> Expect universities to fight this hard. Fees from international students make up a huge portion of their budget.

And so begins the inevitable death spiral of Academia as we know it.

I'm a big proponent of an International Work force and recognize that is what made California what it is today and that includes bringing in International students, the problem lies with the administration who abuses this system while taking Local/State/Federal taxes and does everything in its power to skew this, and inevitably restrict access to the domestic student's to basic things like lectures/labs, by overwhelming the system to accommodate the higher paying International cohort and making ever grander Campus Life amenities to attract them. Eric Weienstein has discussed in detail that its been a systematic effort to drive the cost of labour ever lower and is systemic and includes the higher tier Universities where he was an alumni: MIT and Harvard.

After University I was one of 3 US based workers in a Lab department of ~20 including the CLS who was from Germany but a US citizen by marriage, the rest of the techs and associates were from Vietnam, India, and China and I knew we all worked those crazy 60+ hour weeks back then in the shaky post-financial crises situation to earn our keep as we all had debt to pay off, so we all shared a collective trauma but seldom spoke outside of work, as the buyout from Novartis was happening.

They started staggering the US worker's breaks and lunch hours in an effort to prevent us from talking about the abysmal work environment we found ourselves in and what we'd do about it. I'm not pro-union, and would never agree to one, but even I thought that was an overt act on their behalf, especially since so much of Swiss Corporate culture is in fact Union based.

And even though it was never discussed a part of me knew the non-US workers were not being paid the same as us as they all required work visas and their tax rates were horrible as well.

I knew in my Junior/Senior year during the 2008 crises it was typical for the Indian students in our health sciences department to rent a house and have like 15+ people in a 3 bedroom off campus just to make ends-meet. Chances are they were doing that bed hot-swap I heard about in the Valley where roommates are prioritized by work schedules in such a way that they could have 4 beds in each bedroom and have it each serve 8 people when fully optimized.

I rented a room on airbnb in Palo Alto while I was looking for a place in Sunnyvale that had that this model, they called it a 'long term' hostel, but whatever it was it was f'ing sad.

Jesus Christ, we need to move away from this horrible system, and as painful as it may seem in the short term I'm glad its happening. This isn't 'paying your dues' its outright exploitation and the creation of a perpetual underclass.

Paying your dues would be waiting tables, or cleaning floors, or painting houses in the Summer: this is a total loss of Human dignity so that Universities can pay its administration obscene amounts of money in what is supposed to be a Public Good that's subsidized by the People, instead its State financed, vulture capitalism at it's worst and I'm glad its finally getting disrupted!