You have to believe that if this was happening in Africa, there would be a massive outcry about this one. This is racial discrimination from the same university that tried to reduce the number of Asian and Asian-American students by Race-Norming years ago. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/05/05/berkeley.sars.ban/index.html All it takes is a two-week quarantine of any of these incoming students to certify that they are SARS free. Most people living in this region are NOT affected by SARS. I live in a city of ONE MILLION people in Taiwan and there are only seven probable cases in the entire city.
One of my students (I found out yesterday) was in the process of getting ready to go to California for the summer to study English. She was crushed and on the verge of tears when she told me that she learned about this policy and that she couldn't go. It was her dream to go to America to study English and it has been taken away from her by a "discriminatory policy" (her words that I translated from Chinese). Most people I know here believe that the policy is unfair and racist.
The decision was not based on sound medicine. If it were, the United States government would also have placed restrictions on Taiwanese from entering the US, which they have yet to do. Also, read this letter to the editor from a PharmD in California printed in a local Taiwanese newspaper. Simply an overaction on the part of UC Berkeley. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/opinion/
I know a former Vietnamese exchange student, and a good friend, of mine and our family (it was actually him who got me interested in soccer), isn't going back to Vietnam this summer for the fear that he might not be able to come back for his next semester of school....which is a shame, as I know how much he was looking forward to going back.