nor does it explain Obama voters who switched to Trump.
While you dressed up the language, you’re still just calling others “istaphobes” to avoid contending with real class issues — and making an ad hominem argument rather than contending with their legitimate disagreement.
Obama voters who switched to Trump are not a portion worth talking about. They are in the same vein as talking about no votes for genocide hardcore Palestinian supporters who sat out or people dating immigrants that had their partners deported. Interesting news stories that are nothing more than a distraction from the huge percentage of people that voted fully unconflicted and knew exactly what they wanted.
When you see those black and white photos of people hanging black people, or read stories about kids putting glass in the food and chairs of children going to an integrated school, so many of those people are still alive.
Trump was in his second year of college when the civil rights act passed and it was official policy black people were supposed to be treated like people. The civil rights act passing wasn't some official decree where the whole of the US respected that.
Most scientists are rational people. If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem. There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
> A rational person would totally be fine with a non-zero chance of being sent to an El Salvadorean torture camp for the rest of their lives with no due process even when directly ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States... the chance of it happening to you is probably pretty low (though of course we actually don't have a good way to know since people are being whisked away without even chances to contact their lawyers)!
It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
> If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem.
Sure, they SHOULD never have a problem. But, increasingly under Trump, they MIGHT have a problem despite this, especially if they are not white and/or come from a country that Trump is currently feuding with, and/or have publicly spoken out against Trump, Netanyahu, or their allies. One shouldn't base any serious decision on how things SHOULD be.
What you should be asking is; what would happen if I illegally immigrated to some country other than the US, where they have no guarantee of due process?
I’m confused by what point you’re trying to make because it isn’t relevant to the article.
It is possible to address illegal immigration in a manner that doesn’t deter those visiting who will very likely return. Unfortunately whether it is the result of agency-wide policy changes or a few rogue officers, there’s certainly some new anxiety up for those wanting to travel here.
I think the point was that, if there is a problem, you don't currently have a guarantee of even a minimal due process, as a foreigner at the US border.
True, not much data yet, but a cery real day to day factor for conference organizers. We have had two Canadians skip a US conference last month due to the dramatical worse general climate. Zoom instead. This is NOT just about immigration and passport control. It is the new ugly American zeitgeist that changes enthusiasm.
We will probably be skipping the US for two international conferences I have helped organize. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax are all great alternatives for larger meetings from 2027 ti 20??.
The 2nd, and supposed to be final, term of the current US President is scheduled to end on Jan 20th, 2029.
I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
I know I'm asking a LOT. However that's one of, if not the most, important jobs in the world. We all deserve to have someone at least that qualified there.
The genie is out of the bottle, the die is cast, etc. We’re not going back to what was before.
I’d only put 60/40 odds on the 2028 election not being temporarily suspended due to a state of emergency.
This country survived Roosevelt. Nothing ever happens.
60/40 feels very pessimistic to me (meaning I think the election is more than 60% likely to occur on Nov 7, 2028 and the results heeded more or less as usual).
If you think 60/40 is the right odds, you have some opportunities available - to make fake dollars, at least: https://manifold.markets/AndrewG/will-donald-trump-attempt-t...
I bet you could find more than a few people here to take the other side of 60/40 odds in a $100 bet.
We already had a coup attempt in 2020.
Do you think the current VP has the integrity of VP Pence?
*2021
In a different comment so people can vote on this idea independently: I am not a Trump supporter, but I have many Trump-supporting people I interact with on a level that I don’t think they’re lying to me.
Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning. This is not a “I wouldn’t vote for a felon/rapist/whatever” type of red line that falls apart when you question it - they are universally against it. I sincerely think screwing with the election terms or dates to prolong Trump’s term is likely to cause immediate and shocking support evaporation. Enough to embolden Congress to do stuff, and he won’t have enough control over any armed agency to do anything to Congress.
I think that a Trump who is trying to avoid prosecution for $crimes is much more likely to throw his weight behind a GOP candidate in early 2028. Vance or whoever. That’s his best chance to stay out of jail (for prosecutions political or legitimate, doesn’t matter). After a few solid months of propping up another GOP candidate, Trump’s base will be even less rabid about him specifically. He’s going to be old news in late 2028.
If Trump doesn’t support another candidate in 2028, then I’d start to worry. I just don’t see it happening - the game theory very obviously says he must support a not-him candidate by early 2028, and doing that will make it even harder to pull off shenanigans.
It's hard to believe that trump will run in 2028 at the age of 82. assuming he's alive then (not implying assassination but just rather natural causes)
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term. It’s stunning.
Yeah because it didn't happen (yet). Standard Trump supporter maneuver. If you went back to 2019 and asked them if they'd support someone trying to overthrow the result of a presidential election, you'd get the same visceral negative reaction.
Once it happens, they find reasons why it's okay.
