U.S. To Seek Social Media Details from All Visa Applicants
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit in allowing these kind of activities to continue. And the American public would sooner blame the other "side" in this political dog and pony show, than take responsibility for this being what America's fear based society has brought.
As an aside: These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. I own entire domains of email addresses and make them up on the fly, I've also thrown away dozens of "social media" accounts in the last five years for trivial reasons.
But the incomplete answers will be very useful when they want to arbitrarily withdraw someone's visa, in the same way that medical insurance used to have intentionally complex registration forms which they could comb through to look for ways to kick people off after they got sick. So people that hold a visa better not protest, write to their representatives, or otherwise stick out or they'll just yank the visa and say bye bye.
I'll write in again during this public comment period. But frankly public comment periods just seem like a way to placate the masses, both you and they know this is coming, nothing a public comment could say will change that.
My personal favorite (to draw attention to) contributing factors are:
- Plurality voting (the possibility of third parties 'splitting the vote' helping otherwise generally unpopular candidate winning)
- Money money money money money. There's not much to stop someone with lots of it from influencing elections by e.g. running attack ads against the person they don't want to win. We talk a big talk about the voters having power, but when most people don't have the time or energy after spending it all making money for the guy who's going to run those ads, they're not going to be well informed.
And there's no incentive for this system to change on its own. Our politicians and the people/corporate entities who pay for them care more about staying in power than they do about 'freedom' or 'democracy' or their constituents' general well being. Our best hope is that people will come to realize that the problem is systemic and start demanding systemic change.
Here in Argentina we use the two-round system (also known as the second ballot, runoff voting or ballotage) to avoid that issue. To win the presidential election, a candidate must get more than 45% votes or 40% AND 10% of adventage over other candidates. If this condition doesn't apply there is a next round where the candidate with most votes wins.
Imagine the following situation: You got three candidates for the elections: a. Trump (39%) b. Clinton (38%) c. Sanders (23%)
There is going to be a second round, but maybe Sanders voters are going to vote for Clinton to avoid Trump winning. In the current system Trump would have win. You could argue that in the current system Sanders voters would have voted for Clinton but maybe they thought Clinton was going to win since Trump didn't have much chanced.
With the two round system this becomes explicit.
This let's you vote for your favorite and in the second round you pick between the two big candidates.
My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...
If you're running against Trump in an election, what's the point of drawing the ire of industry (pharma, insurance, military, surveillance, general big-corp) when you can focus on orthogonal issues? You could get more funding by ignoring them and focusing on mostly-irrelevant wedge issues such as abortion (never going anywhere), "decorum", etc. Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
Pretty sure any phrase preceded by the word 'neoliberal' is already (by definition) aligned with corporate interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
"Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980."
A common critique of neoliberalism is that it pays lip service to adding diversity to traditionally high status/class/prestige careers and positions without disassembling the unfair power structures that cause those careers and positions to be so desirable. Hence "neoliberal diversity theatre" is somewhat separate from ostensibly selling out to corporate interests, because diversity theatre's goal is to advance justice along identitarian lines without removing injustice from the system; it's spreading injustice out among races and gender without addressing it as an intrinsic symptom.
Politicians selling out to corporate interests is the main mechanism through which those power structures are maintained and expanded, but the equality-charades are a necessary ingredient to make the main course palatable (for the democrats. Republicans are also neoliberal but use other wedge issues).
Some Democrats and some Republicans are neoliberal; the dominance of the neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party is weakening, and it's even weaker in the Republican Party—Trump is decidedly not a neoliberal.)
Just over 50% disapproval isn't actually that easy to beat; its enough to draw strong candidates of diverse viewpoints into the opposition primary (rather than them sitting out as often happens with a strong incumbent), but not solid enough for opposition complacency. Of course, that number could move strongly either way before candidates are firmly in or out of the primary.
> Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
Personally, I think if the Democrats nominated a candidate like that again, they’ll lose to Trump again, even with his unpopularity.
Also as election season approaches, I think that disapproval will rise simply due to all of the marketing/discussion that will bring back into the public consciousness all of the reasons people disliked Trump in the first place.
if Trump is still around in Nov 2020, he's overwhelmingly likely to lose. his opposition is extremely motivated and overflowing with a prurient desire to defeat him, while Trump's remaining voters, who have been repeatedly embarrassed and disappointed, have as much motivation to show up at the polls as a child has to show up at a vaccination clinic.
Have they been? In real life? Or was it rather the inverse (all the impeachment fantasies etc, the collusion stories endlessly appearing and fading, the economy that was "sure" to suffer, etc...).
That said, is the Washington Post a representation of the "real life"?
Have they regularly run such stories by embittered union leaders before, when the President was more to their liking?
Or is it just confirmation bias?
