This Johns Hopkins Ph.D. candidate was denied U.S. re-entry to defend thesis [Immigration]

Just before Omar F. Zaidan was scheduled to return to Baltimore to defend his thesis and receive his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, he was married abroad. But Zaidan, a Jordanian citizen, was not allowed to board his plane in Cairo, Egypt, to return to the U.S., and instead watched as the “flight staff tore up his ticket without explanation.”

When Zaidan returned home to Jordan, the U.S. Embassy there initially said nothing was wrong with his student visa. After a week, they recalled Zaidan, telling him they had found a problem with his visa they could fix. Zaidan returned to the embassy only to have “canceled” stamped onto his visa.
In this letter sent this month to President Obama, Zaidan’s thesis adviser Chris Callison-Burch, an associate research professor in the computer science department of Johns Hopkins, said that, by holding Zaidan’s visa re-application in processing, the “U.S. squandered its financial resources and gave up on a great intellectual opportunity when we excluded Omar Zaidan from the country.”
Zaidan successfully defended his thesis via teleconference, and now works for the Microsoft office in Cairo after the company’s attempts to secure Zaidan a H1-B visa — a necessary addition to immigration reform in the U.S., according to some tech companies and U.S. congressmen — were unsuccessful.