Philosophy Grad Student from China Deported upon Arrival in US (updated)
A 22-year-old student from China who had traveled from China to Texas to study philosophy at the University of Houston was detained upon arrival in the state, questioned, and deported back to China 36 hours later, according to the Associated Press.
The student, identified only by his family name, Gu, the AP reports, had his paperwork in order, and had a full scholarship to the MA program in philosophy at the University of Houston.
He had previously spent a semester as an exchange student at Cornell University.
Gu also was banned from returning to the US for five years, “abruptly halting his dream for an academic career in the United States,” according to the AP. Gu said of the events, “There is no opportunity for the life I had expected.”
Redacted deportation questionnaire for a Chinese philosophy student who was deported from the US after landing in Houston to study at the University of Houston (via AP)
The AP reports:
Gu told AP that he liked his Cornell experience so much that he applied for a master’s program to study philosophy in the U.S.
Despite reports of stricter policies by the Trump administration, Gu said he wasn’t too worried, not even when he was first stopped and taken to a room for questioning by a customs officer after landing at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. His belongings were searched, and his electronics were taken away, he said.
After the officer went through the devices, he started interrogating Gu, focusing on his ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Gu said.
He said his parents are party members, but he has never joined, though he — like nearly all Chinese teens and young people — is a member of the party’s youth arm, the Communist Youth League.
The customs officer also grilled him on his connections to the governmental China Scholarship Council, which popped up in his chat history. Gu said it came up in his chats with his schoolmates, but he did not receive money from the Chinese government.
Three rounds of interrogation lasted 10 hours, before Gu was told he was to be deported. No specific reason was given, he said, and the removal paperwork he provided to AP indicated inadequate documentation.
By then [following the flight and the interrogation], he had hardly slept for 40 hours. The waiting room where he was kept was lit around the clock, its room temperature set low.
“I was so nervous I was shaking, due to both being freezing cold and also the nerves,” Gu said. “So many things were going through my head now that I was being deported. What should I do in the future?”
It would be another day before he was put on a flight. Now, Gu is considering appealing the decision, but that might take years and cost thousands of dollars.
Redacted deportation form for a Chinese philosophy student who was deported from the US after landing in Houston to study at the University of Houston (via AP)
The Academic Union Network has a website with potentially useful information for students and researchers traveling to the United States.
Readers are welcome to share other related sources of information, advice, or help.
UPDATE: A commenter has shared a link to the student’s own account of what happened. An excerpt:
By this time, it was around 11 p.m. local time. I had been traveling for 29 hours and was utterly exhausted, but the anxiety kept me from sleeping. About an hour or two later, D [a US Customs and Border Protection agent] called me back to his office. This time, he was a completely different person, full of aggression. As soon as I entered, he slammed the door shut, glared at me, and demanded, “Why did you lie to me? Do you know that lying to a federal officer is a felony, and you could go to jail for it!”
As I stood there confused, he followed up with, “Why did you say you never joined the CSSA?” I was even more bewildered, as I had never paid attention to such a student organization before. He then picked up my phone, opened WeChat, and pointed at our university’s “CSSA Chinese Student Freshmen Group,” asking, “Then what is this?” It was only then that I realized this freshman group, which I had joined after receiving an email invitation, was one of his main points of suspicion. D continued, “Don’t you know that the CSSA is funded by the Chinese government and is responsible for stopping any speech in the U.S. that slanders the Chinese government?” Actually, my first reaction was to laugh, and I wanted to tell him that the head of our CSSA freshman group was an American (though I didn’t say it to protect her). Still, I naively thought this wouldn’t be a reason for him to deport me.
You can read the rest here.
I’m a US citizen. I taught in China for several years. I held meetings about studying abroad, like in the US. I talked about potential pros and cons (personal, professional, financial, etc.). I wrote letters for students who decided they wanted to pursue further education in the US. Many of them are currently pursuing further education in the US.
I’m distressed by the story. I never thought that one of the potential cons that would have to be discussed was: immediate deportation upon arrival. I can’t do anything for the student mentioned here. But I can issue a public apology to my former students. It never occurred to me that the risks for studying in the US could be this extreme. I apologize for giving advice and recommendations that underestimated such a risk.
Well this was an unfortunate piece of news to receive before heading to bed. Nevertheless, as an American who has sent his fair share of Chinese students to study in the USA, I should mention two things.
First, I am no legal expert, but on the surface it seems strange to take CPC affiliation as relevant to the presumption of immigration. Besides the fact that many (though not as many as the AP suggests) innocuous Chinese people are so affiliated, I don’t see how it hurts. If anything, you’d expect party loyalists to want to return to the Motherland!
Second, this past half year has been full of stressful emergencies involving visa interview suspensions, funding shortfalls, and so on. This might be the straw that breaks this camel’s back — I don’t know if I can in good conscience recommend that my students apply to and attend US programs, at least not without having a concrete backup plan in place. That pains me to say, truly.
A small thing: The AP article is suggesting that most Chinese young people are associated with the communist youth league (not cpc), which is largely correct
I’m open to being wrong about this, but I really don’t see where the evidence for that claim is coming from. Most figures I can find (including those from official sources) state that membership is around 70-80 million. Overall population figures for ages 14-28 (the relevant age range) seem to be over 300 million. So we have a sizable percentage, but not most.
It might be fair to say that most students who are in Gu’s situation are associated with the Youth League. A cursory glance at my student rosters shows that a large majority (but not all) of my students are. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that membership rates are higher among the universities in Beijing. At any rate, I suspect there is a correlation between Youth League membership and enrollment at an elite university
Thanks for checking! Then the claim probably needs some qualification. I was just speaking from my personal experience growing up in China.