Especially with economic indicators going strong (so much for the "disaster" people like Krugman predicted "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never" [1] on those same papers), and many companies, including Apple, announcing plans to bring jobs back to the US.
At worst, the WaPo link you've sent would be "business as usual", the untangling of US manufacturing jobs that has been happening since Reagan, if not earlier. Surely not some unique catastrophe imposed by The Donald.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec...
* fiscal conservatives have had to defend the guy who brought them new tax laws that increase the deficit
* border wall supporters have had to support a man who just signed an omnibus spending bill which included basically no funding for the wall (not to mention the lack of funding from Mexico, which Trump also promised)
* immigration restrictionists have watched the Trump administration feebly defend travel bans that were immediately held up in the courts
* voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives have had to defend a president who frequently insults and/or abruptly fires his own allies and team members
* voters who mistrust Wall Street big banks and want the swamp drained have watched as Trump embraced and employed some of these same Wall Street big bankers, including a couple of Goldman Sachs Democrats, who ushered in a huge corporate tax break
* conservative Christians have had to defend a serial adulterer
* manufacturing workers who were promised a significant revival of the manufacturing base have not seen much progress either, because bringing millions of manufacturing jobs back to the US is really really difficult to accomplish. but Trump promised it during his campaign. "You'll get so tired of winning..."
* what's going on with the US trade gap with China? we shall see, but, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, Trump is not off to a great start. does he even know what he's doing? which brings me to ...
* voters who respect competence, order, a well-oiled machine, etc are not seeing much of it in this administration. at all.
On the other hand, non-fiscal conservatives should be jumping with joy.
> border wall supporters have had to support a man who just signed an omnibus spending bill which included basically no funding for the wall (not to mention the lack of funding from Mexico, which Trump also promised)
Well, "border wall supporters" also knew that "Mecico will pay" was BS political strong talk promising. And they see that Trump does indeed moves to restrict immigration, which is what really mattered to them, not whether some physical wall will be built or not.
(And let's not talk about "broken promises" about the Wall, when there's the previous administrations tons of broken promises about progressive politics, all official promises during the campaign of "Hope").
> immigration restrictionists have watched the Trump administration feebly defend travel bans that were immediately held up in the courts
And they can easily just blame the courts for this, while still thinking Trump at least tried
> voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives have had to defend a president who frequently insults and/or abruptly fires his own allies and team members
Voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives either are hypocritical or felt they have had no place in modern politics ever since at least Nixon.
> voters who mistrust Wall Street big banks and want the swamp drained have watched as Trump embraced and employed some of these same Wall Street big bankers, including a couple of Goldman Sachs Democrats, who ushered in a huge corporate tax break
I'll give you that. Not that they weren't expecting it, short of actually having some kind of revolution.
> conservative Christians have had to defend a serial adulterer
That's no problem for them, Christ himself was all about forgiveness, and besides, most of their TV evangelists are serial adulterers as well.
> manufacturing workers who were promised a significant revival of the manufacturing base have not seen much progress either, because bringing millions of manufacturing jobs back to the US is really really difficult to accomplish. but Trump promised it during his campaign. "You'll get so tired of winning..."
At least they do see some movement in this direction, which is more than one can say for the previous decades.
> what's going on with the US trade gap with China? we shall see, but, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, Trump is not off to a great start. does he even know what he's doing? which brings me to ...
Well, Krugman had also said in November 2016 that "the economy is never going to recover" (from Trump), based on some temporary disruption in the stock market. Clearly (and perhaps just like Trump) there are no consequences whatsoever as to whether what he prophecies holds up or not.
> voters who respect competence, order, a well-oiled machine, etc are not seeing much of it in this administration. at all.
Those are fewer and fewer, because many (even people who didn't vote for Trump) feel that the "competence, order, a well-oiled machine" of prior decades has been mostly working against them. What they want is to see some disruption to this well-oiled machine of "business as usual".
my overall point is that these issues are enough to keep a reasonable or perhaps substantial fraction of the previous Trump voters at home on Election Day in 2020.
by contrast, we will see a huge fraction of Trump opponents dance into the polling stations on Election Day 2020.
forecasters should not take all of these past Trump voters for granted in 2020. there's just not enough good news to make them enthusiastic.
Advocating for tax cuts and then using the resulting deficit increase to fuel advocacy for spending cuts has been a strategy of fiscal conservatives for decades, so this is just fiscal conservatism as usual, not something that will cause most of them problems.
But really, there is not one single overriding reason that she lost the election, but a different combination of reasons in all the millions that voted for Trump/against Clinton.
Maybe, but her being a corporate mouthpiece combined with her lack of charisma, combined with her 2016 loss is a big reason a sizable part of the activist base of the party is in open rebellion against the dominance of the neoliberal wing of the party, and why it's been able to force concessions (though not won outright) over internal leadership issues within the party. The 2020 nominee will probably be to the right of Sanders , but the party won't hold together if they are as firmly in the corporate camp as Clinton, much less the “biggest corporate bootlicker Democrat we’ve ever seen”.
