One year in, still no visa | Hacker News Reader

One year in, still no visa

daniel.haxx.se

45 pointsFindus238 comments

I think it's part overreaction from security folks, part bureaucratic overcomplexity.

Someone I know got denied a visa to the US. She went to the embassy to get interviewed, and got told no, and no reason. Just an intimidating guy telling her no, you're not welcome. This lady had nothing to do with anything computer related, or crime, or anything remotely odious.

Someone else I know got stuck getting her docs because she passed her citizenship test in one state, then moved to another before the ceremony. She phones up about it, at the person on the other end literally says "wait a few minutes while I fuck this up, I have no idea how this system works". Somehow after a few weeks of desperation they managed to solve it.

I can imagine the curl guy's application getting 10 seconds of time, most of which will be taken up by the fact he's going to kick up a lot of hits on google and he has "haxx" on his homepage.

The amount of damage it does is huge to the foreign psyche. Already numerous conferences plan to move to anywhere but the US.

I'm entirely sure Russia and China cheer on this level of pettiness.

If he had actually done something wrong they'd have welcomed him in with open arms and arrested him on US soil a la Marcus Hutchins.

Hopefully it's only a few years before the pencil pushers realise how self defeating this strategy is. Resting on laurels and foreigners keen for large paychecks will only go so far for the US. The world can and will move on, decent wages only goes so far, there's definitely decent wages to be found in China too and many reject it.

To people outside the Internet bubble, saying you're an ethical, white-hat hacker must sound a bit like saying you're an ethical, white-hat thief.

"During this year I missed out on a Mozilla all-hands, I’ve been invited to the US several times to talk at conferences that I had to decline and a friend is getting married there this summer and I can’t go."

Wouldn't all these things be covered by an esta?

https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/

Edit: nevermind he talks about it in the other linked article https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/07/28/administrative-purgat...

At this point, wouldn't contacting an immigration lawyer be beneficial? As he says in his other article (see lm28469's comment), he wants to visit the US and not give up hope. See https://www.ailawoffice.com/immigration/visa-denial for example.

I fail to understand why he sounds so bitter about all this. He, nor anyone in fact, is in any way _entitled_ to a visa and any government is well within their rights to reject for any reason.

Besides, his counter page and his list of events he's missed is laughable. Such whining!

I've only ever encountered the _very_ privileged (and Mr. Stenberg with a Danish passport firmly falls in this category) who are outraged when there are complications with this sort of thing.

A Singaporean once lamented to me about getting a Ukranian visa for a friend of theirs as if it's some kind of terrible tragedy failing to realize that most of the world needs visas whenever they travel.

E: His other article, "administrative purgatory" is an even bigger whinefest that it crossed over into the funny, complaining about literally any and all things that literally everyone who doesn't qualify for ESTA has to go through...

Permit me to be outraged, equally, when anyone is denied access to a resource without good reason given, to something that is readily available to their peers. Your comment is unseemly and unkind.

Does this specific person have a right to travel to this specific country? Clearly not. Do people from countries not covered by ESTA face a more difficult authorization process: clearly yes. Does the chain of events indicate something is wrong with the process? Clearly yes. People are allowed to talk about how systems violate expectations, perform poorly, or fail, even if those failures are not violations of human rights, and even if those failures are not the worst kind of failures that happen.

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