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Just got refused a Canadian visa I needed to present my poster at #cogsci2019. I believe that not everybody fully realizes how much visa issues hurt diversity in academia. So here goes my thread on the topic.
Canadian, USA and UK visas are notoriously difficult to get for people from developing countries (especially for young women). If @cogsci_soc really cares about diversity as they claim, why not organise the next event somewhere else*?
* i.e. in a country that is not so paranoid about guileful female immigrants who don't know better than to write papers for major conferences just to penetrate its precious borders
We (students from developing countries) put a lot of effort in finding money to pay the registration and visa fees on top of actual travel expenses. But it's not enough: we then need to have children or immovable property in our country, just to prove we're not going to immigrate
Check out the infographics: does it really look like conference locations are chosen with academic diversity in mind? Considering the current visa situation, a typical female student from a developing country could probably enter only 4 #cogsci conference locations out of 20. 
The same holds true for other major academic events (such as @NeurIPSConf, @icmlconf, etc) – also mostly organised in Canada or USA.
Because of 🇱🇷 visa denials I personally had to miss a summer school (despite winning a full travel grant), academic internship, and my PhD interviews. Now the 🇨🇦 consulate makes me unable to present my work at a major conference. I know many others who have faced similar problems
The "diversity travel grants" that #cogsci2019 offers only supports 5 students out of all who applied. At the same time, overall conference attendance is around 1000 people. Given the scale of the problem, it looks more like a gesture than a genuine attempt to solve it.
I really hope @cogsci_soc takes real action in the future. Organise the conference in one of the developing (or, at least, not the most restrictive) countries and it would be a real boost for cognitive science around the globe.
Just in case, I put some personal context here: I have a long travel history (conference in Australia, summer school in Germany, Finnish residence permit for studying, etc), I have never violated any laws, I am not related to politics/army, and I have perfect performance in uni.