It's an old book but I recommend reading Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it gives an incredible insight into how current affairs are spun into particular forms to suit certain agendas. The key motif of the book is that there are more than two sides to every debate but we treat it as gospel that you're either for or against. It's never so easy as that.
We, as free thinking, reasonable people are continuously drawn into hyper-polarized debates, particularly on social media: There is no nuance (as you said), only pro vs anti (as you said II). It also seems fairly systematic, and that we are clearly being kept busy with these "debates" while we are flanked and maneuvered on.
This is simply a wakeup call. A democracy is not a forest, it is a garden. We should not rely on forest fires to shape our society, we should tend it carefully at all times.
This is wrong in so many levels, and explains exactly how we got here. You're judging the issue not by its own weight, but by who is going to deal with it, or not.
In a representative system, the "who" is, and is intended to be, important.
In any case, I don't think it's a counter, nor related to the comment. We're magnifying some issues because Trump, when the fact is that it shouldn't matter who's President in order to assess its importance.
So it isn't Trump's "disapproval" ratings that are new for any President, it's the level of hatred that the press has for Trump that is new and allows for their spin on everything he does to "...be made alarming" as you put it. Look no further than HuffPo for your ridiculous daily press alarm. Obama was right in the same range in terms of disapproval, you just heard less about it because he was very popular among the types of people that tend to become reporters.
[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential...
http://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-...?
Considering how laughably biased the media has been against Trump, relative to the exact opposite treatment that Obama had, he’s actually doing amazingly well in this regard. I think Trump has made a tremendous number of mistakes, but just going by the numbers, he seems to holding better than Obama ever did given the headwinds he faces.
My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election. But Republicans didn’t do that, and took a considerably higher road than Democrats have done since Trump’s election. It has been shocking and terribly disappointing to see how poorly Democrats reacted to losing, and that poor sportsmanship is still playing out. It turns out that the “party of tolerance” is only tolerant of those in its own party.
No, they were not always in that range, and that's a huge range; the only time Trump has been anywhere near 40% is the initial honeymoon phase, where Obama was in the 20s.
> My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election.
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition (another sign of widespread opposition is getting fewer votes than the other major party candidate; George W. Bush had the same problem, and started with the same poor numbers as Trump; unlike Trump, he managed to improve them to more typical early first term numbers quite quickly, even before the post-9/11 rally around the flag effect.)
They weren’t always there, but they certainly wound up there as his Presidency dragged on and things like Obamacare began to hit people’s wallets. Where it wound up is what matters, as people can’t disapprove of things that haven’t happened yet (except in Trump’s case, where some Democrats were calling for impeachment before he was inaugurated).
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition
The protests were driven by the media’s response, which were unlike anything that any candidate has faced before. The media was furious that they were unable to influence the election for Hillary, and then they realized that they could profit from the polarization. With enough negative media coverage, anything can sound like a big problem to those that allow the media to shape their opinions.
You're forgetting the birthirism, the claim that Obama was ineligible for the presidency because he was born abroad, complete with theatrical demands for his birth certificate.
His approval reasons would be in the dumps, media influence or not.
You're making a pretty wild assertion, that Trump's and Obama's approval ratings would be equal if it wasn't for media influence. How do you propose normalizing that?
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
That's quite the objective statement statement you have there.
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
It would be relatively simple, though it would involve some data collection. Count the number of positive and negative stories published at various time frames, and come out with a ratio. Then figure out the correlation between that ratio and approval/disapproval ratings at that time. Then you'd multiply Obama's disapproval number by the delta between his positive/negative ratio and Trump's (and probably include some multiplier that would be less than 1 based on how strong the correlation turns out to be) to show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump.
That's off the top of my head, but the process would be fairly close to that. Nobody in the liberal media will do it, but the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump.
I feel very confident making that statement. Considering his personal and professional conduct, his backpedaling on earlier statements, his absolutely disastrously inept attempts at diplomacy and a whole host of other issues, it is accurate to say that he is absolutely not a person you would want to have any sort of relationship with, what so ever.
>"It would be relatively simple"
You're arguing from a biased starting point. You're assuming that media coverage is the most important factor in a president's popularity rating, not his actual actions and fuckups.
>"show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump."
>"the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump."
You're ignoring the massive backlash, smear campaigns and outright hate spewed by the right-wing media during Obama's presidency. I'm not sure if you've just forgotten it, or if you're willfully ignoring it, but it was everywhere, endless pandering to birtherism, outright racism, doomsay prophecies that he would turn the US into a socialism/communist hellhole, that he would take everyone's guns, put all white people into camps, the whole spiel.