Although official statistics suggest that only around one quarter of Chinese youth aged 14–28 belong to the Communist Youth League, this relatively low national rate is mostly due to the large number of teenagers who leave school after junior high. By the time students reach senior high school, membership is so common that it has become a routine part of student life rather than a marker of distinction. This explains why, when you look at your university rosters, the vast majority of your students turn out to be League members. But Youth League membership has no correlation with admission to elite universities, nor does it vary meaningfully by region. What it really reflects is simply whether or not a young person continued on to senior high school. In my own high school class, for example, only one student chose not to join the League, and this had no impact whatsoever on their chances of being admitted to university.
Thanks for the insight, fromChina! I want to clarify my thought just a little bit. But it’ll be my last post on the matter since I don’t want this to detract from the much more important issue surrounding Gu’s denial of entry.
I did not mean to suggest that there is a causal connection between the two — I definitely did not mean to suggest that being a member of the Youth League played a positive roll in being admitted to an elite university. But it seems like we might agree that the two incidentally correlate because of a third variable, academic achievement.
I would be very interested to see statistics about what percentage of high school students are members. I talked to my wife about this, and her experience was similar to yours. But she also went to a fairly well regarded high school, she is friends with others who did not, and those friends were less likely to be members. So I still suspect that there is some variability more closely tied to academic achivement/eliteness rather than having continued on to high school.
All that being said, it seems like we agree about the more substantive point that membership is common and routine. And I suspect we also agree that this is even more true among students who would be moving to the USA for a PhD
the student himself wrote about this episode on reddit with more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/GradSchool/comments/1n0fa17/as_a_master_of_arts_student_i_was_deported_and/
The student didn’t write that text himself. It was generated by AI, as the student clarifies in the comment section.
EDIT: Justin, maybe this would be worth flagging in an update?
I think we should really sort our attitude straight regarding the use of AI. If it is ethical to use AI in anyway we like, as long as we take responsibility for what is written, as many people support in the other post, then we should not talk about whether a text is AI-generated/translated/polished *per se*, at least not with a negative connotation. What matters is what is written is truthful etc, whatever quality that matters relative to the context. This would help hold the author accountable.
I could expand on this in the context of, say, conference presentations, but have to cut it short.
P.S. from the comment, the author said he wrote the Chinese version and ask GPT to translate it.
Are you joking? He says he wrote it originally in Chinese and used ChatGPT to translate it to English. Seems totally irrelevant to mention in a comment let alone “flag in an update”
In response to Alice and Ann:
My point is that with any text, we should distinguish between “the author wrote it” and “the author had somebody (or something) produce it,” even if the production is a translation. There may be some translation errors. The AI may have filled in some gaps in the original text or reframed some points — without having the original text or a transcript of the chat, we don’t know. We don’t even know which AI was used!
Again, my point isn’t to criticize the student. I just think we should be extremely careful in how we handle our evidence when it comes to cases like this one. We should distinguish who wrote what, at a minimum.
Platypus, yes I knew you are not criticizing the student specifically. Nor do I assume that you think AI is ethical or not. And my point is exactly that it is *not* the case that “with any text, we should distinguish between” someone writing it with and without the AI assistance”.
I think this is very important as a part of ethical Ai practice as a whole.
but because this discussion is tangential to this post, I am just going to stop here.
There could also be “translation errors” if he had written the text in English himself, since he is a non-native English speaker. Would we have to flag that too?
Probably not. But it might be relevant!
If the audience knows that the writer isn’t fluent, they will know not to put too much interpretive weight on subtle word choices. And they may be willing to forgive small inconsistencies that would otherwise have looked suspicious.
As a bit of background, so you know where I’m coming from: I have spent a lot of my adult life trying to help (and fund) refugees and asylees as they navigate a very unfair system. I’m staunchly pro-immigration and anti-xenophobia. Anybody who has spent time in this sector knows that it is *essential* to have high-quality translation of crucial documents and interviews. Border officials are notoriously quick to write off someone’s entire life story just because of a minor inconsistency or omission (as may have happened in this instance). This can often be unfair, but it’s a fact that immigrants and their supporters have to grapple with, whether in the US, the UK, the homeland of the platypus, or other countries that exert a lot of border control.
(Sadly, many asylees run into trouble because they can’t afford the right translation services. They might have to use a friend who isn’t fluent in English, or they might only have access to a translator who speaks their second or third language. That’s its own systemic problem.)
I feel bad for this student. This trend is also obviously bad news for US higher education. However, it is arguably good for the world. The US has too much dominance over global higher education. Their self-sabotage of their own academic system is helping to diminish that dominance and create a more balanced playing field. In the long-term, a greater number of promising students pursuing their higher education outside of the US is a good thing.
I would rather see other countries improve their offerings than the US degrade theirs. Leveling down is the worst way to achieve equality!
Yes, but what we are seeing is not pure levelling down. For example, if the good is attracting to universities in your country the strongest candidates from around the world, then what we are seeing is that the US was claiming a disproportionate share of them, but now other countries are getting more, and the US is getting less. This is straightforward redistribution and does not directly involve levelling down.
What you were presumably referring to is that this redistribution has happened because higher ed has deteriorated in the US rather than, say, higher ed improving in other places faster than it is improving in the US. I completely agree with you that the latter would be preferable. But we can still celebrate the outcome of a fair redistribution of this good, even if the cause of it was a dispreferred one.