A lot of Trump supporters, when questioned in a general context, are very against a LOT of the things Trump has done or is doing.
Then Trump does them, and when questioned about that, they shrug it off.
let's not forget he also doesn't do a lot of things he says that are highly problematic, like invading greenland.
thats not excusing trump supporters but also you can maybe understand why there is a predilection to just hope it goes away (because often it does)
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
I don’t want to argue against your lived experience, but somebody is buying all those hats and yard signs.
Yeah - I think there’s a very small core of people who genuinely think Trump will win a third term, and a slightly larger core of people who want him to. Then a much larger set of people who are engaging in some very unwise trolling.
I just think it’s telling that all the rabid Trump supporters I know aren’t there. Zero of them want to see him on the ballot a fourth time or otherwise pull shenanigans.
Your account is reassuring to me, yes.
Run the 9/11 playbook again and those morons will fall in line immediately.
> Without fail, every one of them has a _visceral_ negative reaction to a hypothetical Trump 2028 term.
They said the same thing on Jan 6, 2021. Trump supporters had a very negative visceral reaction to that day.
But on Jan 7, 2021 the propaganda machine started up again and minds began changing one by one. Today, the very people who were running for their lives on Jan 6 are in support of officially teaching in schools that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats -- the very lie that cause the violence of the day, that caused so many to say "I do not support this". Four years later they voted for it again.
So when I hear tales of a Trump voter who is against something Trump has done, I just remember that they voted for him again after he caused an insurrection against the United States in an attempt to illegally overthrow a free and fair election.
If a voter can find their way to excusing that, they will find their way to excusing a third term. Here's how: "Yeah it's not ideal, but what am I supposed to do? Vote for a Democrat? They would be worse. We are choosing the lesser of two evils." Works every time.
> I am hopeful that my fellow Americans will elect a responsible, intelligent, virtuous leader in 2028 to be sworn into office on that day.
The US elected Biden after Trump's disastrous first term, and immediately followed up with Trump's totalitarian self-destructive second term.
Sorry neighbours, but it's not about Trump. Trump is one man. The Republican party is effectively captured by that one mans 77,302,580 supporters.
Changing leaders isn't enough to fix it. You all broke it, and until you re-establish norms for democracy, reinforce the checks and balances, and start holding criminals who hold office accountable, it's not going to get better.
I wish you luck, you will need it :/
He could serve a third term and probably will attempt to do so, the two term limit could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and Trump has a record for doing a lot of unprecedented things.
I think it might take more than a stroke of a pen -- it seems like the easiest legal way would be to bribe the House to elect Trump as Speaker, bribe a pair of Republicans to run and win in 2028 and then in 2029 have each of them resign, promoting Trump back in to office.
The bribing might be costly but people are more than willing to buy Trump's merch.
If such a candidate presents himself then s/he would win. You have pretty much nailed the reason why Trump won. Everyone saw him as the second least competent presidential candidate. Bad leadership is a real problem and it has created a vacuum which Trump has roared in to exploit.
But there's a more fundamental problem, where neither party has offered suitable presidential candidates in the last 3 elections. Your system needs a bit of a reset. The Democrats have to return to their roots, and the Republicans have to get over the Cult of Trump. But i'm hopeful in time these two problems will resolve themselves in time and not mutually reinforce each other. Trumps Republican Party has a hard expiration date, and the Democrats will eventually have to listen to their voters if they want to win elections.
Some Canadian companies have just straight up banned business travel to the US.
Some X companies did Y
so what?
Ottawa has plenty of event spaces, poor direct airport routes though. I wouldn’t count out Calgary and Edmonton either.
I ve heard about these problems for many years. In particular, many indian phd students were reluctant to travel to European conferences for fear that there might be complications when returning back to America. The unreliable current administration must have turbocharged these fears
This is bound to happen for a lot of other events besides scientific conferences. I know of a guy that wouldn't go to a retrogaming convention for fears of being detained at the border.
Its not just like you get refused entry and get sent on a return flight, there is risk of incarceration, rummaging through your digital life etc. It could be very disruptive and negative.
There is also the risk of being sent to completely unrelated continents based on eugenic preconceptions.
This, I was "randomly selected" way too often to risk it nowadays.
This!
The risk of being turned away at the border always existed.
Yes it’s drastically increased now, but that’s a quantitative change which will have a quantitative effect.
What we are seeing now is a qualitative change in traveling behavior and that’s reflecting the qualitative change in the severity of punishment that may occur if there is a problem while trying to enter.
There's a risk of life imprisonment in a concentration camp in a third country.
Yes, I run tech conferences and international attendance is dropping rapidly this year (we're shifting to aggressive local marketing, but it's still sad.)
Won’t be attending local conferences anymore.
My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.
They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.
So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.
Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.
Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
So much for „land of the free, home of the brave“
That’s why other countries have social security. It provides freedom and courage.