In contrast, most of the coverage of Trump is simply detaling what new stupid thing he did.
But if it's so simple, why haven't you done it yet?
Like the sitting US President:
* https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/18/politics/trump-obama-muslim-b...
* https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/10/opinions/why-trump-clings-to-...
* http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/time-donald-trump-talked-birt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-b...
* https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-proud-birt...
Edit to add: You say birtherism as being fringe and rightly dismissed as nutjobs. My response is to show that it’s not fringe as it was supported by the current president. Part of the disapproval you’re trying to dismiss can be attributed to people frustrated with things like this.
There are legitimate reasons regardless of the hype you’re trying to use to dismiss the high disapproval ratings. There are well-known Republican/conservative voices that are speaking out against Trump as well. We’re also no longer in a period where people are necessarily comparing Trump and Clinton, choosing the lesser of two bad options.
Anyway, I’m out. Have a good $timeOfDay.
There are countless articles, videos, tweets (from The Donald himself) documenting it.
Instead you attack specific sources, in an attempt to discredit the facts.
Both were shitty candidates, Trump was just the shittiest of the two.
- Allegedly Sidney Blumenthal urged a reporter to investigate where Obama was born, suggesting it was Kenya. This was denied by Blumenthal and appears to be a misread or exaggeration of an email Blumenthal wrote. (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election...)
- Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo about Obama's "lack of American roots" in reference to him having lived abroad, which the campaign never acted on. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/09/the-fro...)
- A volunteer coordinator in Iowa forward an email promoting birtherism and was fired for doing so. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/sep/25/...)
I have a hard time reconciling "very active in birtherism" (or promoting birtherism at all by the campaign, much less Clinton herself) with these incidents. If you've got other references, please share. (Though this is really far off the reservation with respect to the submission.)
I also want to point out that it's pretty facile to assert that if Republicans had disapproved of Obama more strongly, he would have been more strongly disapproved of.
I think even the most hardcore Democrat would agree that the vast majority of media outlets are liberal leaning. So their disapproval has a stronger effect on their opposition simply because they are louder and more people listen to them.
No, it's not. From the source cited upthread, here's what other Presidents had at the same point in their Presidency as Trump's current 53.6% disapproval:
Obama: 45.3% Bush 43: 17.6% Clinton: 40.2% Bush 41: 15.3% Reagan: 45.0% Carter: 34.5% Ford: 38.6% Nixon: 31.4% Johnson: 15.1% Kennedy: 12.0% Eisenhower: 22.2% Truman: 45.1%
That’s either scary or good, depending on your political leanings I suppose.
That's true in the sense that it's true that Nixon's outgoing numbers were pretty good given the time of the media coverage at the time; there's not a lot of evidence, though, that measuring support relative to media coverage produces any kind of useful information.
There are studies proving that the media does in fact have an effect on overall opinion. So if you believe those studies, then you have to also believe that the overwhelmingly negative media attention received by Trump would have an effect on his disapproval ratings.
Obama got to 55+% disapproval rating twice, in two single polls (3 Dec 2013 and 2 Aug 2014). His yearly average disapproval ratings were 36, 47, 47, 48, 52, 50, 46%.
Trump has spent roughly 30% of his time above 55%. RCP doesn't have yearly rates up, but it's pretty clear they are much worse than Obamas.
factoring in the unprecedented liberal media headwinds faces by Trump
It seems to me the only thing keeping any kind of approval at all for Trump is his attacks on the media. It seems to me that fighting with the media is the only thing keeping him below 60% disapproval.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648.
It seems that the political tangents are just fine, as long as they are liberal-leaning. Futher, if you look at the entire universe of my comments, maybe 1% of them have anything to do with politics (and again they aren’t the rants that most accounts are allowed to go on without the threat of banishment - they usually have references and data to back them up). If you do ban my account, you would essentially be sending the message that it’s ok to discuss political matters here, but your view on those better be leftist or you’ll face a ban.
Check out George W. Bush's ratings in the comparisons below the fold - massive spike peaking at a little less than 90% approval right around 9/11, and almost always staying above 50%. I really thought he was unpopular.
That said, the world is a big place. Let's hope not every other country does the same.
No one cared about by email addresses or social media accounts.
Source: People at my institution who I put a lot of faith in (but are maybe paranoid).
The only extreme thing with this, is collecting this useless information.
Especially for people who have been outspoken about the US' illegal wars and various war crimes.
... ok, sure sure.
Also, it seems to me that one of the best things about America is, or was, that people from all over the world went there or wanted to go there.
Let's not pretend the US is unique in actually screening visa applicants and choosing to decide who can enter and who can not. I'm getting tired of the self-righteous condemnation of the United States when pretty much every country in the world discriminates in visa issuance. But the immigration policies of India, Mexico, Japan, Korea or Australia are far less interesting in this click-bait media world in which we live.
