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.
The system in the US is capable of running on nothing but hope because of the availability of lending and investment. "Unfortunately" that means the average person won't receive an impossible to ignore signal that something is going bad until bankers and investors lose hope. By that point, something would have had to have happened that can't be fixed in the short term by a reversal or a sudden period of sobriety.
For a concrete example, the stock market is going up and down every time the tariff threats change tone, but the layoffs that the tariffs will make inevitable won't be done until companies run out of financiers who can be convinced the setbacks are only temporary.
> 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.
The shipping people off for indefinite imprisonment in El Salvador without due process or appeal is new. I realise the people they've shipped are not conference delegates but it's still a bit off putting.
They've also started detaining people at the border for some minor visa violations where they normally would just refuse entry. That's a very real concern for conference travellers.
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.
It's harder of a choice the closer the event date is, but sometime it's just the most responsible thing to do. You won't see many people coming to your event if it's now in a war zone for an extreme example.
It’s not the choice that is hard, it’s the logistics of changing such. Huge event on such a short notice. It’s simply not possible, so you can cancel if you feel your guests would not be safe, yeah. But who would agree to that? It could very well bankrupt the conference.
Indeed, in my own field we are talking deadlines for hosting bids at least a year in advance and an announcement about ten months before the conference is held. Organising a conference with possibly thousands of attendees is a massive undertaking and you can see the link below as to what one of these calls to host looks like.
Here's another example [0]: "Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales". A quote: "“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email." No reason to think this conference is especially different from others like it.
An article from Nature, which is targetted at scientists, is the sign you are looking for. The fact that you are getting on HN, is indicating that you get to know of this before other people.
I can say that this is definitely an issue in converastions for me.
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.