What you need to keep in mind is once enough frogs are boiling things get worse fast.
No logical breakdown from an armchair is going stop parents with hungry kids.
This is the failing to read the room part I mentioned. Our biology is composed of biology not philosophy. It is self selecting. It’s biological imperative is select self.
Ok good you got some sort of Excel sheet breakdown. That’s just words.
This is what I’m talking about; American public is so dissociated due to economics that straight up ignores externalities. 8 billion people are the externality and it’s going to be hard for 300 million to ignore them and live in their narcissistic bubble much longer. Third world countries have rebuilt and don’t see the specialness in Murica or the point in sewing their shirts if they’re going to be so low affect.
Americans have to change not because of some philosophical position but because of physical reality not really caring about the excuses of 300 million; only half of which is cogent, and half of that actually intelligent. It’s not looking good, Bob.
It’s hard to protest. There’s no single movement, it’s just a bunch of different people. Stuff needs to get a lot worse.
It's important to understand that this has always been the case at any point in history where widespread protests affected change. And that people have won demands in situations with much worse oppression.
The reality is that it's not that hard. It requires learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone, lowering your expectations a bit and not expecting to do one thing and be done. This is how protest movements have always been.
Find something that aligns with one of your values and show up. Learn about more actions, join a chat group or calendar, and find what you can go to. Do not expect there to be one massive action that everyone shows up to first time. Do not burn yourself out.
Humans are social. Just showing up on the street reminds people that things aren't OK and there is something to protest about. Over time this builds people's consciousness and more people practice taking collective action.
I don’t mean protest.
I mean consume less media. Stuff.
Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt. How many new shirts does a person need a year? 2-3? That’s like what, a cold December?
Be a human not a battery in a Matrix pod propping up ad companies and Hollywood.
We live in a Newspeak bubble; it’s freedom to stare at screen.
Local culture in the US is hyper-normalized around money making metrics.
Boomers did all the drugs and lived. They convinced GenX and Millennials to Netflix chill, order grubhub and watch AI content
It’s so bizarre
Edit: this is what gets attention not blocking roads https://finance.yahoo.com/news/target-badly-misses-on-earnin...
> Take burden off workers in the sweatshops and learn to sew a shirt.
Presumably they're working there because it's the least-bad option? If so, removing it so they have to go with the next-least-bad option might not be much of a help.
Yeah the usual uncreative answer “copy paste the Newspeak”
This answer is a euphemism for “don’t rock my boat.” Because if they ain’t sewing your shirts, you are. Your freedom from such is due to blowing Vietnam (and elsewhere) to a crater, fostering existing conditions. Not exactly informed consent.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy this analysis. They lived being oppressed by US military. They see Americans as the Taliban, not a great white hope Americans have been propagandized to see themselves as.
Ah yes, smashing capitalism by restoring the bourgeois ethic of thrift /s.
Ah yes, a sanctimonious tech bro reducing everything to a Twitter size sound bite.
We know; you’re scared of change because you have seen your lived experience and know you cannot grow a potato.
But you’re just a meat suit and your personal story and literacy aren’t anyone else’s concern. And that’s under the political norm. You prefer no guarantee of healthcare.
Fine, have it your way. Under the American norms I hereby give zero fucks your meat suit exists.
Fortunately for me I have generational wealth thanks to the building and auto booms in the US, and EE degrees. SWEs exist so long as open compute platforms exist and there’s no guarantee governments around the world will forever allow that.
Should you find yourself shut out of employment opportunities, thoughts n prayers.
I went to a protest. I was anxious about being photographed and added to some biometric database to be used for who knows what purposes. My wife and I had a serious discussion about whether to go, the possible risks, the possibility of violence, but I ultimately convinced her to go as our civic responsibility. I left our phones at home as a precaution so as to avoid being geolocated to the site.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
are you ready to die for the principles of your country? if not, then there is no point. things are bad, but they have been way worse in the past (remember, we had legislators getting caned on the floor of congress, citizens locked up en masse without trial, everyone's bank accounts confiscated and held for weeks, biological experiments run on minorities, and underage citizens assassinated by drones). in the face of the injustices that the administration is going to commit, you should have ready for yourself the answer to two questions:
1. given a sober, nonpartisan review of past history, how far is too far for this administration?
2. what are you willing to do to stop it, how much are you willing to sacrifice.
i suspect that nothing the administration has done to date really clears the first bar. be prepared for the day it will, save your energy till then.
There are various activist movements, groups, interests, communities.
You have to find your people. It can take a while. Change takes time, big social movements were decades into the making in the fringe before they reached the mainstream consciousness.
> I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take.
Get involved with your preferred local political party. Push for policy preferences that won't drive turnout for the opposing party and won't give that party a chance to nominate a clown and then still win.
