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Visas for a group of Afghan high school girls were denied recently, meaning the team can’t enter the U.S. to compete in an international robotics competition.
The team was set to compete in the FIRST Global Challenge, an annual international robotics event that aims to get young people -- though not exclusively girls -- excited about STEM fields.
Organizing the materials for the team and traveling to the U.S. embassy in Kabul wasn’t easy, The Washington Post reported. Raw materials sent for the competition from the U.S. had been held up for months amid terrorism concerns, so the team had to gather their own supplies. The embassy, which the girls traveled to twice, was 500 miles away, and their visits came despite a deadly truck bomb that recently killed an estimated 90 people.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently reinstated parts of President Trump’s travel ban, which affects immigration coming from six majority-Muslim countries, the visa denial wasn’t related -- Afghanistan isn’t on Trump's list.
Afghanistan remains a tough spot from which to travel to the U.S., however. According to State Department data cited by the Post, only 112 business travel visas were granted in May, versus nearly 800 from Iraq and more than 4,000 from Pakistan.
The Afghan team will have to watch their robot compete via Skype. Teams from Iran and Sudan -- which are on the list of countries affected by the travel ban -- as well as Iraq will be at the competition.