There is nothing personal in bank statements compared to social media profiles.
That basically describes your entire life.
Also, I was under impression that any visa can be revoked at will, why would they need special trick questions for it?
That's why this initiative in nonsensical. They'll never know whether the answers to these questions are complete and accurate. I'm pretty sure that later tonight, a new paragraph will go into the ISIS handbook saying "create a Facebook account in your real name that you can give to the authorities, that has nothing on it except for pro-American content". That would actually be good advice for all prospective travelers to the US. Lock down your real profile before your trip so that it can't be searched for, and maintain a separate, public, very vanilla profile that you can give to them. That's all it would take for most people to go through with no issues.
It's insidious, of course, and really makes me regret posting anything to Facebook at all.
Who knows if you're friends with someone who did someone naughty or who is suspect for some reason? Social media has turned into a nightmare.
This is true for me also. And the result is that I'm now not going to risk a holiday in the US. I've never been and I'd love to go but the entry requirements are just too onerous.
(I'm from the UK by the way and I don't suspect anything in my past or social profile would cause a problem but the system is too capricious for me to want to engage with)
It's interesting to note that the only other countries on my "too much hassle for a holiday" list (other than outright warzones and similar) is the UAE and it's neighbours because of their terrifyingly arbitrary legal system and the risk of being innocently targeted)
EDIT - it's not entirely clear whether this affects tourist visas but my concerns extend beyond this particular measure and any visit is likely to be a mixed purpose trip in any case.
I recently flew through the US on a connection flight from the UK and needed to give details of my employment history and my birth place amongst other things. In Tampa I got interrogated for looking nervous, which I was because we had landed late and I had very little time to catch my connection. My phone was searched, my WhatsApp messages were read, and they asked me all sorts of personal questions such as my girlfriend's birthday and the names of her cats.
After all this nonsense and their military-checkpoint style TSA procedures, I was able to continue on my journey (after the almost 20 hour delay).
So if they ask for social media profiles and phone numbers it's just a minor addition to the existing useless questions. If I wanted to hide something I could easily lie and they'd have absolutely no way of checking. Quite honestly I hope I never have to go anywhere near the US border ever again, I would rather pay an extra £200 for an alternative flight.
You forget to list that LiveJournal, Advogato or Quora accounts: family gets deported.*
Your daughter forgets to list that Pinterest account: family gets deported.*
Your son forgets to list that last.fm or SoundCloud account: family gets deported.*
Your mom forgets her Academia.edu account and Mittens forgets her vampirefreaks account: family gets deported.*
[*] or separated...
The truth hurts, right America?
The system appears designed so that once you are targeted, they can easily crush you by bringing forth laws generally ignored for the average person not targeted by the legal system. It needs to be fixed, but there is almost no political will to fix it and any fixes will be a drastic deviation from what we currently know.
Now, its fair that in practice this can be abused to protect people in power by not charging them, or to get people deported by charging with things no jury would convict on, or scare them into a plea deal. But that is where the political system is supposed to step in (most DAs are elected) and remove prosecutors who are making decisions the voting population doesn't like.
But people don't vote (or don't research or don't care) enough to be an effective check on the legal system like that, which is a whole different set of problems... but my point is that these systems are designed to balance each other, not so that each system is perfect by itself.
Not anymore. Now what happens is that once you are targeted all these laws that aren't enforced normally are pulled out, and you end up with an insane maximum potential time spent in prison. At which point a relatively light plea deal is offered. Even if you are innocent, unless you are rich enough to have money to afford a good lawyer, it isn't worth fighting. And even if you are rich, the prosecutor can just fine tune the plea deal until it is better than fighting the charge. This has strongly tilted the system now that most people (something around 90% if memory serves) do not get their day in front of a jury.
I am pointing out that the legal system is designed this way on purpose, the problem is that the other systems that are supposed to balance it are not doing so, and the focus should be on why the checks and balances are not working, not designing some perfect legal system to exist in isolation.
Whom would it waste resources to deport?
Then can they use this to easily create legal pretext to do so?
Someone with friends in high places decides he doesn't like your ugly face.
So long as that doesn't happen, the government will ignore the omissions you made in the visa application. But now they have a pretext for deporting you as soon as they feel like it.
Latest round of stupidity is schemes to encourage doctors to come work in rural areas ... that don't meet the salary requirements for visas, so the NHS spends money recruiting people that the Home Office rejects.
It's curious though, as the popular thing to claim today is that China is obviously the future. They're going to supposedly dominate everything, from AI to robotics to insert-tech-thing-here.
Article after article proclaimed that China would take advantage of Trump's immigration policies to do a massive global talent grab.
So what happened to that fraudulent premise? There are almost zero human rights in China. The few they had acquired, have increasingly been stripped back away.