Honestly it sounds like you just want to give yourself an excuse to stop engaging. This reads like "I ate a salad once and I didn't like it, so I'm done with vegetables entirely, it's hopeless". Then the rest is you complaining that other people are unserious?
Going to protests is usually not much fun. There are all kinds of people there that you might not feel much in common with. People will make signs that focus on things you don't care about. This is normal! Protests can also easily burn a person out, so people try to have fun if they can because it's important to sustain pressure. The fact that someone dresses up, has a joke on their sign, meets a friend and smiles, or takes a selfie is not an indictment of the person or their protest.
Resist the urge to wallow in contempt for those people, particularly when you haven't done anything that has been effective.
>They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.
Then they're not looking.
Yes your brief firm comment surely establishes truth.
They see weekend warriors focused on their paychecks.
They don’t see coast to coast collective pushback for long term stability. Sure, America is big and pockets of tribal thought.
And so it’s unreliable. A hodge podge of asocial cults flip flopping around the rules every 2-4 years because of its distributed, async social nature, does not make a reliable ally.
Still not reading the room.
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Americans are doing stuff. I call my reps and their vms are full. I go to their offices and there are lots of other people there. There's been protests at state capitals, Bernie & AOC have been giving speeches and zoom meetings about organizing and canvasing. Lawyers are suing and judges are trying to use the system despite the supreme court gone mad. It's tough to get a big group photo, but people are doing stuff. I'm as angry and jaded as anybody, but I dislike this defeated "nobody is doing enough so fuck it" thing I keep seeing. It's laying the groundwork a self fulfilling prophecy.
I'm a Canadian who moved to the SF bay area after graduating. A lot of my smartest friends who came with me at the same time are actively taking steps to move back due to the political environment.
It’s fascinating that people still see these things as new or unique to our current administration. This has been an issue for decades that were often ignored or minimized because it only affected smaller more marginalized groups of people. For example conferences involving HIV/AIDS had to contend with these issues for decades due to the blanket ban on HIV+ individuals from entering the country, even for a scientific conference. Often the conferences would continue leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
It seems new and unique, given that conferences (and scientists) are leaving?
You know how if you pile lots of flammable things in the corner of your garage and it's fine for years, and then a toddler strolls through with a book of matches, then suddenly you get a new and unique fire?
The conferences and scientists leaving are the results of decades of policy undermining education and human rights, coupled with the rise of the alt-right, normalization of racism and misogyny, with a soupçon of neo-nazism that allowed a populist regime to rise to power. All of that was the pile of flammable things. The extrajudicial deportations, conferences and scientists leaving, and tourism crashing are the first tendrils of smoke rising in the corner. It's not too late for America to fix it.
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Do you have some statistics?
Because there really does seem to be a change in immigration enforcement lately and multiple universities have issued guidance accordingly.
> leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.
Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?
If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
It’s a question of degree
Has anyone done the legwork to demonstrate the degree? The linked article is lists around 6 conferences. Which is not a huge number, in the grand scheme of things, given how anti-Trump the US academy seems to be. More than 5, less than 10 and I assume conferences move around fairly regularly.
It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).
[0] https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008585/jessica-rein... & https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52195/1/BJH2300063_R.pdf
Conferences are organized months if not years in advance.
The fact that 6 of them found this a big enough issue to move their conferences out of the U.S. is a huge deal.
The real impact will be felt 2-3 years from now.
It's far too early to say. You can't move a conference to a different country on a short notice. You can only hold it with whatever audience you can get, postpone it, or cancel it. For larger events, it's already too late to move events scheduled for 2026, and possibly even for 2027. Maybe there will be some data in a couple of years, but until then, anecdotes and informed guesses are the best you can have.
this is on a much larger scale and supported by ~40% of the USA who think Trump can do no wrong, and agree with his racism and unconstitutional imprisonment of brown people who are here to just visit or get an education. Basically now if you're not white, you are a suspect if you are coming/going internationally. I'm pretty sure some heroic person will eventually whistleblow a tape recording/email/memo that cites this as the new operating norm for the current regime.
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This, Harvard, WHO, NIH, and NSF changes create that sucking sound you hear, a brain drain, and people deciding not to go to the US or to leave. Such myopic stupidity in the White House weakening America's power and reputation.
When he started talking about a golden age I knew he was going to drive it straight into the ground.
Attending US conferences was always more a hassle than most other places.
The 'interrogation' before even boarding the flight was just ridiculous. And the process repeated after landing. Jeez.
Isn't there a history of security researchers and open source programmers being detained or threatened when visiting the US? So the same thing is being done to the US's domestic researchers as well now?
https://archive.ph/iYdBT
Did anyone read the article?
