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Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

This seems bad seen through lens of "everyone should be treated fairly" but if you instead look at it as "America is a private club which accepts membership applications of people that it likes for whatever reasons" then it's quite normal. You have to show that you fit in with whatever you think they want. Some people might be permanently excluded through no fault of their own but the same is true of many clubs or gangs that have all kinds of frivolous reasons for refusing membership.

If it was a small country, that 2nd view might make more sense, but it has so much power that people everywhere are going to alter their lives to try to fit in because it's the most important club around, and those who miss out are going to be very disadvantaged compared to the lucky few who make it in.

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> "America is a private club which accepts membership applications of people that it likes for whatever reasons"

This is every nation state on earth. Of course they care about your background, skills and likelihood of naturalization. It's hardly unique to the US

> Of course they care about your background, skills and likelihood of naturalization.

How is all that relevant when you're on a week long business trip or visiting as a tourist? Vast majority of visitors in USA are not staying.

Or F1 student.

Afaik, for nonimmigrant visas they don't care about skills, but they do care about any ideological background (preventing terrorism) and they care a lot about the probability of overstaying the visa: they want to see evdence of connections and plans to return from the US.

> Afaik, for nonimmigrant visas they don't care about skills,

I am afraid they actually do. I know someone’s visitor visa was rejected because the consular officer thought he works on AI. I have no idea why working on AI is grounds for rejection.

I don’t know why I am getting downvoted but I have been asked to submit my CV even when applying for B1 tourist visa. So they do care about skills.

Most other countries don't have such a monopoly on being the best place to go to. For an engineer or scientist at least, America is often where your career can go the furthest.

It seems a bit non-straightforward that the right of a private club to choose members seems like an important freedom, but that that only applies when there are numerous competitive alternative clubs. For countries, that's usually the case but America is number one in many ways and sometimes by such a wide margin that applicants don't really have a choice that isn't much worse. So maybe it has more responsibility to be fair in order to avoid being tyrannical to the rest of the world.

So you'd be okay if every other country in the world did the same to US citizens? They would demand you hand over all of your social media information and then scrape the data when going on vacation? Would you trust all of those governments? Because that's where we're headed. If the US does this then so will every other country.

Canada already does it.

Except it's not a "club", which would imply a voluntary nonexclusive membership as well as the competition arising from free choice.

Rather it's more like a Homeowners Association that starts enacting overbearing rules, like say putting up a locked gate that can only be opened by bona fide residents (and not simply their guests).

This seems a little too cynical and reactionary for me. Are we to simply resign ourselves to the societal and legal infrastructures we exist in and which our tax dollars, labor and existences support becoming creeping authoritarian dead without freedom? Should we be okay with letting any such "membership" applications becoming inexplicably opaque?

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