While this is clearly xenophobic and just plain awful, it seems like the most sensible workaround for this is for universities to offer very small (4 students or less per session) in-person classes specifically for their new international students. This could work essentially like office hours with faculty leading small group discussions to help acclimate international students to their new lives abroad. I can imagine anyone moving to the US in the year 2020 (the peak of our crazy) could use some emotional support.
I'm not quite certain I understand that last part. To the best of my understanding, Kafka's design is such that consumer ingestion is completely decoupled from production throughput. All messages from the producer are first copied to disk and then zero-copied from disk to network to the consumers at the byte array level. If a consumer falls behind, it has its own independent offset stored on the broker that keeps track of where in the byte array (or log) it left off. This, by design, allows Kafka to handle different profiles of consumers and even have consumers drop off entirely and later join to catch up. But perhaps I'm missing something about what you're saying.