They have one example of a meeting moved. The other one is going to Canada, but most attendees are Canadian students (hmmm), the other one is cancelled because of funding cuts (that's not a fear of coming to the US),
As a scientist, a lot of these conferences are nothing but rackets. Organizers can make a lot of money from them if they can get enough attendees. I've been approached by multiple conference organizers and when you start to look it's clearly a joke (same with many journals).
I'd also wonder how many of these conferences were teetering to start with (look how many happened ever 3 years, a good sign they can't get critical mass).
Yes agreed. So much ridiculous hyperbole in this thread that says way more about the political affiliation of the commenter, than it does about any real or imagined threat.
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> The laws haven't changed.
But the interpretation of how to enforce them certainly has changed with this administration, that much is undeniable? I don’t remember prior admins kicking out all foreign Harvard students or sending masked plainclothes ice agents to arrest US citizens protesting outside detention facilities?
This isn’t just my opinion - this administration is actively defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision finding it acted unlawfully, and ordering Noem to return around Mr Garcia no later than April 7th. To say that because “the laws haven’t changed” that it’s all a media invention is crazy to me.
I mean many laws especially regarding the border were simply abandoned under the previous admin. It was basically an open border. So yes we've returned to the norm. That's not a bad thing. If anything it makes people visiting the US safer.
If I grant you that, then at the very least we both agree _something_ has changed then and it isn’t just the media.
But I don’t think it’s just that- what do you have to say about Noem v Garcia then, where the Supreme Court ruled this administration was not following the law?
> It was basically an open border.
Can you explain this perspective? I consider an open boarder to be something similar to what we have between states. I can go to New Jersey, and back again to New York, and no one asks any questions, no one checks my papers, I don't need a visa or a reason to be in NJ, and I don't need to declare anything I bought in NJ to NY customs.
By contrast, the US boarder under Biden was enforced with millions of deportations, expulsions, and legal processing. While it's true more migrants were allowed in under parole and asylum programs, and some Trump-era restrictions were lifted, the US-Mexico boarder did not resemble the open NY-NJ boarder.
So given the the checkpoints, border patrol agents, deportations, surveillance systems, legal entry requirements, physical barriers, detention facilities, visa controls, asylum processing, and international boarder agreements, I can't see how it was "basically open".
A friend's relative was detained at the border and had their phone searched on political grounds. There are multiple videos of people being whisked away by masked police and government. Not to mention all the other screws that have been turned on academia that I've heard in countless stories from people in my circle.
The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
>The media is not doing us any good, but the fear is not imagined.
Statistically nothing has changed. Source: I and many acquaintances I know have crossed the border multiple times. It's completely the media.
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> The laws haven't changed.
It’s really amazing how ignorant people can be despite the evidence. No laws needed to change for the risk of abuse by the border authority to go up. Tell me about your opinions on civil asset forfeiture.
> There is no risk for people visiting the US and not doing criminal behavior.
There has been extensive coverage of the US detaining people without charge under the new regime's immigration policies. The fourth amendment has been effectively suspended for foreigners. They are literally putting people in jail forever simply because they don't like them.
I'm sorry but this simply is not true. What you bring up is an example of the media misinformation I talked about.
How many examples do you need? Mahmoud Khalil remains jailed in perpetuity without charge. In any reasonable world that should be enough. We can keep going.
(Just to head this off: I know you're going to say he's a criminal. That's how the scam works. But if the government could show he's a criminal they'd charge him with a crime. They don't want to, they just want to jail him, LITERALLY because they don't like what he was saying.)
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Can't read the whole thing because paywall.
I thought nature was about publishing research. This reads like a political opinion piece but is published as "news"?
The author has other similar articles like these about the "US brain drain":
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01540-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01489-y
What would help me get an accurate picture is how many conferences are typically held per month in the US and how has that number changed but instead we get fluff like:
"Some meetings have been put on hold" - which meetings?
"Several academic and scientific conferences in the United States have been postponed, cancelled or moved elsewhere" - Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
"Organizers of these meetings say that tougher rules around visas and border control — alongside other policies introduced by US President Donald Trump’s administration — are discouraging international scholars from attending events on US soil. In response, they are moving the conferences to countries such as Canada, in a bid to boost attendance." - Which organizers?
EDIT: I found this resource which would be interesting to examine for trends: https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/science
EDIT2: there are some specific anecdotal examples towards the bottom of the paywalled article. This is still not meeting what I would consider accurate non-opinionated reporting.
> I thought nature was about publishing research. This reads like a political opinion piece but is published as "news"?
Nature does both: scientific news and scientific literature.
> Which conferences, what % of the total? more specifics?
This is probably the paywall getting you, because many specific conferences are listed.
What about specific percentages?
No specific percentages
> At the moment, there are no data available on how widespread the issue is
(Not surprising, remember it’s only May!)
Also, at the end of the article they mention some other conferences that seem unconcerned
Would you mind explaining where in the article the author gives an opinion, as opposed to stating uncontested facts that would be newsworthy to scientists?
