My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress.

I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI taught me how alternative realities, having very different interpretations of the same factual events, can lead to huge misunderstandings and unpleasant encounters.

In 2022, the last COVID year, I was expecting a visiting student from a top ranked Chinese University as new member of our team. Hosting a visiting student from abroad entails a lot of paperwork at MIT, to obtain approval inside MIT, and initiate the process for a visiting student visa which the student can get from an US embassy in his home country through a visa interview. In the past I had had dozens of research visitors from Chinese universities, both graduate students and more senior researchers such as post-docs and visiting professors. It had always been clear that the Chinese visitors at US universities were junior partners in research, whose main goal for a visit at top US universities was to learn and acquire as much knowledge and skills as possible. While the process in the 2010s had been quite straightforward, under the presidency of Donald Trump the process had gotten increasingly hostile and onerous for both visitors and host universities, as the US government had started to treat the Chinese more as enemies and less as junior research and business partners. For Chinese applicants in fields such as computer science and AI which were considered relevant for the military, it had gotten quite hard to get a student visa. As a researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management, my work making use of AI to measure wellbeing and happiness straddled both computer science and management science.  This visiting student therefore had asked me in his email to assign as his focus management science, and not AI, to increase his chances to pass the visa interview. As this was a decision not for me, but to be made by the MIT visiting student office, I just forwarded all his communication to the MIT administration without any comment – which it turns out in retrospective was the only “crime” I committed. MIT subsequently processed all his paperwork, and the student obtained his visa at a US embassy in China. However, on the evening of the day the student was supposed to arrive in Boston, I got a desperate phone call from his father, who told me that his son had gone missing on his trip from China, over Frankfurt, to Boston. It seemed that the student had made it to Boston but then had mysteriously disappeared. I alerted the MIT administration, and we sent out the MIT police to search for him in the apartment he had remotely rented, and in the MIT offices and streets of Cambridge, to no avail. Only next day I got a phone call from his father, who told me that his son had resurfaced at Frankfurt airport in Germany.  We then found out that at immigration at the airport in Boston they had put him into detention, questioned him for hours, rejected his visa, searched his laptop and phone, and sent him back to Frankfurt. As this was still COVID time, and the Olympics in Beijing were ongoing, it took the poor student six weeks to get back to China, as during the Olympic winter games the Chinese let nobody enter China except active participants in the Olympic games. First, without a Schengen visa he was stuck for almost two weeks at Frankfurt airport in the international terminal with no chance to leave the terminal, and then for another three weeks in Thailand, until he finally was let back in into China.

However, the big surprise for me came afterwards, when I tried to fly back into Boston from Zurich to Boston the next time after the Chinese student’s adventures. I got a first warning when I got an email that my global entry card had been invalidated, which had allowed me to enter at US airports without having to talk to an immigration officer. I didn’t think too much about it, assuming that this was somehow related to Covid regulations. However, when I was to pass through the immigration booth at Boston’s Logan airport, I was pulled aside by the officer, and after some wait escorted by two plainclothes officers into an iron cell, where I was seated on one side of a desk, with the two officials sitting on the other side. They also took away my phone and laptop and forced me to give them the passwords. I was then told that I had committed visa fraud by helping my potential Chinese graduate student visitor to wrongly answer the visa question about his study subject. They told me that it would have been my patriotic duty to declare him as a student in the field of AI when passing on his application to the MIT visiting student office. Obviously, they had found this out by searching his laptop and reading the emails we had exchanged. They also told me that they had found out that I had had many Chinese collaborators in the past – my dozens of visitors from China of the previous decade which made me suspicious. These previous visitors showed up in my Google Scholar profile as co-authors of my research papers. I tried to explain that this was precisely the reason why I had invited these scholars, to collaborate with me on research and publish papers together. After having interrogated me for two hours, and searched all my belongings, I got my laptop and phone back, and was let go. As can be imagined I did not sleep well that night, and next morning I called MIT HR and the head of our research center at MIT. They were  very supportive, as this was not the first time this had happened to MIT researchers collaborating with Chinese academics. In fact, a highly respected senior MIT professor of Chinese descent had just been put into investigative custody. MIT was thus not very surprised about my experience and provided me with a lawyer to assist me in my trials and tribulations with the US Department of Homeland Security. Sadly, I found out that these were far from over, as a few weeks later when I was trying to board the plane to fly from Boston to Europe, two plain-clothes agents were waiting for me. They asked me again for my laptop and my phone, informing me that they had good news and bad news for me. The good news was that I would still be allowed to board the plane. The bad news was that they would be taking away my laptop and phone and requested again my passwords for phone and laptop. Highly upset and disturbed I was finally allowed to board the plane without my phone and laptop. As I was supposed to teach a course online next day, as soon as I landed in Switzerland I went to a computer store to buy a new laptop and get myself a new phone SIM card. I then called MIT IT support, which reset my password, so at least I could log into my computer and access email again. The next day my confiscated laptop and phone already arrived in Switzerland by carrier, but by then I had already spent 2000 dollars for a new laptop. I subsequently called the Swiss consul general in Boston to complain. He was very understanding but told me that there was nothing he could do.

Unfortunately, my suffering did not end at this point, as the next time I flew into Boston, I was again pulled out at immigration and questioned for an hour and searched. I told this to my MIT lawyer, who then spoke with the state attorney for Boston, who promised that this would stop. What happened was the opposite, as the next day I got a visit from two FBI agents in my house in Cambridge. For the better part of the following year, whenever I flew into the US, I was pulled out at immigration and questioned and searched. It only stopped after about a year, when at JFK airport I told the immigration officer doing the questioning that I found this totally unfair, as it was obvious that they only wanted me to stop working with Chinese academics, which I had done by now. Worn out by the rough treatment, at this point, I had no Chinese visitors anymore, they had now all returned to China, and I had stopped accepting new Chinese visitors. It seems that this outburst stopped my being questioned and searched at US airports. For me the consequence of this harrowing experience was that after 22 years in the US, I sold my house in Cambridge and returned permanently back to Switzerland.