So this social media grab is a massive problem for the US. Having zero rights in China means they're going to acquire all the world's talent and dominate the universe. Something certainly doesn't make sense in the storyline.
I wouldn't call it bureaucracy, but I don't know of a proper, better name. Hysteria maybe. Not sure.
It shouldn't be.
All border checks should be abolished. All passports should be abolished. Free people in the world should be able to travel between countries freely, and without having to justify themselves or ask permission, just as they can travel between cities within a country freely.
Seriously though, it depends on what responsibilities you think the government has towards the people. If a country with high taxes and generous public services bordered a country with low taxes and minimal public services, you can see why problems could arise if people could cross between at will.
I don't see the problem.
If they start shooting at people, then that's a crime and you should arrest them for that, regardless of whether you had any border checks.
And even if you do have border checks, if 30,000 people storm your border at once, a handful of guys with truncheons and paper forms aren't going to be much of a deterrent.
I've posted this before in another thread, but after 2001, less Americans have been killed by terrorists per year than have been killed by lightning. And yet think of all the money and attention that have been devoted to something more dangerous than slipping in the bathtub, and the rights "we" willingly gave up for that. It makes 0 sense
I think the real problem is that our elected representatives (politicians) are so concerned with reelection that they manipulate their constituents rather than acting as representatives. It's more of an electoral problem.
Making an overly broad questionnair to introduce arbitrariness by enabeling your executive branch to selectively invalidate a specific visa holders questionnaires consistency.
It's really fun stuff.
Outside of dictatures, people are born with all the rights, and the law is made to remove them. Those law are generally made to protect the rights of other. The main law that doesn't enter this category is immigration law since changing country doesn't remove any freedom to the citizens of the country of arrival.
In theory, but historically speaking not really: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?r...
But then again, it doesn't seem to work very well for US citizens these days either.
As a non-citizen, the internal arguments of the US legal system aren't very interesting to me, but the historical record of how the US treats non-citizens is. The US has clearly demonstrated that in practice, non-citizens are not protected by the same rights.
If you are a non-citizen living here, you'll generally enjoy most of the protections of the constitution and laws. If you are sitting there at customs just visiting, there are a lot of those protections that simply don't apply. Of course, some of those protections don't apply to citizens at these places either, though they play out a bit differently.
In general the government has only accepted the idea that refusal to answer questions can't be held against someone in the context of a criminal trial. For example you can certainly take the fifth in a deposition or examination in a civil case, ideally on an attorney's advice, but this decision can be held against you for civil purposes (for instance, the judge can instruct the civil jury that it can consider why the witness didn't want to answer the question). The government's position is most likely that the immigration proceedings have an analogous status where you may be allowed to decline to answer, but an adverse inference can still be drawn from your refusal (like making an assumption that you had something to hide).
The 5th amendment doesn't really apply because entry to the US on a visa isn't a criminal prosecution; no one is compelling you to answer the question, you can choose not to by choosing not to apply for a visa.
No, they are going to say anything like that to you; what they'll do is go to a judge and say we have this evidence that this visa-holder is a terrorist (which evidence doesn't actually relate to any crime prosecutable under US law, because not all terrorism in the world is a US crime) and that they therefore committed the crime of attempting to defraud the government by the way they filled out this form stating that they totally weren't a terrorist, and so we'd like to go arrest them please. And the judge will say, “why, sure". And then what they actually say to you will involve lots of guns carried by high-on-adrenaline counter-terorism agents storming into the place where your family is sleeping in the middle of the night.
It’s also easier to arrest someone on suspicion of falsifying customs forms and hold indefinitely than to do so on “terrorism” charges.
So this does indeed give law enforcement a lot of leeway than not having it is.
So, to answer your question, yes.
Nobody who hasn't already been convicted will fill out those forms, of course, but that's another criminal charge if the DA wants to put you away for even longer.
The purpose of the IRS is to collect tax on income, not to punish people for obtaining that income illegally.
Then a similar question for nazis, intelligence agencies, military and some more.
There is a podcast of a story of an immigrant who was associated with a group as a kid. Decades _after_ him immigrating to the US the US declared the group a terrorist organization. Will post the link if I find it.
I'm still not gonna check that box though
You think the President or Congress can just snap their fingers and say "you no longer are a citizen!"?
You see this pattern in more than just immigration cases.
The FBI and other federal agencies infamously "get" people for making untrue statements to their agents, since that's a federal felony right away, and easier to prove than that the person committed some other, more complex crime.
The other day in a reddit thread I got to bring up a case from New Mexico involving someone who literally fabricated evidence of a child in order to claim support payments. Once it was established the child didn't exist, proving all the various elements (like falsifying birth certificate and paternity test) of the crimes involved in getting to that point was difficult, but it was very easy to prove she'd claimed the nonexistent child as a dependent on her income tax returns, which sent her straight to prison (if you want all the details on that one, Google "Barreras v. Trevino").