I would also add that things are more complicated than the simple description above because higher ed has actually been improving faster in places outside the US over the past two decades, however, the redistribution that should have happened as a result of this has not happened. The reason for this is that US academia has used its dominance of higher ed (including its influence over various important institutions such as leading journals, influential professional bodies, influential media, etc.) to unfairly preserve reputational prestige for its universities and prevent up-and-coming universities in other places, especially Asia, from claiming the prestige that they deserve on the basis of merit. In such circumstances, it is not clear that their current self-sabotage is dispreferred. Imagine that I rig the system in my favour so that I unfairly claim goods for myself that would have gone to others if distributed on merit. Obviously, it’s preferrable that I just stop doing this and compensate other for the goods I wrongly held. However, being selfish, I’m not going to do that. If I eventually self-sabotage, messing up my life in certain ways that cause me to lose the goods that I had wrongly claimed more than my fair share of, then this seems like a pretty good thing. Certainly, those who I have unfairly dominated are going to cheer.
You think American universities should pay compensation for claiming a “disproportionate share” of top candidates?
What a curiously zero-sum, legalistic view of the academic world.
No, I clearly said the issue is US academia rigging the system in their favour through control of key institutions that greatly influence perceptions of institutional prestige. If you disagree then why not directly respond to this point rather than strawmaning my argument.
I fundamentally reject the idea that American universities are harming other universities on net. (Same for Chinese universities, UK universities, Japanese universities, etc.)
International academia is an *incredibly* positive-sum system. Great new medicines discovered in China can improve lives in North America. mRNA research done at Penn can save lives around the world during a pandemic.
Philosophy, too, benefits from relations between universities. If there were just one big department or community, we’d suffer from groupthink and stagnation. American departments (at least traditionally) have made an effort to include international students and recruit international talent. And I think American PhD programs have trained a lot of great philosophers working abroad!
If you have specific allegations of wrongful conduct at American journals (e.g.), I’m all ears. But “they rigged the system” is a pretty vague accusation. And I don’t think prestige is the summum bonum of our profession.
STEM is more complicated. But here’s a simple test you can try for the other parts of academia. Choose a discipline. Look up what journals are ranked as the best in that discipline. Look through recent issues of those journals and observe how many of the articles published have a clear US-centric focus in their approach, the examples or case studies they use, the assumptions they make etc. What you will find is that many of the journals are US-centric. This is obviously advantages US academics and disadvantages academics elsewhere.
By the way, when you do this test, make sure that you are aware of your own biases. Fellow anglosphere academics (Canada, UK, Australia) often share a lot of the cultural preoccupations of their US counterparts, making it less obvious to them how US-centric many parts of academia are. Academics in continental Europe have more distance, but also share several commonalities. But, for academics beyond these regions (e.g., those in east Asia) it hits you smack in the face how US-centric so many parts of academia are.
You consider that “rigging the system”? The kind of bias you’re describing doesn’t even have to be intentional! It’s not as though people think to themselves “This will perpetuate American hegemony!” when they make a Simpsons reference in their papers.
I agree that such biases give an unearned advantage to American academics, but describing them as “rigging”—a kind of intentional injustice that calls for compensation—is just confused.
This is just one of many examples of how various key institutions that are US-dominated “rig” things in favour of the US. If you don’t like the term “rig” then use another term, the general point I am making still applies. However, one important thing missing from your description of the phenomenon is that various powerful players choose to accept and propagate this system when they could and should do otherwise. For example, the editors and editorial boards at leading journals that are US-centric could acknowledge that, if they want to justify their standing as one of the leading journals in their field, then they need to reduce their US centrism. But, they don’t do this. Likewise, the various US-dominated institutions that support the elite status of these journals, such as professional bodies that publish list of the top journals in their discipline (something that is common in many disciplines), could do the right thing and count US-centrism against a journal’s status. But they choose not to do this.
This makes me really sad and ashamed as well. I teach philosophy at a university in China. Last year, I found myself advising my students against planning on graduate study in the US in case Harris did not win the election. While I do have a couple of former students still studying in the US, others were able to finish their programs last year. The good news is that recent philosophy graduates from my uni got into great programs in Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
It’s just so sad and shocking (but not surprising) to see what the US is becoming.
That is very sad. The reddit post is worth reading. Start with suspicious agents and very quickly you are reading about a full search of electronic devices…including private messages. Whoa.
I didn’t grow up traveling internationally and started grad school pretty young, so I hadn’t seen much of the world. But through school, I’ve made lasting friendships with people from all over—people with such different lives, educations, and customs than mine. I think a lot of Americans, like me, grew up landlocked and only really got to know the world when it came to them. It makes me sad to think there will be fewer chances for those kinds of friendships. Or fewer students raising their hands in class to share those experiences.
This is enraging .
This is not much of a solution, but it seems notable that this happened at an airport in texas. It might be good for foreign students in a place like that to fly first to somewhere less unsympathetic to immigration like San Francisco, and go through immigration there, and then fly domestically to their destination. Just a thought.
Is there evidence that SFO border agents are “less unsympathetic to immigration” than agents at Texas ports of entry? They might be more used to it, especially from Asia, and so might interpret some facts about, say, a Chinese student with more context knowledge than the average Texas CBP agent might, but that doesn’t make them any “less unsympathetic”. Nor does it make entry any less risky if your case has any of the features that would trigger secondary inspection, the rules for which are determined by a federal agency, not state authorities. Individual discretion does play a role, but then insofar as it does, generalities about California vs Texas probably have little predictive power.
In other words, don’t make travel plans based on stereotypes about different states unless you have good statistical evidence for differential treatment between different ports of entry.
