For anyone organizing an event with even a slightly international focus, the question of location is suddenly a lot trickier. Crossing the U.S. border today — by land, sea or air — is deeply fraught.
Anything can trip you up: It could be your race, your sexual orientation, your gender presentation, or your political or social views. It could be your field of study, your circle of friends or just meeting the wrong border agent on the wrong day.
For whatever reason, you get turned back.
That’s at best. At worst, you disappear into an increasingly lawless, secretive system of detention.
This isn’t extrapolation. This isn’t me reading between the lines of Project 2025. This is the actual experience of visitors to the United States today.
As someone who enjoys conferences and who works with a lot of speakers, I’ve been thinking and talking about this a lot… but not quickly enough to keep up with events. When I began drafting this a few days ago, what I was hearing came from non-American speakers and attendees who were reconsidering attending events in the U.S.
Now, there’s formal guidance from at least one professional association to avoid non-essential travel to the States.
Like it or not, this affects your event.
The implications are wide-ranging, with the most pressing being the threat to the physical safety and liberty of event-goers. And while you might think this isn’t a concern for the average sales convention compared to, say, a sociology conference, I’d suggest that’s self-deluding.
The pace of authoritarianism can be breathtaking: What’s apolitical this week may be beyond the pale by next Tuesday. And even if your event is “apolitical,” at least some of the people involved are almost certainly not.
The danger to them doesn’t end with a successful U.S. border crossing. An increasingly bold, aggressive campaign by ICE is seeing people grabbed from the street with little or no recourse — especially given the administration’s contempt for court orders.
Expect the quality of content and participation at these events to drop steeply. Attendees and speakers will come from an increasingly narrow group of people: those who believe (correctly or otherwise) they aren’t the kind of people who are at risk. And even they will second-guess what they say and do, for fear of coming across the regime’s radar.
The obvious solution would seem to be to host events outside the U.S. But that, too, puts people in danger: American residents, for whom border crossings are also getting riskier. For many, that’s always been the case, but the peril is now exponentially greater.
Start acting now to protect your event’s community.
Safety has always been part of an event organizer’s responsibilities, including fire safety and emergency preparedness, first aid, food safety, codes of conduct and more. This is no exception.
For now, conscientious organizers will want to begin consulting with speakers and attendees about how to best accommodate their safety concerns. Part of the solution will almost certainly be robust hybrid events, offering as rich and complete an online experience as possible.
But the answer also has to include taking a stand against this appalling abuse of power. There’s a solid business case that event conveners can make against it in their lobbying. But even more important than that is the fact that so many people are being threatened and terrorized; their freedoms violated; their lives turned upside down.
I’ve lost count of the number of events I’ve been to where the hosts talk about their conference, summit or convention as a community. Well, a community stands up — and speaks up — for its members. And it doesn’t put them at unconscionable risk.
This is about safety. But it’s also about solidarity.
(Photo by Red Dot on Unsplash)
