Visa denials

Multiple media outlets are reporting that a group of Afghani teen girls have been denied visa to travel to the U.S. to take part in a competition known as the First Global Challenge.  You can read the Washington Post version of the story here.  Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The State Department does not comment on specific visa denials. According to recent State Department records, it's particularly hard  to get a business travel visa from Afghanistan. Just 112 were granted in May, 2017; 780 visas were issued to visitors from Iraq and 4,067 from Pakistan."

Comparing 112 to 780 and 4,067 makes it look damn near impossible to get the type of visa these girls were trying to obtain.  But then again, without the number of applications submitted to get to these approval numbers, we're viewing those three numbers in a vacuum.  2017 data on visa refusals is not yet available.  But there is data available for FY2016, which ended last September.  Here are the visa refusal rates for Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan:

Afghanistan - 73.8%
Iraq - 51.71%
Pakistan - 46.43%

In point of fact Cuba was the only nation on the planet with a higher business visa refusal rate in 2016 than Afghanistan.  Cuba's visa refusal rate was 81.85%.

Based solely on those statistics, it seems these girls had little chance of getting the visas needed to travel here to take part in the competition. 

* * *

This reminded me of an incident that took place in late 1986.  At the time the Soviet Union was in the middle of their unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing.  That moratorium ended in February of 1987 when the Soviets tested a nuclear weapon.  While I didn't break the story about when the test took place, I did break the one about how it was going to happen, because I was covering the efforts of U.S. and Soviet scientists involved in independent seismic monitoring of the two nation's nuclear test sites.  The scientists in the Soviet Union monitoring the test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan were ordered to turn off their monitoring equipment

My coverage of the story began in 1986 when the Reagan Administration refused to allow the Soviet scientists to travel to Nevada to work with their American counterparts.  They were using seismic monitoring equipment to track testing at the U.S. Nuclear Test Site at Mercury, NV.  The Reagan Administration preferred another method of test monitoring known as  Corrtex.  Corrtex measured the yield of nuclear tests by burying a cable in a hole near the site of the nuclear detonation. 

History repeating itself?  In some ways, but the Reagan Administration's preference for Corrtex was the reason they wanted to impede the independent seismic monitoring project. 

Then again, the results in that case and what's going on today are also similar.  The Soviet scientists were allowed to travel to New York City to monitor U.S. nuclear tests remotely.  The girl scientists from Afghanistan will watch their robot compete in Washington, D.C., via Skype.