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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it worries my American chums, but I won't visit the USA. As a foreign tourist bringing money into your economy I feel there is a very real risk to my privacy and increasingly my person. I am beginning to favour goods and services from EU where human rights still mean something.

Perhaps it doesn't matter to you how the US is perceived overseas, perhaps you don't want my money. Perhaps you don't mind being poorer. To me it has become the land of the police-state and the home of the Trump-Chumps.

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I am an American living outside the US for ~5 years. It's become very difficult to plan for the future now that I am in a permanent relationship with a non-US citizen (we would be married already if not for the various complications associated with being different nationalities). Especially since she is from a so-called "shithole" country, one of the poorest on earth, we have doubts about whether it's even worth ever trying to go back to the US longterm. What if we do everything right, go through the green card process, and then suddenly green cards just no longer exist? That statement might have sounded crazy 10 years ago, but can anybody really assure me otherwise now?

I know 10+ people who are educated, hard-working, and have every qualification yet are denied a simple tourist visa to the US for whatever reason. The process is lengthy, costs a decent amount of money, consists of filling out ridiculous forms on antiquated websites and attaining sponsors from the US, and then results in a 5 minute interview where some prick essentially makes a snap judgement about the candidate. We got lucky once with the tourist visa process, but that was pre-Trump.

The US is an utter embarrassment, and if it weren't for my family still being there, I wouldn't really care much about never going back.

Why wouldn't you sponsor her for a K visa?

If it's not too personal / I'm curious, where do you live?

Apropos of anything else, my arrival in the US from Australia (as a K-1) has cost over the years, at last count, coming up on $25,000...

Jesus, why? I think my K-1 (originally from Canada) cost something like $5,000, maybe $6,000 total. I guess plane fares and hotels might play into it, since I can cross by land.

Since 9/11 the US is like a bull in a china shop, stung by a bee. I only go back once a year to visit my family now too.

You should talk with your local US embassy or consulate. They can provide whatever help to clear up the process for your partner. If they are doing their job, they can greatly simplify everything. Please do not confuse the local state dept people with the shenanigans from the people at the White House...

The visa process is relative straightforward. Will the person who is given the visa come back to the country of origin? This is determined by money more often than not, and it's the harsh reality of the situation.

I went through this process in 2015-2016 after my fiancee was turned away while we were entering the US in PHL (they said she had already spent too much time with me there). We went back to Spain where she's from and started the 4+ month long process of getting her a K-1 fiancee visa.

It is a lot of reading, a lot of forms, and nerve-wracking interviews so I understand where you're coming from. But now she has a green card and it's a huge weight off our chests, great to be able to live a normal life. No one is coming for legal permanent residents, especially by marriage.

Almost everyone we interacted with along the way (except for the border control at PHL) was pretty friendly and just doing their job. No one seemed to have an axe to grind against immigrants.

The best resource I found was VisaJourney which has guides, timelines, useful forums, crowd-sourced processing times, etc.

I'm sure you'll find other users there from your partner's country so you can get a feel for what the process is like from a relevant perspective.

Here is the process/timeline for a fiancee visa: http://www.visajourney.com/content/k1flow

Happy to help if you have any questions

The immigration system is horribly broken. My wife, too, is an immigrant, and our experience is vastly different from yours.

For example, they scheduled her for an interview on a date that was impossible for her to make (iirc, that was her first day of a new job). She went to the INS offices to ask to have it rescheduled, and the person at the desk just gave her a flat "no, we do not reschedule interviews". My wife asked to speak to a manager - something that's eminently reasonable, if maybe slightly annoying, at any business - at which point the INS employee bushed a button that summoned to burly guards to physically remove her from the premises, stating that she was a threat to the office's security.

Wouldn’t an immigration interview trump any other reaponsibility a person has? I’d explain to my boss the situation and see if I can get my day switched way before I’d expect any government agency to shuffle things around for my work schedule (especially any agency that’s immigration related).

I'm sure it would if the conflict cannot be resolved, i.e. both the immigration officials and the boss are unwilling to accommodate the other requirement. Missing one's first day of work generally looks bad though, and trying to avoid that if possible is reasonable.

Attempting to reschedule an immigration interview doesn't strike me as unreasonable, nor does escalating to a supervisor if you don't like the answer you got. The employee calling security, on the other hand strikes me as abusive. I think that employee should be fired and probably not given a position of authority where they can mistreat others that way again in the future.

I agree that the latter part sounds very excessive, but I still can't understand how protecting one's legal status in the country they are in wouldn't far and away be the most important thing on their calendar.

Given how long everything takes when dealing with immigration, it's not exactly surprising that they aren't able to accommodate people's schedules.

Attempting to schedule something in a way that minimizes conflicts doesn't necessarily imply that it's not the most important thing on the schedule.