A few years ago the US Supreme Court (Abramski v. United States) upheld a conviction of someone who purchased a gun, because at the time of the purchase he filled out a form which said he was purchasing the gun for himself, and not on behalf of or as a stand-in for someone else. Except he lied when he checked that box on the form; he was buying it for his uncle. The Supreme Court ruled that it didn't matter whether his uncle was legally eligible to buy the gun (he was); Congress had made it a federal crime to lie on the form, in order to prevent people from skirting background checks by getting someone else to buy a gun on their behalf, and the guy had unquestionably lied on the form.
a police officer once told me that there are thousands of laws in the vehicle code, and, if the police want to pull someone over legally, all they have to do is follow their car for a few blocks or so. sooner or later, that driver will violate a law.
that's a standard technique available to all types of law enforcement officers in the US.
and, yes, there's a lot of discretion in the hands of the police, just as for prosecutors. this is either a strength or a weakness, depending ...
> [...] In addition to their social media histories, visa applicants will be asked for five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, international travel and deportation status, as well as whether any family members have been involved in terrorist activities.
I know a number of people going through, or have been through, the US visa process and surely if this is required, applicants are going to drop.
Furthermore, if you submit that you don't have a social media account are they going to assume you're a liar? Are applicants just going to create new "real" accounts just to avoid looking suspicious?
That's the point that the administration wants to push.
This has already been the case for at least 4 years. Every visa I’ve ever had asked me to fill out which countries I’ve visited in the past 5 years and whether I was ever deported.
I don't think this word means what you think it means in today's internet.
You might think you're not a racist, but in the UK, racism law extends to criticizing Islam or even questioning aspects of it. So you better not be an outspoken atheist either.
[1] https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/apply-for-...
I couldn't tell even if I wanted to, I go somewhere, pick up a SIM card, trash it when I leave. These days many countries sell them from machines or newsstands at the airport, this is not unusual any more.
Japan and the UK, both from 2015: https://cdn.techinasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Screen... http://travelpal.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploa... and actually even the USA, this is JFK: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CX0y79EWQAAGlfZ.jpg
It would not be at all odd for them to use failure to disclose as a reason for revoking your visa and putting you on a list of people who would be denied entry in the future, and it would be unsurprising if, before kicking you out, they also criminally prosecuted you for lying to the government.
College is still inside my 7 year window, so I get to include 4 college addresses, 4 internship addresses, and a couple since graduating. I've found my Amazon address list to be immensely helpful. I also started a document to track it.
Copy+paste into those horrible background check online forms makes them more tolerable. The last one I did had to be done in 1 sitting and was estimated to take 30 minutes. Spent 2.5-3 hours on it...
something like that already happened to me. i was coming into the us as a tourist (and i was a tourist, i was visiting SF because i found really cheap tickets and a cheap airbnb). at border control, the office starts typing at her computer, i asked her if there was something wrong.
she said, and i'm not joking, that she was searching for me on facebook because "she wanted to see the reasoning for me to come and go from the us". i said i had no facebook account (i don't, i don't like facebook) and she said "it was really suspicious for me not to have a facebook account, since everybody had one".
That's the point.
Which I think is an interesting admission they have all the calls stored somewhere so they can check them for content...
The only thing I guess unequivocally counts as social media is my Mastodon accounts.
git commit -m -S “just having my 4th Oreo milkshake haha”
ASKfm
Flickr
GitHub
Google+
JustPaste.it
Tumblr
Vine
VKontakte (VK)
YouTube
Other
Seems like a dumb policy to require details on a purely voluntary activity.
Link for the lazy: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret....
Social networks are also run by companies, not the government. They need to just stop expecting us to interact with a tiny number of specific companies (it’s “big 3” credit reporting all over again, only somehow worse).
And finally, can we stop treating potential immigrants so poorly!?!? There are enough rules, forms, fees and delays already; how many more things do they really need?
Are you kidding me? This is information that won’t add any tangable value to the actual state of affairs, yet money will be payed for the information. This reeks of a deal struck with the big social behind the wheel. They get Money from the tax payers for sharing information with no need to prove actual added value, just the promis of hiring some key people in well paying positions down the Line when it’s less objctional.
With China developing Social Credit and US government interest in social media data, the "in-game outside-world activities" might as well be bypassed. Have a 'good' Facebook history, or else.
Remember that major governments have been, and undoubtedly continue to spy on all of us, either openly or covertly. You can #deletefacebook all you want - you won't be able to opt out of your own government's spying efforts.
I already work at a large university that can't use anything hosted on US servers because of their shitty homeland security server laws. So many cloud services out of huge campus wide contracts.
I delete all my apps and texts when I go through borders as well.
Mostly the US and the UK, it seems. For example the EU Blue Card system is generally quite reasonable: if you have high qualifications and can find a job, you get a work visa, which eventually turns into permanent residency.
