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Comment by the-pigeon | Hacker News Reader

Regarding number 2. I absolutely agree and we need to change the visa system to prevent the routine abuse that happens to people because of it.

Though I don't know how we can change it to prevent that.

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We maybe need to consider a change to the order and timing of how rights are granted towards citizenship first, because when you become a citizen in any first world country you get a LOT of benefits, more than we realise, and it is all or nothing.

The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.

Call your house representative and two senators in Congress, and write them each a letter about the abuse. Let them know you value your coworkers and that they should be able to enjoy the same labor rights that you do.

Spot on an industry-wide blacklist is yours!

It's a seller's market, there's very little teeth to a threat like yours :)

Don't let these people make you afraid to use your power as a citizen and as a valuable employee.

I’ve always heard of blacklists but I seriously doubt their existence. Who would trust such a thing? It also sounds illegal as shit so I assume you can’t do this for profit.

It's like when you get MBA - you get a free network with it. Now you are inclined to trust your MBA circle due to shared history. Imagine the same with companies; there is a limited number of spots at the top, most people know each other or heard of each other, share common interests, club memberships etc. They are inclined to trust their own, insiders, or see benefit in it, than some random outsiders, i.e. in-group preference and benevolence. Then when an outsider is "put on a blacklist", i.e. some insider holds a bad opinion of an outsider, the whole group might be affected.

You've managed to describe the function of a blacklist, but have not provided evidence that one exists.

My impression of blacklists is that they're much more systematic and pervasive than that. If you're an individual contributor, I think it'd be really hard to become so infamous that your manager's manager is complaining about you to his peers during a golf game and they remember you.

Also, if you're writing your Representative about some kind of abuse or malfeasance, you could always use and assumed name (and say you're doing so to avoid retaliation).

In order for an industry-wide blacklist to exist, large numbers of people would need to have access to it. This large number of people at many different, competing organisations would have no reason to trust each other to keep a secret.

The existence of such a list, the details of its construction, and the possible Social Justice implications of this would attract so many eyeballs and so much advertising revenue, that it would be hard for any online news publication to resist reporting evidence of it.

Unless those news publications are put on the same list, losing access to latest stuff and their relevance. See what is known about Hollywood, internal Google blacklists, Apple preventing newspapers access to latest gadgets as a retaliation for bad reviews, "gatekeepers" in other "mature" industries etc. Seems like it's a defect in human nature, or a really bad heuristics, emergent with increased organizational size and a buffer shielding an individual bureaucrat from fully comprehending that as a moral choice with serious consequences to somebody else.

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