Why am I not attending JMM, but organizing a session?

For the past couple of years my colleagues and I organize a session at the JMM (Joint Mathematics Meeting). For the past couple of years that I’ve been in Canada I traveled back to US several times for various conferences and for visiting old friends that are like my family here. Last spring that the new US president announced the muslim ban I cancelled all of my plans for traveling to US (2 were planned and 2 were pending), and did not even bother to go for a visa interview. Until this Fall that went for interview for the January meeting. After all, I’m one of the organizers and I need to be there.

Everything was like before. The person interviewing me tried to find out if I have any close relatives in US, and after finding out that it is not the case, he tried to say something meaningful along the lines that: you lived in US before, you have come back several times after moving out, and every thing is fine, but the rules have changed, that was back then and this is now, and the rules are different now, we cannot issue you a visa, because of the presidential proclamations. Reject.

That day I went and bought a season pass to Lake Loiuse ski area. I think I know what I’m doing during the break :)

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PS. If you are in San Diego, go to our session or emerging topics in graphs and matrices, there is an amazing list of speakers giving talks, including the one and only Fan Chung on A generalized Alon-Boppana bound and weak Ramanujan graphs, as our plenary speaker.