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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Who is having trouble getting a Visa exactly? Just curious, trying to separate fact from hysteria

I understand this post is more startup-visa focused, but generally the US employment based visa and permanent residency system is fucked. I'm in the US on a work visa, but due to my nationality am looking at over a decade of wait time for getting permanent residency. This means I've to stay in the country at fear of losing my job, pay top of the line taxes and still not get any rights during my best years. Which is highly unfair. Canada is a culturally similar first world country where I can get to a citizenship quickly. The only thing preventing me from moving tomorrow is the large difference in tech industry size. If more and more companies set up shop in Canada, I'm ready to go.

You could say that things are how they are, and if I don't like it, I should go back to my home country, but I _want_ to be American/Canadian. I identify with the outdoor, adventurous culture of the American West more than anything else. I am willing to pay my dues and become a well integrated citizen, but this country doesn't want me to, because it continues to conflate people like me with immigrants who don't pay taxes or commit crimes. Or because it has weird laws that cause these delays and a government unwilling to change that because indentured labor is better for existing companies. I already see Canada being a much better choice in a few years.

So the problems for highly-skilled people who want to to become a part of the US are more widespread than just having difficulty getting a visa. If this YC experiment is an indicator of things to come, and more tech companies lead to better salaries in Vancouver, I can see many engineers taking their taxes and skills north of the border.

I'd guess about 5 founders emailed me, and I always assume that indicates there are a lot more who don't.

Nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen that do not currently hold dual nationality with another country, an existing visa, or another document permitting entry. No hysteria there.

Are there any stats on how many prior YC founders were from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen?

A brief search turned up one from Sudan. I don't know where to find a comprehensive list. Don't forget to include non-Americans with dual citizenship. Someone "from" a totally unrelated country might still have citizenship in one of the banned countries and would not be allowed in. See Mo Farah as a prominent example.

I imagine the main concern here is uncertainty, though. The original travel ban was introduced with no warning and affected people who already had plans, who already had visas, and even who were already in flight. There's no telling if and when they might do something like that again. That kind of uncertainty tends to discourage people from trying to make plans in the first place.

It's worth pointing out that the new executive order explicitly exempts dual nationals from the ban. Not that I think that's practically any better.

Thanks, I was unaware of that.

Which countries do people suspect might be banned? I don't really expect any more than already have been.

Given that this was the administration's attempt to implement a ban on Muslims entering the country, I'd expect it to be expanded to more predominantly Muslim countries if the courts don't completely smack it down and the administration survives long enough.

And beyond that, who knows? When insane people are in power, anything is possible. Maybe some big attack is carried out by a radicalized Muslim from France or Sweden, and the response is to ban entries from there. I'd have called this idea absurd not too long ago, but now I consider this kind of thing a serious, if small, possibility.

>Given that this was the administration's attempt to implement a ban on Muslims entering the country

This is an inflammatory comment, and not a given.

> When insane people are in power, anything is possible

Also inflammatory.

>Maybe some big attack is carried out by a radicalized Muslim from France or Sweden, and the response is to ban entries from there. I'd have called this idea absurd not too long ago, but now I consider this kind of thing a serious, if small, possibility.

This is plausible, and a good point.

Sorry to spend most of my comment criticizing your comment but I really cant stand this kind of rhetoric.

Trump spent his campaign talking about banning Muslims. Rudy Giuliani is on record saying that the original order happened because Trump asked him to implement the "Muslim ban" legally. Personally, I'm willing to believe the people involved when they state their goals and motivations, and I don't think that quoting administration insiders is reasonably described as "inflammatory."

Describing them as "insane" I'll grant you. But it doesn't matter whether or not they really are: a lot of people think they're insane, and that drives how people make plans. Trump might be the sanest person on the planet and might be ironclad in never doing any sort of visa ban again, and what I described would still be accurate as to why people might not want to make plans to interview with YC in the US.

Curious: Do you think Hillary Clinton is still at risk of being jailed? I mean, do you generally believe campaign promises, or do you selectively believe them?

I believe that Donald Trump wants to implement all of his campaign promises, including banning Muslims from the country and prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

I do not believe that he will be able to do all of those things. At least in some cases, either Trump or his trusted advisers know this, so he won't actively try. I suspect (but don't know) that prosecuting Clinton is in this category.

Are we just pretending that Rudy Giuliani didn't outright say this was what it was?

Not at all, but I don't trust Rudy Giuliani. There seems to be agreement that this administration lies in a new and blatant way. I want to stop taking their word for things across the board.

Part of that is not trusting their admissions of "guilt", the same way that I don't trust their admissions of "innocence".

They do sometimes tell the truth. Their animosity towards Muslims seems to be real, not a lie. There seems to be no other adequate explanation for the travel ban (the people who would push it as a rational security measure would also have been smarter about it) so I think this is a case where they can be believed.

I think the travel ban could serve any number of non-obvious political purposes. A show of power? A distraction from less unusual political changes? A way to get press (albeit negative)? A way to decrease overall immigration? Security theater?

Airline stewards want me to turn off my cellphone. I can't think of a good reason, but that doesn't mean I'll believe the reason they state, when it makes no sense.

The reason they usually do not tell you is that cell networks on the ground do not handle phones well that are visible in too many wide spread out cell towers.

If planes were in danger because of turned on phones they would check for them much more thoroughly and also check lugagge for turned on phones.

No, it's not inflammatory. You don't have to agree with it or condone the idea of a blanket ban on Muslims --- you don't even have to stop supporting Trump to believe we shouldn't ban Muslims.

