[Chapter-delegates] Moving ahead on visas & preserving access to our meetings

[Dave Burstein]

Kathy and folk

It was very good to see the comment. The folks on this list know what the
issues are, so the question is what to do about them. We need more than
high order principles here.

I suggest the board at the meeting this week pass a simple resolution like
the following.

"ISOC meetings should be held where few, if any, of our members will be
blocked from attending. The temporary U.S. visa requirements definitely
prevent our board member Walid AL-SAQAF from attending and require other
board members to go through "Extreme vetting." (Trump quote) If these
become permanent, we will follow the lead of the IETF, who "are already
reviewing what to do as far as location for the next open North American
meeting slot." https://www.ietf.org/blog/2017/01/barriers-to-entry/ Jeri
Arkko, Andrew Sullivan, Leslie Daigle

That's very simple, commits us to nothing, and should immediately find
support on the board. Clearly, moral and rational arguments are having
little effect. Time to try financial ones, particularly those that affect
the hotel business.
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I also believe CEO Brown or Chairman Camarillo should immediately tell IETF
Chair Arkko that he can freely call on the resources of ISOC. We have a
large communications staff including pr pros who can support IETF.

In the IETF discussion, several pointed to their lack of resources and
suggested IETF look to ISOC for help. I believe our $30M subsidy from .org
registrations was originally intended to support IETF but I doubt even 10%
goes there today.
 -------------------------

Datapoints:
ICANN board member Kevah Ranjbar already was blocked from his flight to Los
Angeles for a board event. He will be unable to attend IETF Chicago as
IAB's liaison the the IAOC, despite having a Dutch passport and U.S. visa.
(Born in Iran.) This is affecting us already.
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Natives of Pakistan, Afganistan, Saudia Arabia, and probably Egypt & Kenya
also will find it somewhere between difficult and impossible to come. Trump
said they will face "Extreme vetting. It’s going to be very hard to come
in. You’re going to see. You’re going to see. We’re going to have extreme
vetting in all cases. And I mean extreme." It's not just the first seven
countries.
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44 Nobel Laureates have signed the petition at
https://notoimmigrationban.com/. So have all the Fields Medelists since
1990, including Elon Lindenstrauss of the Hebrew University and
Iranian-American Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford. 9,000 U.S. faculty have
also signed. The number is rising almost hourly.

Dave Burstein
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