By the way, these sorts of stories predate Trump 2.0 are seem to occur at all kinds of airports, from California to Texas to Massachusetts:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/20/chinese-students-in-us-tell-of-chilling-interrogations-and-deportations
No, there is probably not evidence for this unless you count as evidence the fact that people who work in the Bay Area are less hostile to immigrants than people who live in Houston, of which there probably is ample evidence. Feel free to do some research yourself. Personally I think it’s basically obvious.
So the evidence is vibes?
Fallacy of division!
Do you think ICE agents are also more open-minded in the Bay Area than in Houston? Do you know that Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the US?
First of all this is US Customs and Border, not ICE.
Second, yes I absolutely do think that. People do not go into that job because they love stopping immigration, they do it because they need a paycheck. (Indeed, until very recently it did not even have that connotation.) By and large the officers are being general pool of workers with the strength of biases they already have.
–
This is all about minimizing risks, if the stakes were higher then a dearth of empirical evidence would matter more
Upon reaching the front of the line, a foreign student could go to stall 1, or stall 2 where the agent has a confederate flag tattoo. You: where’s the study showing that agents with confederate flag tattoos are stricter? That’s just vibes!
I think Phoenix is asking about ICE agents because you seem to think all subgroups in CA will be more sympathetic than their counterparts in TX.
I plainly clarified that I did not think that in the very comment you’re replying to.
My point is that you don’t have good evidence at all that choosing ports of entry on the basis of such assumptions will minimize risk or that these are warranted assumptions to begin with. And so you end up making several invalid inferences. You shouldn’t advise anyone to think like this. Stereotypes and vaguely educated guesses are not helpful. The stakes are actually high as one can see from this case.
Finally, again, since this is directly relevant to the case at hand: what makes you think CBP employees in Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the nation, are less sympathetic to immigrants?
You have a basic misunderstanding. Obviously, or so I thought, the stakes relevant to our discussion are the price and inconvenience of flying through SFO vis-à-vis Houston. When costs are relatively minimal, it makes sense to rely on educated guesses. If you don’t do so you would never leave your house
Texas’s political climate is obsessed with strict immigration enforcement. It would be surprising if this didn’t shape CBP’s institutional culture locally. The Bay Area’s pro-immigrant environment indirectly pressures officers at SFO to behave less harshly. That is my basic reasoning here, which seems compelling enough to justify adjusting your stop-overs, yes. Call it vibes if you want, makes no difference.
I think you’re deeply confused about how federal agencies operate but let’s leave it at that. This isn’t very productive. If someone’s reading, I just hope they don’t take your advice, which is about as meaningful as deciding based on a coin flip.
Is there something we can do for or on behalf of the student? Is this a legally acceptable way to treat visitors to the US?
As long as it’s not projected to be a divisive issue, the board of the APA could issue a statement on our behalf.
The question was whether there’s something we can do for the student. An APA issuing a statement doesn’t do anything. (This is true wether it’s about Ukraine, Gaza, or this.)
Have we even heard from the philosophy department or UH? Assuming the APA should say anything, which I have no considered opinion about, it seems like we’d want department or university to make a statement first.
I feel really sad about this news, given that I personally know the student. At the same time, as a Chinese student who just came back to America, I think it’s noteworthy for every international student that the city you choose to enter the US does matter. I entered America at LAX. The process went very smoothly. The officer didn’t even ask me one single question. Try to avoid airports in Texas. Prioritize those in blue states.
I would be very cautious before generalizing this piece of advice, also suggested by Amy above, let alone acting on it. CBP agents are federal agents; state politics has very little, if any, effect on their guidelines and enforcement. It might be that blue states agents tend to be more sympathetic than red states agents, but it might not, and I’d like to see some evidence before believing it. Other factors such as traffic volume and local priorities (e.g., drugs, counterfeit goods, tourism) are much likelier to determine conduct than how people vote in those states.
Just a couple of points, after which I don’t plan to return to this discussion:
It strikes me as quite odd that so many things are just ignored here, and that not a single commenter so far seems to have even considered the possibility that the student was denied entry for legitimate reasons.
I’m not saying that he was. Perhaps this was a case of blatant injustice. Perhaps it wasn’t. I don’t know all the relevant details of the student’s case, and neither do any of you, I’m pretty sure. We don’t even know his full name. We’ve got his account of the reasons behind it, and an excerpt of the interview. That’s it.
The AAUP has warned us about malign infiltration of the Chinese government into US education through various means, including Confucius Institutes.
The student in this case was, as he himself tells us, asked whether he had ever joined the CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association). The student denied that he had, but the Customs and Border Protection agent pointed out to him that he had clearly joined the group, and hence had answered falsely: an app on his phone showed this. The agent asked the student whether he knew “that the CSSA is funded by the Chinese government and is responsible for stopping any speech in the U.S. that slanders the Chinese government,” but the student’s first reaction was “to laugh.”
Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia page for the CSSA (with links to the original sources): “Journalists and human rights groups have described CSSAs as government-organized non-governmental organizations used to surveil and report on Chinese students abroad.[4][5] According to the United States Department of State, “the CCP created the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the CCP’s stance.”[6]”
Here’s an article from Foreign Policy on the Chinese government’s operations through the cover of the CSSA, in which many anonymous Chinese students express concerns about the pressures they have come under.
Is it really so obvious that this is a laughing matter?
Would it be very surprising if a student visiting the US from China were pressured by the Chinese government, perhaps in part through organizations like the CSSA, to act against US interests for the benefit of China? Is this suggestion so preposterous that there is no need to discuss it before jumping to the conclusion that the US had no good reason to deny that student admission?