Or would you mind sharing a snippet that expressed any political belief of the authors?
I could not find either
As for your specific questions, they are answered even in the paywalled version. Just keep reading past the first sentence
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So no acknowledgement of the fact that your questions are answered even before the paywall? The conferences (and organizers thereof) listed also include International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA), the International Conference on Comparative Cognition, and then the article goes on to add
"The International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has cancelled its conference, originally planned for August 2025 in Nashville, Tennessee, because cuts to federal funding meant it was “no longer financially viable”. The 2026 Cities on Volcanoes conference in Bend, Oregon, has been postponed to 2030 or 2032. The International X-ray Absorption Society cancelled its upcoming 19th conference in Chicago, Illinois, which was scheduled for July this year. “
Your argument that there is an agenda is not compelling.
Yes there are a couple of examples closer to the bottom. I admit to getting stuck in the fluff.
FWIW e.g. the IACBT conference was cancelled more than 2 months ago. 2026 Cities on Volcanoes (COV13) was cancelled almost 3 months ago. Having that information would also have been helpful.
EDIT: I misread the cancellation date of the COV event, it was last month and not 3 months ago. I still want to know and it wasn't mentioned.
Helpful how? Stopping you from having a knee jerk political reaction to news of real events?
So you don't think that whether something happened 3 months ago or yesterday is relevant?
No. How about you - did finding out it didn't happen 3 months ago change your kneejerk reaction in some way?
It did change my reaction a bit.
I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for more data to see if something makes me change my mind. I looked at how many conferences are happening in the US. I looked at the agenda to see how many foreign speakers participated. I tried to use AI to help me spot trends.
So far I'm still ok with my initial judgement that the story serves an agenda and is not real news. Or if it's news then it's low quality/poor journalistic excuse for news. Real news should give the facts, it should give the relevant background, it should do so in a way that attempts to be as unbiased as possible, not push a view point, and it should provide enough information that intelligent readers can make up their minds based on evidence. The opposite of news is coming in with an agenda or a thesis and then cherry picking things to support your viewpoint while not providing any information that can serve to falsify your viewpoint.
Maybe if I saw the article in its entirety I'd change my mind, but I doubt it. It seems the journal has an editorial position/agenda here and is seeking to drive that forward. The journal has run many "news" articles on these topics which this article prominently links to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01295-6 "Will US science survive Trump 2.0?"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00859-w "‘Anxiety is palpable’: detention of researchers at US border spurs travel worries" (also worth noting that afaik those "detentions" didn't happen, people were refused entry)
This also doesn't mean that the assertion is false. I don't have enough data to say one way or the other. It is possible that many people are worried to travel to the US. Maybe they're Nature readers. So it is possible that many conferences are cancelled and moved and that is significant. But this is still a political opinion piece and not a news story.
> From the article would you say the author is a supporter of US Republicans and Trump or not?
Having a stance is not disqualifying, or else there wouldn't be anyone left to do journalism. "Agenda" has uselessly become code for "I don't like what I'm reading."
Analysis has always been a part of journalism, that's not a new or subtle point, nothing is new about this, I don't understand where this sentiment would come from other than being offended by the words you're seeing.
It's pushing my buttons obviously.
Everyone has some sort of stance. There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is masquerading as "news" while pushing your world view. Creating a narrative and manipulating the reader's emotion is not reporting news. If you have a position as a journalist the honest thing is also to disclose that position.
News should be objective or as objective as possible. This is what happened. Report on that. This article could have been rewritten along those lines/principles:
- Report/lead with what actually happened. (these conferences/these dates/information about the conferences/their decisions)
- You can interview the organizers and quote them.
- Ideally you give a broader context (e.g. yearly we have 10k meetings/conferences and these 4 have been cancelled) even if it doesn't support your narrative because that's what an educated reader needs to have to be able to form their own opionions.
An analysis is not "news". If you're analyzing some trends then make clear that's what you're doing. An opinion is also not news.
> An analysis is not "news".
The analysis refers to things that just happened in May. 'New' things that happened in May.
The IACBT conference was cancelled 2 months ago.
The Volcanoes conference was cancelled in April.
NOWCAM 2025 meeting was held in Victoria, BC, Canada, from May 8–10 on the UVic campus. I can't even find a reference to it being moved. I mean maybe it was.
So clearly not "new things that happened in May".
Years ago, I would have found this deeply dismaying. Today, I still see it as a negative development, but far less so, because my regard for the sciences has declined with the growing ideological capture of many disciplines. It’s become typical for political narratives to take center stage at scientific conferences. For example:
e.g. https://healthjournalism.internews.org/article/decolonizing-...
There seems to be more fear mongering than reality here. Why would a scientist coming to the US for a conference be picked up and sent to El Salvador (or some such)? Do they really believe these things are happening to everyone? Are they spending too much time on Reddit instead of doing research?
This makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I think a more common legit fear is paying for flights, accommodation, conference etc then getting turned back (maybe after a short detention) because of some social media post in your past or your name was on some misidentified "woke" science.
I had to scroll to far too find sanity in this thread.
I suspect the opposition party is literally just fear-bombing social media with what ifs and AI slop to further divide folks.
But if some conferences or even colleges full of people susceptible to that kind of misinformation begin to fail, I'm all for it.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/which-countries-have-issued...
Yes the rest of the world is wrong and Trump has the truth.
Its not fear mongering to acknowledge that this administration is anti-science, or at least less pro-science than previous administrations. Hundreds of grants are frozen due to the Harvard shenanigans - its not just Harvard, as many grants flow through there on their way to other universities.
Are the chances of getting deported high? No of course not, but America is certainly not rolling out the red carpet for international scientists right now.
The story of this one French guy being turned back at the border (out of millions of travellers) is what people see:
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
There were a few other stories that made the news like a British citizen that was prevented entry to Canada and then arrested trying to return to the US (who wanted to work illegally in Canada but admittedly treated very badly by the Americans).
- https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-rele...
"Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security."
- https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/march-2025-air-passeng...
"Non-U.S. citizen air passenger arrivals to the United States from foreign countries totaled:
It's true that there is real confusion and fear. I have coworkers (I work for a large US company with offices all over the world) that share worries. This includes people with green cards, other working visas, and foreign visitors. There's plenty of travel and zero issues. People are worried is true.In Canada there we also have a lot of people with strong feelings/emotional response to Trump's 51st state nonsense and tariffs. There is a real feeling of betrayal. There are practically zero issues with Canadians traveling to the US.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250522/dq250...
"In March, Canadian residents returned from 2.7 million trips to the United States, representing a 24.0% decrease from March 2024 and accounting for 63.9% of all trips taken by Canadian residents in March 2025.
Meanwhile, US residents took 1.2 million trips to Canada in March, down 6.6% from March 2024 and representing 81.3% of all non-resident trips to Canada in March 2025. "
Basically the worries are real, fueled to a large extent by these sorts of articles, and in my opinion politically motivated (and I don't like Trump either) but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
> Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to the administration change are false. CBP’s search numbers are consistent with increases since 2021, and less than 0.01% of travelers have their devices searched. These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security.
I'm sure the CBP would never dare to lie about such things in a way that potentially puts their egomaniacal boss in a more favorable light than he deserves.
In these sorts of situations you need to consider what is the more likely reality based on whatever limited data you have.
A few things to consider:
- Organizations take a while to change. Is it more likely that the CBP is operating more or less as it has been or that it had some dramatic changes?
- Searching phones takes time and effort. To scale up this in a significant way while still supporting similar amount of traffic would require more people? extended waiting times?
- Do you know people who travel to the US? Have they had their electronic devices searched? Have we seen a surge of stories about electronic devices being searched? The numbers they claim are less than ~450 a month (0.01% * 4.5M). Do we have evidence to suggest the scale is significantly different?
- The CBP could simply have said nothing. What would be their reason for explicitly addressing this question? If it's a lie wouldn't they be concerned e.g. with needing to deal with this down the line? Do you think Trump reads these reports and rewards some person in the CBP for this? Feels very unlikely.
- CBP is a huge org. 65k people or so. If there was some major change or lie then presumably it'd leak somehow?
> but the likelihood of running into problems is small and unclear if larger than it ever was.
very true based on my own observation. Source: I and many acquaintances I've know have crossed the border multiple times. It's completely the media.
This will heal the status wound.
?
Half of politics can be explained by framing it around the idea that for a sizable chunk of the population the last 50 years have inflicted a wound to status. The civil rights era changes, demographic changes, and the consequences of the Triffin dilemma leave a large group of people with the living memory that they had more status in the past than they do now.
The natural urge to find a cause results in externalizing blame, elites being one targeted group. It makes sense that lashing out at them is an attempt to heal the status wound, even though the chance that this succeeds is zero.
Mate, not everything in the world is some 4D chess conspiracy. I think it's more likely they just don't want to get send to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador tbh.
If I'm reading the user right, and I'm not positive I am, they're more framing the people who support the administration's (reprehensible) agenda as being on a revenge kick for losing a small amount of their original privileged status.
I think it's a fine argument to make, and I'd even agree -- it's just put really obliquely.
You read it correctly. In an attempt to appear less partisan, I made the writing too oblique. My apologies.
A revised version would read:
Over the past half-century, shaped by civil-rights gains, demographic shifts, and the dollar’s reserve-currency burdens, one once-dominant segment of the population has felt its social standing erode. Its members still remember when the political, social, and economic order tilted decisively in their favor.
