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Afghan Girl Roboticists Denied US Visas (bbc.com)
Three anonymous readers share a similar report: An all-girl team of roboticists will watch their creations compete in a US competition via Skype after being denied visas to enter the country. President Trump recently ordered a ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries, but Afghanistan was not included on the list. Teams from Iran, Sudan and Syria -- which are on the list -- did manage to enter the country. The six-member team watched their ball-sorting robot compete in Washington DC via a video link from their hometown of Herat, in western Afghanistan. "We still don't know the reason why we were not granted visas, because other countries participating in the competition have been given visas," Fatemah Qaderyan, 14, told Reuters.
Exactly. The consular officer probably had concerns about them not returning to Afghanistan (or perhaps their chaperone) and that is then most likely explanation. Visitor visas are not a right, contrary to what many in the tech community seem to think. They require a finding by the consular officer that the visitor has sufficient ties to their native country that they will return to it at the end of their stay. A child with no job, parents with a less than ideal situation, in a devastated country, would have a hard time establishing this, and it gets worse if they are bringing their parents as a chaperone. Sadly, people get denied visitor visas everyday. It is part of life in a non-visa waiver country. It isn't just muslim countries.
So it has nothing to do with Trump's ban on those countries has it?
US immigration is a law unto itself and usually pretty arbitrary. I realise a lot of the world's problems are Trump's fault, but not all of them are.
This is at least the fourth story I've seen posted here where the "muslim ban" is referenced while in the same article it specifically states that the travel ban has nothing to do with why this happened. Such a BS biased tactic on the part of the editing staff both here and at the various sites that reported this.