If so, could someone please explain why?
Just to explain why this is really so obvious a laughing matter. CSSA in many universities offer lots of service to incoming students from China, including picking them up from the airport, driving them to banks to set up a local bank account, finding housing, etc. Many Chinese international students join those WeChat groups organized by CSSA so that they can get relevant information about these services *while they are still physically in China*. But it doesn’t mean that they are the official members of CSSA in any meaningful sense.
When I teach students who are foreign nationals, whether from China or elsewhere, my default presupposition is that they are not spies reporting back to their home governments for nefarious political purposes. Call me an optimist.
True, it doesn’t follow from the mere fact that a student joins a CSSA group (and then tells a Customs and Border Protection agent that he didn’t join it) that he’s complicit in sabotage we know the Chinese government engages in using students like him.
But why assume that the CBP agent had no further information that led to the decision? The student didn’t tell us anything more. And… that’s it?
Again: I’m not saying the decision was right or fair. My point is that we’re in no position to make that judgment, as far as I can see. And yet, pretty well everyone here is assuming that.
Joining a wechat group (much like a loosely organized facebook group or email ListServ) is not the same as joining the actual organization–which is why I think the student truthfully denied his membership of the CSSA. And the officer took issue with it because he probably assumed one has to be a member of the organization to be in this online group. It is also the case that Chinese students (perhaps Korean and Japanese too) love online groups–an individual can easily be in 20 plus groups even if they were never active or never read messages in those groups. It is more like listserv one subscribe to to gather information. That’s why people familiar with the context would find this “evidence” so ridiculous.
Like ‘Another Chinese Student’, you are confusing two different issues in my post, and making the error of assuming that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence (i.e. the fallacy of appeal to ignorance).
Issue 1 (the main issue that has been overlooked in this thread): Was the CBP agent wrong to refuse entry to this student?
We seem to know that one thing that the CBP agent discussed with the student was the student’s CSSA membership. We do NOT know, and in fact we have no good reason to believe, that that was the only basis of the CBP agent’s decision. That being the case, we clearly need more evidence before we are in a position to judge that the decision was unfair or unreasonable.
Issue 2: Was the student right to laugh at the CBP agent when the agent asked whether he “knew that the CSSA is funded by the Chinese government and is responsible for stopping any speech in the U.S. that slanders the Chinese government”?
Again: we have plenty of evidence that these claims about the CSSA are in fact true (see my original post). And the fact that CSSA groups also provide a number of useful services to Chinese nationals studying in the US, and that it is possible for Chinese nationals to join CSSA groups for non-political reasons, does not negate a single word in that quote I just gave — again — from the CBP officer.
I asked whether it is clear that the CBP’s statements to the student about the CSSA are laughable and obviously false. Nothing you or anyone else has presented here gives reason for thinking that they are.
I also asked whether it is preposterous to think that the Chinese government might have put pressure on the student to act in ways that would be harmful to US interests while in the country. Nobody has answered that question, either.
I also asked whether we have any reason for thinking that that possibility is not worth considering before we settle on the conclusion that the CBP agent’s decision was wrong — settle on it, again, in the absence of who knows how much seemingly important information that the CBP agent had access to and we do not. I don’t see how any of this answers that, either.
And with that, I will try to do better not to be sucked back into this discussion. I came to see whether the evidence of wrongdoing here really was as woefully inadequate as it seemed, and I think I got my answer.
Call me crazy but whether someone rightfully laughed at something or not does not strike me as grounds for any sort of government action, let alone deportation. So I am not sure why you are harping on this point so much. When it comes to whether you get deported or not, the American government should not be keeping track of what you laugh at.
“Call me crazy but whether someone rightfully laughed at something or not does not strike me as grounds for any sort of government action, let alone deportation.”
If you think my position is that laughing at the comment justified his being denied entry, then you clearly didn’t read my comment very well.
If you think that he was in fact denied entry for laughing, then you also didn’t read his own story very well.
I guess I’m having trouble figuring out why it matters that he laughed if his laughing doesn’t justify some sort of behavior on the part of the government. Your original point seems like it’s maybe about whether this is “a laughing matter.” To me, whether or not it’s a laughing matter is irrelevant, because laughing at something that is not a laughing matter does not provide cause to deport someone, or cause for anything else the government might be inclined to do to someone. So it seems neither here nor there whether this is a laughing matter. But maybe there is some other reason to care that it’s a laughing matter, such that the laughter could at least potentially be something to get upset about in some context, but not something that could serve as a basis for governmental action? Or do you think that laughing could be the basis for the government doing something, albeit not deporting? (Like serving as an evidential basis for concluding, in conjunction with other evidence, that someone ought to be deported?) What exactly is the point you’re trying to make about the laughing?
I think this is pretty clear from what I said. The student found it laughable that the officer said that “the CSSA is funded by the Chinese government and is responsible for stopping any speech in the U.S. that slanders the Chinese government,” But, as I pointed out, and I gave sources for this, that does seem to be correct. It’s odd to laugh at something that’s correct. The student, in writing this account, seemed to presume that we, too, would find it preposterous that the officer would say something so ludicrous about the CSSA. And indeed, nobody here pointed out that what the officer said did not seem laughable at all, but in fact seems clearly to be true.
No doubt, the CSSA also provides Chinese students visiting the US with useful information, as others have said in response to this. I hope I can presume that the average Daily Nous reader is at least capable of understanding that the very same organization can do some helpful things for Chinese students while at the same time clamping down on speech in the US that criticizes the Chinese government. And yet, if one recognizes that basic fact, then it should be clear that this response does nothing to rebut what the officer said, or to make it laughable that he said that.