> Given how long everything takes when dealing with immigration, it's not exactly surprising that they aren't able to accommodate people's schedules.

If things take a long time, it shouldn't make much difference to them whether they do an interview this week or next. It's surprising that everything takes a long time though, from a certain point of view anyway.

I'm not sure why you'd think that the convenience of a government agency should outweigh any other concerns.

Because they are a government agency that’s notorious for having rigid rules and moving slowly. I’m not defending their behavior, but that is the way it is - it’s not exactly surprising or shocking that they weren’t willing to budge on that.

As an immigrant, I wouldn't expect them to make adjustments for my schedule. It's unfortunate that you went through this, but for most people priorities are different.

> As an immigrant, I wouldn't expect them to make adjustments for my schedule.

Your desire not to be a burden is laudable, but there's a more-important principle at stake here. Government officials should always make an effort to accommodate reasonable requests, or if that's not possible, to explain why — and moreover, those officials, as representatives of this country and its citizens (including me), should damned well be at least that welcoming and courteous to a visitor or new resident such as the GP's wife. Assuming that the GP was accurately telling the whole story, every American should be thoroughly embarrassed that the GP's wife was treated so abysmally, and the officials responsible should be disciplined.

> Your desire not to be a burden is laudable, ...

That's not what I said. I don't try not to be a burden, I just don't expect consular officials to give a shit about my schedule, and set my priorities based on that. Sure they should be welcoming and all, but it is what it is.

I have a friend who's a US citizen who was living in Venezuela for a while, and he got married to a Venezuelan gal there about 5 years ago. They'd been working on moving back to/to the US for most of that 5 years and finally got here about 2-3 months ago. I believe that both the US and Venezuelan governments gave them a bit of run-around, but it did all work out eventually.

Similar situation here, although I'm in country #2 (if you know the political-comedy reference).

The US has many natural wonders, and it has a lot of quite good people. But the political system is so out of whack that it makes me want to stay away for a very long time.

Furthermore, having to deal with US taxes while living and working abroad is really a hassle. True, one doesn't typically owe any US tax money if paying a higher rate elsewhere, but filing is still required. And filing can be messy if your life is not the standard simple permanent employment situation.

I have a similar policy for my work at university. Not so much as a political statement but for mere convenience I have avoided going to US conferences during my scientific career so far, even though some of them were quite interesting. Too many border controls/visa requirements. It's not worth the hassle.

Luckily, it's not hard for us to get US researchers to our place for a visit, they tend to like sunny, peaceful places in Europe where you can stroll through the city by foot.

I sometimes have to go to the US for business purposes but from now on will only do so with a wiped computer with just enough installed to look like a normal user's data.

wait, so you're actually a spy? What kind of user are you if not a normal one?

The wiped laptop certainly doesn't look like that of a normal user without adding stuff.

> normal user

The normal user browses the web and almost nothing else.

It always amazes me what a "normal user" collects on their device when all they really do is use it as an internet machine.

... but this laptop hasn't even been browsing the web, and so it will have no history and no cache and no saved passwords for websites and wifi hotspots ...

That's actually a good point. Might be a good idea for a software there: something that generates fake browsing history for the different browsers.

This works the other way around you know.

I knew some programmers who worked for a EU company that had a military contract.

When they traveled to US (talking around 2005 here), their entire harddisk was encrypted and they got a short education on how to handle certain suspicious situations.

US is known to use intelligence data any way they want, including economical gain. So if your laptop contains any confidential data of any big European company, it's already a good idea to not make that data available.

The whole Edward Snowden debate was only an issue because US was collecting data of their own citizens. Let's be honest, nobody cared who they were spying on abroad.

It's really sad to see how "friendly" nations treat each other like that.

So to answer your initial comment: The one who has the confidential information is not the spy. The spy is the one who wants to get access to it.

The US border sounds so much like the Chinese one! :(

Just have multi-boot and before crossing set the auto-boot timeout at 0, then change it later. If you want to be safe, you can also copy and delete the boot details for your actual partition.

I leave a dummy partition with Windows, office and other shortcuts and a wallpaper of a cat during my US visits. I also have both a facebook and a gmail subscribed to all the spam you can get.

Not because I have any criminal activities but my customers deserve to have their information protected.

If authorities want to check my private and work data, they can ask nicely through a judge.

If your computer can boot from it, I can recommend using an SD card with a bootable partiion.

As the decoy, or as the main OS? I suppose disconnecting the SATA-cable would make the hdd/sdd invisible to the system...

> I suppose disconnecting the SATA-cable would make the hdd/sdd invisible to the system...

On a laptop? All laptops I've seen have the hard disk plugged directly into the motherboard, with no cables in between. Having a SATA cable is more of a desktop thing.