Politics now orbits the "status wound" this group carries. To soothe it, they cast blame outward, at elites, newcomers, or any symbol of the new order. Each target offers momentary relief, but none can restore what was lost.
These status-injured people don't realize that status isn't a zero sum game. You can give people who have previously been discriminated against civil rights and it doesn't take status away from the previous in-group.
Edit: I misinterpreted the parent comment, apologies.
He's not referring to the scientists. He's referring to a large subset of supporters of the present administration, stereotypically lower middle class white men. They have seen other groups (women, black people, Hispanics, gay people, etc) gaining rights over the last half century or so, while they are no better off and often worse off.
This group also has a grievance against scientists, whom they see as complicit because of their campaign against climate change, among other things.
The present administration is heavily weighted towards supporting the backlash from this group. This weighs heavily on scientists, and is seen as a win for the former group.
The parent is saying the status wound is being experienced by those doing the firing and detaining.
Another way to state this is that those in power today are out for revenge because they feel as though the past ~50 years has been punishing to them. So they are lashing out against those who’ve gained in that period of time. Science and intellectualism in general is one of those gains.
> In an attempt to appear less partisan
This doesn't really work when you're trafficking in "explanations" about how Group A thinks invented by Group B for the purpose of delegitimizing Group A's disagreements with them.
Status wounds are legitimate.
Though just to be very clear here, at every step of the way this group has voted for and voraciously supported the very same elites that have been pushing hardest on the accelerator pedal for some of their problems. The Dollar's status as a reserve currency was not itself a burden. The problem was caused by the Republican Party's continually trumpeted fake "fiscal responsibility" whereby the surplus was still centralized (monetary inflation), but the proceeds were handed to Wall Street to bid up asset bubbles instead of being spent on policies that would have helped Main Street.
Counterpoint:
You’re displaying a form of racism by portraying this as about “lost status” rather than the decreasing material well-being of the public and the collapse of technocratic systems benefitting people in a regime of inflated credentials.
Your theory doesn’t explain, eg, why Trump is more popular than a typical Republican with minorities. Nor does it explain Obama voters who switched to Trump.
While you dressed up the language, you’re still just calling others “istaphobes” to avoid contending with real class issues — and making an ad hominem argument rather than contending with their legitimate disagreement.
Obama voters who switched to Trump are not a portion worth talking about. They are in the same vein as talking about no votes for genocide hardcore Palestinian supporters who sat out or people dating immigrants that had their partners deported. Interesting news stories that are nothing more than a distraction from the huge percentage of people that voted fully unconflicted and knew exactly what they wanted.
When you see those black and white photos of people hanging black people, or read stories about kids putting glass in the food and chairs of children going to an integrated school, so many of those people are still alive.
Trump was in his second year of college when the civil rights act passed and it was official policy black people were supposed to be treated like people. The civil rights act passing wasn't some official decree where the whole of the US respected that.
This article seems like political flamebait.
Most scientists are rational people. If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem. There have recently been a few horrifying stories where this wasn't the case, but those are the exception and not the rule.
> A rational person would totally be fine with a non-zero chance of being sent to an El Salvadorean torture camp for the rest of their lives with no due process even when directly ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States... the chance of it happening to you is probably pretty low (though of course we actually don't have a good way to know since people are being whisked away without even chances to contact their lawyers)!
It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
I can tell you my European colleagues have reservations about attending collaboration meetings in the US
> If they obey US immigration rules, they SHOULD never have a problem.
Sure, they SHOULD never have a problem. But, increasingly under Trump, they MIGHT have a problem despite this, especially if they are not white and/or come from a country that Trump is currently feuding with, and/or have publicly spoken out against Trump, Netanyahu, or their allies. One shouldn't base any serious decision on how things SHOULD be.
>Most scientists are rational people.
I suspect not.
How much can you assure them there will be minimal due process if there is a problem?
What you should be asking is; what would happen if I illegally immigrated to some country other than the US, where they have no guarantee of due process?
Since when is visiting a conference illegally immigrating?
Typically folks who attend conferences fly over, stay the week, maybe even stay for another week as a vacation, then head back.
If anything, this is in the territory of acquiring a temporary visa.
You've said absolutely nothing that I disagree with.
Scientists who follow the immigration rules aren't illegally immigrating either.
I got the reaction I was expecting. I did flag the article, but I guess it hasn't yet accumulated enough flag votes.
I’m confused by what point you’re trying to make because it isn’t relevant to the article.
It is possible to address illegal immigration in a manner that doesn’t deter those visiting who will very likely return. Unfortunately whether it is the result of agency-wide policy changes or a few rogue officers, there’s certainly some new anxiety up for those wanting to travel here.
I think they'd want to be assured that there would be maximal due process.
I think the point was that, if there is a problem, you don't currently have a guarantee of even a minimal due process, as a foreigner at the US border.