tibicen

For twenty-mumble years, we've been going to the Amherst Early Music Festival, a week-long summer workshop with classes taught for (largely) amateurs like us by some of the best early-musicians in the world. (It's actually two weeks long, with different faculty and different sets of classes each week; we usually come for only the second week, which usually has more of a Medieval/Renaissance and less of a Baroque leaning.)

This year they had to cancel or re-staff a lot of their classes because every single European faculty member was denied a short-term work visa. I talked to a Long-Island-born teacher who lives in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband (from whom I've taken classes in previous years): she was able to attend the workshop because she has dual US/Dutch citizenship, but he wasn't.

I guess I should be relieved that it's not only "brown" people being denied entry to the US: these are British, Dutch, French, Swiss, German, all highly educated professionals and all looking extremely Caucasian. But it's pretty silly. These folks have homes and families and full-time jobs and established careers in Europe; they're not at high risk for overstaying their visas and becoming "illegal aliens", who we've been assured want only a life of raping, looting, pillaging, having anchor babies, living fat off the generosity of the US taxpayer, and eating our house pets.

I don't know what rationale was given for any of these denials. It's possible that several of them (being, in my experience, decent human beings who care about other human beings) had made one or more social-media posts criticizing the Trump administration, and that was enough to make them threats to US national security. Or perhaps it was that they were to be paid by a US-based organization funded by mostly-American students, adding a few thousand dollars to the US's trade deficit.