That’s what I said. Now I’ve said it again. I hope I can trust that anyone can easily see that it does not follow from this that people should be deported, or punished, or written up somewhere, or anything else, for laughing at things. But I should probably have learned by now that however little I hope for here, it’s always too much.
If your only point is that it’s odd to laugh at something that’s correct, I think there are at least three salient things to say in response.
1) So?
2) Presumably the student was laughing at the notion that he was some sort of covert agent for the insidious Chinese Communist Party who applied for a Master’s degree in Philosophy for the purpose of spying on other Chinese students in America and so on. It’s like if I showed up at the Chinese border wearing a Female Body Inspector t-shirt and they started quizzing me about whether I’m a federal agent. Like no dude, I’m not in the FBI just because my shirt says FBI, and this MA student is not a Chinese spy because he’s in a WeChat group.
3) People often laugh at odd things when they are nervous. I do not think it is a stretch to imagine why someone might be nervous in this context.
Point #1 could be elaborated on quite a bit, with for instance:
1a) The implicature of raising the idea that the laughter is odd is that its oddness is relevant to the conversation somehow, e.g. as grounds for deportation or whatever, so this brings us back to my original point, or
1b) Surely odd people are allowed into the United States of America, or
1c) Oddness to me is as often praiseworthy or neutral as it is deplorable and so unless the goal is to offer kudos to this student in a rather roundabout way, I’m curious why this is being discussed, or
1d) I can’t even tell if the student literally laughed, or if his first response was to be inclined to laugh, so are we really even talking about something that happened, or
1e.) etc.
But as you can tell from the various elaborations, I can’t really see why this is a relevant point in the conversation at all, so I’m not sure the topic is important enough to merit the discussion it could otherwise engender.
Justin, I think you’re not understanding what a few replies stated to you. On the narrow point of the student being a part of CSSA, joining a group chat isn’t formal membership. The border agent assumed he/she is a member because they are in the group chat, but the student denies being a member of the CSSA.
The point is he didn’t join the CSSA. Joining a group chat is not the same thing, obviously. I remember being in undergrad and being in several group chats of religious/ethnic groups. It didn’t make me a formal member which had a separate process.
Once again:
Do you have any reason to believe that the CBP agent’s decision to deny entry to the student was based entirely on the fact that the student had that app on his phone?
If so, then what is that reason?
well, I thought the unspoken rule of the internet (since he says/she says) is that we believe the individual who posts the story until/unless counter evidence emerges, or otherwise something important is at stake by believing the individual.
Even then, it is not our job to question the “plaintiff”.
“thought the unspoken rule of the internet (since he says/she says) is that we believe the individual who posts the story until/unless counter evidence emerges, or otherwise something important is at stake by believing the individual.”
Of the internet?! What?
Of all possible rules for such cases, why on earth that one??
One thing that is really nice about being a government agency in a country slouching toward authoritarianism is that when you do something that strikes many people as unjust, you can appeal to secret evidence which you cannot reveal for a variety of bureaucratic or national security reasons.
Then, precisely because they’ve refused to tell us the full story, the Convenient Cartesian skeptics can come along and point out that, since they’ve refused to tell us the story – and they’ve told us that they’ve refused to tell us the story for good reasons that they also can’t tell us – we can’t definitively prove that the action was unjust.
This is the attempted exploitation of epistemic hypervigilance. And it is precisely this that allows people to (rightly) say that we can’t be *certain* that the action was unjust. And then those people (wrongly) infer that the right inference to make is to systematically suspend judgment in cases like this, which allows the injustice to continue indefinitely.
Can we be *certain* that that is what is happening in this case? No, by the very structure of the scenario we can’t. But I know where *I* think the burden of proof lies.
Legally, the burden of proof in an immigration cases lies with the would-be immigrant. And I don’t know why it should be otherwise. By the way, I say that as a non-citizen resident in the US myself.
The student is free to retain a lawyer and argue that the decision was wrong and that it should be reversed. I can imagine some case in which it would come out through that process that the decision was wholly arbitrary. I could see, in that case, why people would reasonably reach the conclusion that the agent had acted wrongly.
But we don’t have any of that evidence. All we have is one side of the story. Forget about shifting the burden of proof to the other side: you’re not even waiting for that other side to have its chance to present any evidence before jumping to your conclusion.
So I think according to you the possible scenarios include:
1) This immigration official deported (at least) three people that day without sufficient evidence that they were subversive Chinese infiltrators with ill intent
2) China was stupid enough to route three of its new spies through Houston that day and not bribe or otherwise deal with the one guy whose job it was to let them through or keep them out (and stupid enough not to conceal the secret evidence this guy was privy to, stupid enough not to tell this agent to delete the relevant WeChat group from his phone, etc.)
3) China is actually flooding the USA with so many spies disguised as students that this guy in Houston only caught a small portion of them who entered the US that day, and many others arrived in America that day at many other airports, perhaps slipping by less vigilant border guards
4) This student/maybe spy is lying about the other people at the airport who met a similar fate (and hoping the US does not expose the lie, because it could if it wanted to) – in fact he was the only one deported that day
5) Something else?
Do you have any thoughts about the probabilities of these various possibilities? Or should we be Pyrrhonians about, like, everything until the facts come in (presumably they never will in this case)?
Try this:
1. Consider how much evidence you think someone should require before deciding that someone you’re inclined to oppose (like, for instance, a CBP officer) has done something wrong.