What you can't do is object to facts that are simply on the record. Trump said early in the election cycle that he supported a ban on Muslims, and then after the election Rudolph Giuliani looked straight into a TV news camera and said that the travel ban was an effort to put that kind of ban into practice.

There's easy inflammatory versions of this observation. For instance: someone could accuse you of supporting bans on Muslims for debating the substance of the travel ban. But that's not what 'mikeash wrote, and it's not fair for you to take him to task for that.

Sorry, I wasn't aware that he was openly for a muslim ban and that this was openly a muslim ban. I'm very used to people misinterpreting his words which is what I assumed was going on here.

And as far as trump supporters go I'm hardly one, but I probably fall more on that side of the spectrum.

This is one of those things where you're certainly entitled to argue the point --- maybe it isn't a Muslim ban! But there's enough evidence at this point so that you can't be outraged when someone else claims it's a Muslim ban, just like you can't be outraged if someone believes in anthropogenic global warming, or, for that matter, in the economic flaws in high minimum wages or rent control. The Muslim ban is firmly in the zone of "issues reasonable people can bring up casually".

(Another way to be inflammatory would be to introduce the Muslim ban unbidden as a distraction in a discussion about something else; for instance, if I said "rent control is a bad idea" and someone else said "if you believe that you might as well believe the Muslim ban is OK". But as you can see that's not what happened here.)

Either way, thanks for the chill response.

I am curious to know why you think that's a relevant question?

Based on their statement YC believes the travel ban will affect their ability to conduct interviews. I was trying to get a rough feel for the magnitude of the effect by looking at previous YC startups.

I think you probably already know this, but this is simply a way for YC to virtue signal. There's basically no one from the affected countries interviewing in the first place.

Steve jobs was syrian

> Who is having trouble getting a Visa exactly? Just curious, trying to separate fact from hysteria

Anyone, even US citizens, who does not want ICE/CBP snooping on his/her IT equipment, cellphones or social media accounts.

Certainly I (born German/Croatian, living in Germany) might be able to land myself a nice shiny job in the US IT industry but no way I'm ever crossing your border as long as such outrageous privacy violations are legal.

That's a good point, you should definitely stay out of the US. ...For privacy

Are these practices unusual?

Randomly grabbing people at border entry and dumping their whole device contents? Or demanding their Facebook passwords? Yes, this is unusual.

But, I have to admit, Germany is planning something similar in even more sinister form: our government plans to buy forensic imagers for all immigration officers... to mirror and scan phones of applying refugees, to determine if they really come from where they claim. Of course, you won't get much resistance from refugees, much less from the general public... but who knows, in two years this "test balloon" can easily be extended to every immigrant.

If you are making your choice of employment based on outrage stories in the media, you are making a big mistake. Of course, some of the stories we read are outrageous. But you should also take into account that literally millions of people cross the border of the US every year (US accepts a million a year only as immigrants, and vastly more as visitors), and vast majority of them have no trouble beyond maybe being asked a couple of questions. Minority of them do have problems, and these problems are a shame, and need to be fixed. But denying yourself opportunities out of fear of a tiny probability you may be unlucky to experience those problems is like never living one's home because accidents happen outside.

Trump's "extreme vetting" combined with the federal hiring freeze applied to USCIS means every visa application is going to take longer.

Lots of people. From the perspective of a founder, the US doesn't have a startup-founder-visa program (there is a recently approved parole program if you have >10% stake). There's two broad classes of visa for founders, EB5 investor green card ($500,000-$1,000,000) and E-2 treaty investor visa ($15,000-$100,000) but of course E-2's are non-intent (no route to green card), only valid for 2 years and only available to nationals of a handful of countries and require the foreign national to retain majority control of the business.

As an early employee you've got 3 options:

TN (Canada and Mexico only -- for as long as there's a NAFTA) - dead easy, $50 fee (+ $2000 in legal fees), 3 year status, no caps, no path to green card. Cannot have majority interest in the company. Need to prove intent to return to Canada once your temporary employment is complete, to the satisfaction of a border guard.

O-1A alien of extraordinary abilities visa, very challenging to get, requires meeting very significant criteria that is hard to do unless you've already started a business abroad. 3 years, no cap, $10,000 in legal fees, good way to test the waters on an EB1A petition without declaring immigration intent [declaring intent precludes you from future non-intent visas like a TN and happens when you file I-485].

H-1B expensive, slow (6 months processing window right now with premium processing suspended), 33% chance to obtain once every year in April and you can't start until October. $6,000 in total fees give or take. Dual-intent so there is a path to naturalization.

Unless they're a Canadian, I'm not sure how a foreigner can possibly join a startup as an early employee, except as an F-1 OPT student.

Outside of the 6 nations banned, it could just be anybody else at random really. CBP officers have infinite authority to reject people at will. It's commonplace at the Canadian borders for Canadian citizens to get turned away[1] [2], I'd like to point at their skin colour but then I'd get called hysterical.

[1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/canadian-woman-turned... [2]: https://news.vice.com/story/another-canadian-of-moroccan-des...

P.S: CBP officers have a difficult job so the decentralised decision-making is understandable to a certain degree

What's your story? I'm curious

For example, for europeans in general it's quite difficult to get to the USA. Sure, you can try the H1B visa, but I must remark the TRY part, as even though the company might want to hire me, they have to fight the visa process as there is a limited number of visas per year... and it also takes a lot of time. And when you get there, you still are not considered a citizen. For decades.

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