US and UK immigration tends to be overcomplicated, draconian, and paranoid.
To all immigrants who went to the US on such a visa (e.g. H1) - take this as a distant warning and make a plan B to leave the US. This story does not have a good ending and it has happened too often in history. There may be a lot of native folks wringing their hands and even offering their support (which is welcome of course) but the underclass is generally too economically ignorant to ever listen to them.
From people’s real life experience: https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-the-passengers-and-cre...
What?! No. I realize you were speaking casually but please don't throw such misinformation around.
Countries are abstraction. “Their own people” are the concrete components making up the country, and, in even in the theoretical ideal, the people all of their policies serve.
Meanwhile, in Europe or even Canada, skilled workers are welcomed and even though salaries are less, one gets an impeccable quality of life which is the point of working to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Waiver_Program#/media/Fil...
That's true, though the Trump Administration has tightened rules for the Visa Waiver Program last year, after floating the idea that they might seek to end it entirely.
So, I think it's perfectly valid to see this as part of a broad policy of making the US less welcome to visitors and immigrants in general, though that policy is also more intensely focussed on repelling immigrants and visitors from non-first-world (or, in the language of our President, “shithole”) countries.
Not quite - you will need an ESTA - a visa waiver, and the airlines (usually) check before you board that you have a current one.
But they are valid for two years, and trivial to get via the webapp.
Edit: Restated as a question.
I've lived outside the states for nearly 5 years now, with no plans on moving back. They ask about this on the voting forms. It helps me suspect my vote is easily cast aside and that I don't count. On top of that, I'm very much a minority in my home state (Indiana). I suspect I don't have someone that will listen.
Sad for the US, but important to keep in mond when organizing.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_(Dota_2)
this will hurt business. this will hurt american companies. this will hurt the country.
this will not catch any terrorists. this will not catch any serious drug traffickers. this will not be socially useful.
i can't make it any more clear.
the more this country outwardly projects "we're a police state, and people from other countries are unwelcome" the more isolated we will become and the more backward our peers will find us to be, and rightly so.
Unfortunately, the same strain of thought that is pushing these measures is quite happy with us being more isolated and worse regarded. They think being isolated is manly virtue; that acting in concert with the international community is feminine weakness. Being liked implies that we give something away; being hated implies that we get what we want.
Hence cries of "globalist cucks!" and so on. Isolation is Strength.
I'm a Brit and would love the same policy here.
Bunch of assholes, really.
And I notice you didn't ask about the opinion, but rather just started complaining about everyone else who wasn't in the mood for their bullshit.
Any corporate bringing people in under a skill-based exception is unlikely to be affected - they already game the system, that they helped create, significantly. Any potential overseas worker wanting to emigrate will just add "make a FB, and Twitter account" to their to-do list alongside get a degree.
Social media accounts are not exactly rare things. Would you be happy for the subjective judgements to be required against everyone's (including natives) social media when applying for a job, bank account, holiday, or travelling?
So which is it - the American government is super competent and tracks everything and everyone, or they're super incompetent and can't tell a social media account has been created for the purposes of getting a visa?
If that show is to be believed, they aren't looking for hate speech. They are looking for the person who says they are just visiting, and then has all kinds of text messages about when they start their new job, or how they are looking forward to moving there.
That's the norm - for known criminals it's different.
Also, could this be another route for backdoor revocation of permanent residency and/or citizenship? For instance, you piss off the wrong person in government, they learn you failed to disclose your MySpace profile, revoke your visa for lying, then deport you? It's my understanding that some of the visa questions (e.g. have you committed war crimes) are there to enable precisely this kind of thing.
(Posted previously to a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16710551)
For those claiming cheap labor, my employer pays me $500k/yr and none of it was negotiated.
By the way, do they understand people change? Immature minds are prone to idealize all kinds of bullshit (incl. marxism and eugenics), daemonize whoever and whatever does not fit in their view (usually extremely narrow to the moment) and shout about this aloud but they grow older, expand their understanding and change their views. How many people don't feel embarrassed reading the comments they have posted years ago?
But thanks to gerrymandering, your vote will very likely be moot. So that has to be fixed first.
(This was a reply that appears to have become stranded.)
"Yes, I 'liked' a video starring 'Isis' on Pornhub 10 years ago but I swear it's not what you think!"
Imagine filling in those usernames, hilarious
Therefore if the social media details become a requirement for visa applications only, then ESTA would theoretically be exempt. Having said that, social media is currently an optional field on the ESTA form so the foundation has been laid.
I'm really not convinced people already understand just how hard it will be to reinstall sane dynamics and politics.
I am not OK with any country seeking private details from its own citizens or those who have already legally gained access.
But of course that isn't the goal; a global-scale chilling effect is what this policy creates.