2. Consider how much evidence some think someone should require before deciding that someone you’re inclined to support (like, for instance the student in this case) has done something wrong.
The social pressures in the dominant in-group to which you belong point in different directions here, and most people absorb those pressures and make them their own gut feelings. So people who approach these questions on the basis of gut feelings will end up with very different answers to the two sorts of questions.
For instance, people who have absorbed the values of the dominant in-group will be inclined to believe, before even considering the evidence or lack thereof, that
(a) the student was turned back due to insufficient evidence by the CBP agent — that far more evidence would be needed to condemn the student
(b) we can tell from nothing more than the student’s report that the CBP agent acted wrongly.
But this should jump out at us, rationally, as a sign that we had better slow down: it doesn’t seem kosher to rush to judgment that the CBP agent rushed to judgment, etc.
Insisting on the highest standard of evidence both ways gets us an implausible result, it’s true. So does rushing to judgment: that lets you condemn the CBP agent, but by the same token it suggests that the CBP agent didn’t act so badly by following the same sort of maxim.
Some more nuanced practice is necessary, and perhaps the easiest way to get there is to join a conversation between sincere people who are inclined in opposite directions, and shuffle our way to the right approach by trying out principles and considering their shortcomings, all the while sincerely considering the opposing viewpoint.
A philosophy blog seems to be a great place for that kind of discussion, but it only works if enough people are willing to use it for that purpose.
I basically agree with Preston, but I think we shouldn’t be too quick to stigmatize “epistemic hypervigilance.” Yes, it can be taken too far, and in fact I think Justin K is taking it too far in this instance. But if there’s nobody willing to say, “Well, actually,” then it won’t be long before we go off the epistemic rails.
(Notably, the Republican Party doesn’t have many people willing to say “Well, actually” these days. Indeed, the few dissenters left in Congress are just giving up.)
Also, flipside of this norm: the people saying “well, actually” should pick their battles and try very hard to be reasonable.
I wonder if the back and forth on the ‘laughing’ bit that’s being debated in this comment thread might benefit from a reminder from earlier – that this text was auto-translated by AI, and we really have no way of determining whether or not things happened exactly as this text describes, given that AI is capable of hallucinations and embellishments.
My skepticism of the fairness or appropriateness of the CBP’s decision here rests on two things: 1, that I assume the University of Houston – who admitted this student with a full scholarship – is capable of determining who would be a fit student to study with them, and 2, that the CBP now has a well-documented pattern of deporting people with very reasonable (non-nefarious) circumstances, for keeping people in ICE facilities in inhumane conditions, and generally being over-zealous in their treatment of people moving across the border.
The ‘back and forth on the ‘laughing’ bit’ was just someone who hadn’t read my comment and thought I was saying something vastly different from what I said. If you go back and read what I did in fact say, you’ll see that the laughing part plays no role whatsoever in the reasoning.
No doubt, as you say, the University of Houston is in a pretty good position to determine whether the student would be a fit person to study with them. But of course, that’s a red herring, since the reason why the student was denied entry was not that he was deemed to be a bad fit for his academic program.
The other reasoning you present here — The CBP has at times been found to be over-zealous in keeping people out of the country; therefore, anyone kept out of the country by the CBP was likely to be treated unfairly — at least it makes the logic clearer. Some As have been found to be Bs; this is an A; therefore, we can be reasonably sure that this is a B. In that case, the details of this case don’t matter: all the work is done by the generalization we are meant to accept before hearing the facts.
It sounds as though that’s all there is to it. Thanks for clarifying.
I don’t think it’s a red herring – what I mean to say is, if this student was a malicious actor sent on behalf of the Chinese government, I assume there would have been something odd about their application materials – akin to the weird job applications and behavior of job applicants from North Korea trying to get remote jobs in the US – that U of Houston would have noticed.
If your suggestion is that simply being a Chinese international student is enough to make you so at risk of the Chinese government using you as a pawn as to render you dangerous and unfit for entry into the US, then it would seem like we’ve got reason to deny all Chinese international students entry into the US. But that strikes me as unjustified.
Overall, I get your point – we don’t know all of the details of the specific case, and perhaps there’s something more nefarious at play that we don’t know about. I concede that’s a possibility, that this could be an A which is not a B. But yes, my hunch is that people’s frustration with this particular case is that if fits in with an objectionable pattern of over-reach by the CBP.
The year is 2029, at the beginning of Trump’s third term. Masked federal agents storm into the philosophy department and arrest several professors on charges of violating a recently passed law against disseminating woke ideology.
Professor 1: This is an outrage!
Student 1: This is fascism!
DN commenter: Fellow philosophers, you are just ASSUMING there are no reasons for these agents to be doing this. Indeed you are JUMPING to a conclusion, without even waiting for the other side to have a CHANCE to present its evidence. It doesn’t follow that because SOME federal agents have wrongly detained innocent people on trumped up charges that THESE agents are doing so. That’s bad logic! Furthermore, some professors ARE disseminating woke ideology, and the state has the right to enforce its laws. The burden of proof is on the accused! How sadly typical of you all to no–
Federal agents: [hogtie everyone and drag them to jail, set fire to the department]
Scene 2: In a prison cell.
Irrationalist Professor: [gestures at the DN commenter] It’s all because of this jerk! Didn’t I keep saying that our only hope of preventing this was to throw all the standards of rigor and rationality out the window? Didn’t I keep saying that we all had to switch off our brains and turn all our discussions that aren’t about coffee makers into one-sided cheerleading sessions? And now look at what’s happened!
