Proving the "War on Terror" is a fraud:
"Foreign student enrollment rebounds from post-9/11 slump" by Associated Press December 9, 2007
BERKELEY, Calif. - The number of international students attending American colleges and universities has nearly rebounded from a slump that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks, which triggered tough new visa restrictions and closer monitoring of foreign scholars.
During the 2006-2007 academic year, nearly 583,000 international students took classes at US schools, just 3,000 fewer than the record enrollment set just before the crackdown began, according to a recent report from the State Department and the nonprofit Institute of International Education.
Vance Gram, 26, a graduate student from Norway who is studying political science at the University of California, Berkeley, said the nation is more welcoming to international students than a few years ago.
Gram, who has been in and out of the United States for years:
"There's been something of a release from the grip of fear and distrust of anything foreign, and America is more relaxed now than even two, three years ago, never mind five."
Time for ANOTHER FALSE-FLAG BLACK-OP then, huh?
The enrollment figures were welcomed by government and academic officials who have worked to attract foreigners.
Tom Farrell, deputy assistant secretary for academic programs at the State Department, which released the report last month:
"This is a hugely important economic investment as well as an investment in human capital. We believe that people who study and learn here with us are better able to work with us later in their careers."
But the government will let American schools fall apart!
Where's the INVESTMENT when it comes to AMERICA?
For years, US schools made it easy for students from other countries to study here for long periods. But after one of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the country on a student visa, the Bush administration got strict, adopting visa restrictions and reforms that allowed the government fast access to foreign students' information.
The FBI also worked closely to keep tabs on international students and watch for evidence of terrorism. After enrollments declined, some officials grew concerned about the dwindling numbers because international scholars help keep the United States competitive in the global market and contribute $14.5 billion a year to the economy.
Karen Hughes, undersecretary for public affairs at the State Department, described the students as "the single most important public diplomacy tool of the last 50 years."
In January 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings co-hosted a summit attended by college presidents. The goal: Recruit more foreign students to US schools.
That resulted in new grants to help foreign students study in the United States, stepped-up recruiting in places such as India and China, and the hiring of new consular officials to expedite student visa applications.
Gram said even now, applying to study in the United States is not without hassles:
"There are so many tedious and seemingly unneeded requirements in visa regulations and so forth. I think that still puts people off, so they end up going other places."
Pui-Wa Li, an environmental engineering student from Hong Kong who is now studying at UC Berkeley, considered studying in Europe or Asia. But she was ultimately drawn to the United States by its "open, friendly climate" toward foreign scholars.
Yeah, because AMERICANS are GOOD PEOPLE -- unlike our mass-murdering overlords of government!
Foreign student enrollment peaked at 586,000 in 2002-2003, the year the visa restrictions took effect. It dropped steadily each of the next three years, before increasing 3.2 percent this year."
And proving that Bush has fucked us, Amurkns!
"Dropping dollar cramps the style of Americans abroad; Expatriates forced to reduce luxuries" by Kim Murphy/Los Angeles Times December 9, 2007
LONDON - Karla Keating and her husband had retirement on their minds in May when they got what they considered an offer too good to refuse: a three-year stint in London.
Coming from North Carolina, they knew it was going to be a bit of a financial leap. But the major US bank where her husband is an executive lured him with a 33 percent increase in pay. Within weeks, they had crossed the ocean and found a nice flat near Marylebone for 1,820 pounds - about $3,750.
Keating recalls: "The estate agent told me the price, and I said OK, I guess that's kind of comparable to prices around Europe. And he said, 'That's the price per week.' "
Since then, it's been all downhill.
The iPod Nanos for the children cost 99 pounds apiece (about $204), compared with $149 in the United States. Keating's six-Diet Coke-a-day habit got shaved quickly to one, at $2 a can. They sit at the end of the day on their small balcony overlooking Great Portland Street, and her husband smiles (sort of) and says, "Here's your $12 glass of wine."
Keating: "When I got here I was like a deer in headlights. I was just, 'Oh my God' about everything. We figured out that with the increasingly weakening dollar, in reality he is making less than he was making 20 years ago."
The falling dollar has been a boon to US manufacturers, and a windfall for the American tourism and retail industries, as Europeans flock to the United States for cheap holidays and shopping. But it has been an exercise in sticker shock for Americans living abroad, particularly in Europe, where the euro and the pound sterling have been expanding against the dollar for more than a decade.
Here in London, a pound that was worth $1.58 in 1995 was up to $2 last spring. In November, it hit $2.10, with a 10 percent rise over the past 12 months.
For Americans and other expatriates paid in dollars, it makes for constant mental arithmetic whose solution is reached by doubling the price of everything in sight.
A Lands' End cashmere cardigan that sells for $139.50 in the US catalog sells for 129 pounds ($266) in the British version. A Starbucks latte that costs $3.10 in the United States is 2.05 pounds ($4.22) in Britain. A PlayStation 3 game console is $399.99 in New York, 299.99 pounds ($617.98) in London. Gasoline? About $7.80 a gallon.
Britain's 17.5 percent value-added tax accounts for some of the difference, but increasingly, a wallet full of dollars feels like scant armament on a continent packing powerful pounds and euros.
Mark Kopenski, dean of enrollment at the American University in London, which has a large population of Americans studying abroad:
"A lot of our students, the first thing they do every day is they pick up the Herald Tribune and look at what the exchange rate is. Because a lot of these kids, even if they come from around the world, their incomes are pegged to the dollar."
Which is one reason the U.S. fights wars.
Anyone who attempts to move away from the dollar is targeted!
To continue to recruit US students, the university still accepts dollars for tuition and housing pegged to a long-ago exchange rate, meaning people able to pay in sterling get charged 20,000 pounds a year, while dollar-holders pay $36,000 - most of which the university must convert painfully back into pounds at the going rate.
Kopenski: "In fact, if you did the exact exchange on that now, it'd be over $40,000. But we would be very hard-pressed to stay in business if we were totally pegged to that exchange, and it was changing constantly. Our students would be just paying more, more, more the whole time they were here. At some point, we could actually lose money by having American students, which would be a shame."
More time to smoke weed and play video games!
Oh, and be ELIGIBLE for a DRAFT, too!!!!
Amanda Owen, a 19-year-old international relations student from Seattle, said she holds herself to a Draconian budget: Dinner out only every other month; she bought her iPod online in the United States and had her parents mail it to her; she weaned herself off lattes, organic food, and, although she is a vegetarian, cheese.
Owens, (a midlevel seat at the Odeon being $25.75):
"I've been to the movie theater twice since I came here, once with my friends, and once when I was baby-sitting. I've come to look at entertainment in different ways."
I sure hope this was one of the movies!
The majority of Americans working in Europe get by because they work for a European company that pays in the local currency, or for a US company that pays a cost-of-living differential, some of which have been adjusted every few weeks as the dollar continues to go south.
Although overseas deployments have become significantly more expensive for US employers, most have seen it as a necessary cost of doing business.
Allyson Stewart-Allen, director of International Marketing Partners, a London-based company that specializes in trans-Atlantic business connections:
"It would be a travesty if an American company stopped sending its people internationally, partly because the business is increasingly international, and American business is already profoundly insular, and it would make American companies even less competitive in global markets than they are today."
Turned us into a third-world nation!
Bush, and Clinton before him!
Damn globalists! YOU WILL FAIL!