On a macbook there's still a SATA ribbon cable between the HDD/SDD and the mainboard

On much older MacBooks that is true. MacBooks since around 2015 have had mSATA "RAM-style" connectors, and I've heard that some more recent models have soldered-on drives, though I haven't seen this myself.

Weird, I do have exactly the opposite experience, incl. a bay for a second SDD (on a gaming laptop/workstation one). Ability to replace an old HDD with SDD on a 6y old laptop... and then replace the optical drive with another HDD (just for the storage)

Perhaps nowadays it's the norm to have it all soldered in but I'd just not buy such.

I think a minority of laptops have soldered-on HDs. More have them hard-attached now than a few years ago (when almost none did), and many recent laptops have "mSATA" connections, which is more like a RAM connection than a cable. You could achieve the same thing with an mSATA connection as you would with unplugging a cable by removing the mSATA drive/card, and applying a thin strip of something non-conductive over the pins, and plugging it back in. Just please don't use something adhesive; the residue after a few applications/removals can screw up connectivity when you want it to work.

That said, I'd imagine there's an economies-of-scale advantage to having soldered-on drives (to say nothing of the economic benefits of un-upgradability: sorry folks, but there aren't enough people to whom part-swap upgrades are important to sway the hardware industry at large on this issue, though a few small manufacturers/lines will probably target that market). As a result, I'd imagine that we'll see more and more of them in years to come, though I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

'course, I don't recommend bringing your data into a country you consider hostile regardless of whether you've set it up so a cursory search doesn't find it. If the country really is hostile to your interests, that won't stop them if they want your info.

>> If authorities want to check my private and work data, they can ask nicely through a judge.

I am confused,surely non-citizens have no rights or recourse to the law at an airport?

In any case, I am concerned that your approach would be defeated if they took an image of your hard drive and threw some basic tools at it. They probably have this as a kit.

Non-citizens effectively have zero rights. Your rights increase as you go through different visa types and get to citizens. The appearance of actions like these can make you appear deceptive, or uncooperative at the very least. CBP can easily put you on a plane back after making things uncomfortable for a while.

And while you wait for a judge to decide, you sit in a room at the airport with no toilet, no windows, no communication to the outside world.

If they plug it in their system, wouldn't you be afraid to bring back some kind of malware? I'd try to bring no electronics when crossing the border...

Isn't it the same with Canada, though? I admit, I only watched those Border Patrol Shows on Netflix and what not, but it always disturbed me how much they always wanted to check the whole phone.

I don't know if it depends on where you come from, but I went to Canada a couple years ago, by plane. No hassle at all, they just asked me if I had Malaria or knew anyone with Malaria, asked me what I was there for (Mozilla workweek, but not for work!), and they sent me on my merry way. Not even a baggage inspection, let alone a computer/cellphone inspection.

I think a lot also depends on which border guard you get and what their 'feel' for you is. I was in the US a few month ago and got waved through after 30 seconds and a couple of basic questions (might have helped that I was travelling with my wife and daughter). When I was in Canada a few years ago I got called into a separate room and asked a bunch of questions about what I do for a living, what my parents do for a living, how long I was planning to stay, how much money I had with me etc. etc.

I always felt the Canadian border questions were mostly targeted towards avoiding people coming in to take jobs that could go to Canadian locals.

This was the Canada / US border.

Yes. I’ve had my electronics thoroughly searched twice going to Canada.

this is surprising to me. my experience with the Canadian border guard is that they are super chill

Yes, Canada, the UK, and Australia all have policies to ask travelers for their passwords for laptops/cell phones, and you'll be sent back home (if you're a foreigner) or arrested (if you're a citizen, at least in Canada [1]) if you refuse.

1: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/alain-philippon-to...

UK citizen here. I'm not aware of any policy in the UK that forces travellers to hand over their device passwords - i.e. not in the same draconian way that's happening in the US. Border control in the UK is pretty well overstretched as it is. I don't think they've got the resources to perform this type of intrusion, even if they wanted to.

From 2013: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10177765/Travellers-mo...

Also a case in 2016 of a UK citizen being arrested for refusing to give his password to UK border police: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/25/campaign-gro...

Yeah, but I don't think it's a routine thing (I'll check with my pal who runs a borders team to be sure). I think you need to have been a specific target and person of interest for things to go that far.

That's pretty much the same "but it only happens to a small fraction of people so it's okay" deflection argument that you can say about the US policy as well, which you called "draconian".

I had a friend get refused entry to Australia because they made him open his Facebook messenger, and they found out he was planning to work on a tourist visa.

They only did that though because he just finished a 3 month tourist visa, left the country for a week, and then came back with another 3 months.

Seems to me that's the digital equivalent of showing up on a tourist visa (or via the visa waiver program) with a bunch of resumes printed in your luggage.

Essentially every country in the world asserts the right to carry out a thorough inspection of anything crossing its border.

