[Lerkfish]

This CNN story

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government plans to charge foreign students a $100 fee to pay for a tracking system created to prevent possible terrorists from using student visas to enter the country, a federal official said Wednesday.

interesting. Although I understand the need to keep track of foreign students, charging THEM a hundred dollar fee seems odd, to me. What do you guys think?

[私]

I think it's bull. If any particular student is suspected of being connected to terrorism in some way, they shouldn't be granted a student visa. All this is saying is that the screening process for granting visas is inadequate and needs to be supplemented with other systems.

-私

[thunderous_funker]

Originally posted by 私:
I think it's bull. If any particular student is suspected of being connected to terrorism in some way, they shouldn't be granted a student visa. All this is saying is that the screening process for granting visas is inadequate and needs to be supplemented with other systems.

-私

The proposed fee is a horrible attempt at a stop gap solution. I can see the story after the next attack:

"Well, we don't know how the known terrorists were awarded the studen visa, but at least their check cleared before they blew themselves up."

[nonhuman]

Also it seems incredibly unfair to the majority of foreign students in the US who will never have anything to do with terrorism. A lot of my friends are here on student visas, so I may be taking this a little personally, but it just seems like a really stupid thing to do, not to mention being bad for international relations and probably working to reduce the number of foreign students who come to the US (a bad thing, in my mind, which will only serve to enhance the isolationist image of the US and further our alienation from the rest of the world).

Isn't this basically the punishing of the moral for the crimes of the immoral in much the same way conservatives are always saying that taxes are punishing the successful for the good of the unsuccessful?