Chorus of cellmates: But we did listen! We did switch off our minds, and came to our conclusions on the basis of social conformity alone! We refused to allow our curiosity to tempt us into considering other possibilities! We extinguished our self-doubt! We showed up on DN to ‘like’ the comments we knew we were supposed to agree with, and never read the other comments: if you don’t believe us, go back and look at how wildly we misinterpreted them! We did our best!
Irrationalist Professor: It may have been your best, but it wasn’t good enough. The only thing that could have prevented this outcome was 100% ideological conformity. We got very close — really, we did — but this damned fool wouldn’t stop raising doubts about things and considering alternative interpretations. Something or other about the fact that we’re philosophers: I don’t know exactly, since I made a point of never listening too closely! But we begged him to stop, and exerted plenty of social pressure, and still he refused. If he had only stopped reasoning for a few years, our resistance would have been unstoppable! But noooo!
I stand up straight, forcing a smile that reaches my eyes. Authoritative but non-threatening. Civil. “Thank you for our past conversations”, I begin. “I have carefully considered your position on its merits and I really understand your —
perspective”, I manage to get out as he shoves me into the gas chamber. “It’s not his fault”, I mutter to myself. “God damn you to hell, Oberlin College.”
If only Martin Niemöller had had the benefit of such a wise DN commenter; he’d surely have substituted “I did not speak out” with “I urged everyone to start reasoning and consider the Nazi’s alternative interpretations; alas, no one did, the fools, so I had to do it myself”.
But thank God I rigorously upheld the reasoning standards of PHIL 102: Intro to Logic. By studiously noting that an A statement doesn’t follow from an I statement, the right views (mine) were able to be defended from all the endless crowds of people saying that we should abandon critical thinking. Endless crowds, so many people, everyone saying it, over and over again. But not me. I stand on the side of facts and logic which is why my opinions are always right.
Some raised the possibility that my penchant for interpreting others as if they were making elementary mistakes in reasoning was just evidence that I was misrepresenting their reasoning, that not every inference can be modeled with the tools of PHIL 102: Intro to Logic. But that’s ridiculous. Why would I have taught so many PHIL 102: Intro to Logic courses if more sophisticated analysis was possible? A, some have said, pathologically literal or else freewheelingly inventive reading of what others say so that I can read them all as committing elementary fallacies hasn’t failed me yet. Look at how many arguments I’ve declared myself the winner of!
Come on, folks.
For what it’s worth, I vote for this place not becoming X/Bluesky. Mocking commenters with sarcastic caricatures degrades the conversation and poisons the site.
I get that people get frustrated, but did you expect some cathartic episode in which your interlocuter bends the knee in shame? Just go for “winning” on the merits, trust your readers, and leave it at that.
I hear the concern. I also agree that looking for or expecting catharsis in the way you describe is a dead end. So no, I’m not doing that. I’m not sure if what I wrote degrades the conversation or poisons the site. I don’t want to do either of those things. One thing that I think does degrade a conversation is to enter it with the posture that you are Socrates and everyone else is part of a mob. That’s not meant to impute ill will; it holds whether that posture is intentional or not. I assume everyone here means well. Finally, there is a substantive point that my vignette is meant to illustrate. It’s not merely a joke. But if people find that it degrades the conversation or poisons the site, I respect that, and it should go.
I think your comment and message were nice. The following ones (jointly) may be too much and a bit unnecessary. (Though each of them was really funny.)
Oh, for sure. That’s why The Republic is the most degraded conversation in history.
Yes, except it was Plato who (allegedly) wrote that.
Praise be the internet, we now have the benefit of having our own Socrates on record.
I love the Republic as much as the next person, so I’ll clarify: I meant real conversations with our peers, not fictional dialogues.
I saw this post and I have to say it caused me some anxiety. I’m a Chilean citizen and I’m finishing my bachelors in philosophy in a Chilean University (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) with the hope of then attending a graduate program somewhere else. As I’m sure you experienced yourselves, even though I’ve done pretty well in my bachelors (I most likely will be graduating with my Uni’s equivalent of a summa cum laude. It is not my intention to brag, but I guess it could be useful to what follows) the process of researching possible programs to apply to has been nerve-racking. The tuition costs, extremely low acceptance rate plus the usual ‘will I amount to anything?’ all play a major part in this, but I guess that’s the norm.
What I suspect has not historically been as common is my fear of not being admitted into the US even if I got into a competitive program. Up to this point, my fear was directed at not getting a visa or being deported for being Latino even if I got one. It never crossed my mind that I would never get to leave the airport even if I were to get a visa.
I post this comment with the hope of getting some advice on my situation, since many of you seem to be a lot more knowledgeable on the current climate than myself. My plan is to apply to as many universities as possible and I have curated list of strong institutions in my field (metaphysics). I don’t have any party affiliations and am not an active political player, but neither was Gu I guess.
Do you think I should abstain from applying to US programs? Or maybe applying nonetheless and getting legal advice in case I make it into one? Is that overkill? I’m looking forward to your comments and I thank you in advance.
I don’t have any advice except to stop worrying about tuition costs, because any program worth attending will have negative costs: they will pay you to come. Obviously that’s not a response to your main worry, but I think it’s important advice to get. When I was a student I too had no idea that this is how graduate study works, and it makes a pretty big difference in terms of deciding what to do!
Daniel, thank you so much for your response. I was aware of the funding packages most US universities offer. Sadly, as far as I know, universities in Europe don’t have that same level of support, at least when it comes to MAs. I’m looking for scholarships and I’m hopeful I will get on. I guess I should stop worrying about the financial aspect, since I should be able to secure funding if I get into a prestigious institution.