I'm not sure why people think electronics would be an exception to this general rule (which has been in effect, like, forever... the only exception that comes to mind is diplomatic pouches).

> I'm not sure why people think electronics would be an exception

I'll take a swing at this.. one reason is that modern electronics contain - both directly and through remote access to other systems via stored cookies, etc - far more private and/or commercially-sensitive information than almost any other widespread physical object that may cross a border. In the 1960s a (non-spy) traveler faced a search of some clothing, cash-on-hand, and perhaps some food/snacks and prescription drugs. Far different from facing a search of every photo you've ever taken, every private message you've written to your spouse, or the full IP of your successful software company, etc.

To be honest, I doubt the amount of money brought into the US by foreign tourists amounts to much in the big scheme of things. I respect your principled stand against the threats against your security and privacy by the US Government, but it won’t really make anyone here poorer.

According to the World Bank[1] the US took in $246b in 2015 from international tourism.

[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ST.INT.RCPT.CD?location...

"expenditures by international visitors in the United States totaled $244.7 billion in 2016"

https://www.selectusa.gov/travel-tourism-and-hospitality-ind...

About 1.3% of US GDP - which is maybe not significant to the US economy as a whole but I suspect that spending is very localized in locations that probably would suffer if foreign tourists reduced in numbers.

The US economy is really massive, $244.7 billion is more than the GDP of Finland.

World Travel & Tourism Council Travel & Tourism Economic Impact 2017 United States

"Visitor exports generated USD 212.3bn, 9.5% of total exports in 2016. This is forecast to fall by 0.6% in 2017, and grow by 3.9% pa, from 2017-2027, to USD 309.7bn in 2027, 9.3% of total." [0]

US GDP in 2016 was USD 18624bn. [1]

So I suppose it's only 1.1% of GDP.

What's USD 212.3bn between frenemies huh? ;-)

[0] https://www.wttc.org/-/media/files/reports/economic-impact-r...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

Exactly. The complete loss of international tourism (and realistically there wouldn’t ever be a complete loss unless we closed the border) would result in a 1% loss for the US GDP/economy. Not nothing, but certainly not devastating.

You do understand there's also a downward spiral for tourism, right?

Tourism generated 1% of the GDP but you don't know the impact on other industries, you haven't seen figures on lost of tax revenue from jobs lost, cost of retraining people to find new jobs, burden on society from unemployment, etc.

I don't think that tourism will cease in the US but any downturn on it has larger effects than just the GDP figure brought by the industry itself.

Of course, if you only care about numbers the dollar figure won't look much, if you care about the lives affected by idiotic policies then you have to look deeper.

I never understood why US airports never implemented the transit concept.

Theoretically it could be extremely convenient to use the US as a transit point if your final destination is, for example, a country in Latin America.

But when you connect via any US airport you need to deal with imigration, pick up your luggage, deal with customs hassle, re-check your luggage and proceed through the entire TSA song and dance.

Depending on the airport not even 3 hours may be sufficient to make the connection and the hassle you experience is just not worth it.

For comparison: Some European airports have legal connection times of 30 minutes (Vienna). Longer than 90 minutes is almost unheard of.

Just about any international airport gets that concept, even in massively underdeveloped countries. The US just doesn't seem to get it.

It must cost US carriers dozen -, if not hundreds of millions in yearly lost revenues.

Because statistically nobody transits through the US. Almost everyone ending up in the US is staying. A lengthy flight across the Atlantic/Pacific to then take another lengthy flight across the other ocean is just not something many people do.

OK, but what if I stopped buying US goods and US services? What if I pulled my investments from US equities? What if I added a tariff on services provided by US companies, because they had benefited from an un-competitively low corporation tax rate?

The US is not the first empire. You might want to read up on how the others failed.

Many of these policies were put in place by the Obama administration. It wasn’t all fun and games.

Would you say the same of the citizenry of other states in similar positions, like Russia or Iran?

The rest of the world should retaliate. (...)

EDIT: That was a knee-jerk reaction. Sorry about that.

I think they should only retaliate on US officials (elected and who work for DHS). Ask them to reveal passwords to national secrets when they enter the country, then detain them for hours when they refuse.

The general population should be welcomed with open arms - retaliation on them achieves nothing. It's not their fault.

> The general population should be welcomed with open arms - retaliation on them achieves nothing. It's not their fault.

Last time I checked the US had elections, so yes, it pretty much is their fault.

> I think they should only retaliate on US officials (elected and who work for DHS). Ask them to reveal passwords to national secrets when they enter the country, then detain them for hours when they refuse.

Unfortunately I don't think this will do what you expect - they'll probably happily hand over their password.

Retaliating against the US assumes that the rest of the world doesn't want the same powers that the DHS now has, which is unrealistic I think.

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