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

[Kathy Brown]

Dave,
These are very helpful comments. I am talking with and listening closely to all parts of our community.  Any other thoughts from this list would be timely.
Our Board is engaged; I am in contact with Jari and others.  Watching closely U.S. judicial review and domestic and international response.  Working through next steps as the situation evolves.
Will keep in touch here with all of you.
Kathy



On Jan 30, 2017, at 5:19 PM, Dave Burstein <daveb at dslprime.com<mailto:daveb at dslprime.com>> wrote:

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.
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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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