Why I stopped travelling to the US and largely stopped doing business in the US

One of the more surreal conversations I've had while entering the US was one guy who wanted to know why I've been to Turkey/Egypt/Morocco so many times - he just seemed to refuse to believe me when I said that they are really nice places to go on holiday and that they are very common holiday destinations for Europeans. I actually had to explain what it is that I like about them!

Note - I'm from the UK.

[Edit: Note that I really enjoy visiting the US - the country is great, its just that the experience of getting in can be a bit odd, although I have to admit that the last few times were all perfectly pleasant].

Americans can be pretty suspicious of outsiders even if the outsiders are fellow Americans. Where I grew up, walking around town (instead of driving) or standing at the bus station meant you were at best are some sort of vaguely criminal transient.

Have you ever been to Qatar? I'd have to disagree with you there.

Just out of curiosity where are you from / what race are you?

My experiences have been as bad too..I am an Indian citizen and came to the US for graduate studies about 3 years back. Immediately after graduation,I was supposed to join a reputed company but due to some administrative glitch by the USCIS, it took me 6 months to get the required work authorization. I was barely able to convince the company to hold my job. Those were the most harrowing days. I came to India this December for vacation and my work visa application has been again kept on hold status since the past 2 months and I am struck here. I am again on the verge of losing my job. The worst part of all this is, the administration at no point does seem to care about letting people know what causes the hold up and the estimated time for it to get resolved. The lack of transperancy is so frustrating. Each day you just pray that you will get some update from them. And I am not alone, I know atleast 5-6 persons who have been held up for some reason or the other at this time. I really like life in the US and the opportunities it provides, but now I am seriously contemplating if all this is worth it.

You're just too much of a flight risk - they see you as having too little at stake in India. I've had some friends have similar issues (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=851287). I myself returned to India after 8 years in the states partly because it was practically impossible to start my own business without a green card, aka 4 years of indentured servitude.

For future reference: Try to show assets you own (real estate, homes etc) that incentivize your return; Bring literature about your conference, maybe ads etc (they need to see that its purpose is not an immigration scam); if you're married or have kids, that helps a great deal. Good luck!

The right way to go about it is get a good lawyer to represent you. It seems like an overkill but sounds like you can afford it. My valid visa case was rejected by INS and I was asked to go through a number of hoops because the lawyer had entered information in a different format. I changed lawyers and it made a sea of difference. Learnt the lesson that never skimp on lawyers. Try talking to Aron Finklestein or Alisa Klein at http://www.murthy.com/attprofi.html. They charge 200$ for a 20 min consult and will tell you what to do exactly. I was not sure if 20 mins would be enough to explain my complex case but 20 mins is all it took for them to come up with a strategy. Best of luck.

Do you truly need a business visa just to enter the US in order to speak at a conference, for a visit likely lasting no more than a few days?

Unfortunately, it appears that India is among the countries hit particularly hard. Anecdotally, it is noticeably harder for an Indian to get a US visa (business or visitor's) than an average foreigner (from a country where a US visa is required).

It's not just the off-topic stuff. It's groupthink. The needle on that has been buried for months now.

I'll give you a telling example: the insane series of threads where, in essence, an angry mob chased a comp-sci grad student around for nominating Wikipedia articles for deletion. "Here's the main offender!" "You're a drain on Wikipedia, a negative source of knowledge!" "You're an idiot!". An Internet-famous guy chimes in with a comment calling him "a gigantic Nazi asshole" (fun fact: this is after the guy took the time to sign up to talk to HN commenters).

Then HN dutifully mods up a blog post by the same guy that calls the guy out by name for "deciding he's the sole decider of the notability of programming languages". Nice.

Then a triumphal thread on a post about how the guy has stopped nominating articles for deletion on Wikipedia. The system works!

Why do I like this example? No politics. Still bad.

You can see the groupthink everywhere on the site, from the comment on any Amazon post that gets reflexively modded up for pointing out that Amazon removed Wikipedia content, or how Sony once installed a rootkit, or how IP laws are bad for America (I especially liked watching people downmod 'grellas trying to provide context and upmodding someone who, presumably, was not a startup lawyer).

Thank you for not only flagging it, but saying something. Supposedly that's against the guidelines, but if a community doesn't communicate in cases like these, how can the newcomers learn that articles like these are not hacker news.

One of my own guidelines for "not hacker news" is if it's an article that's designed to "raise hackles" in the sense of offending one's sense of justice or "how things ought to be". This clearly falls in that category. This isn't "intellectually gratifying", it's gratifying to your sense of righteousness / indignance. None of this stuff is at all new to anyone whose residence is not located under a rock.

Oh, also, as an aside:

> And please spare us the lame "situational logic" response of how <anyShit> is hacker news.

I think of that game as "7 degrees of hacker news". The more outlandish it is, the more 'fun'. For instance, an article about renaissance Italy could be hacker news, because Paul Graham has talked about the style of painting in that time period, and has compared painting to to hacking, and since Paul Graham is a hacker...voila`! Although, truth be told, that sort of subject matter might at least be interesting in the sense of telling me something I didn't know, rather than discussing current US politics.

Given that the US is largely considered the most entrepreneurial country in the world, I think this is relevant. A lot of people from other countries want to do business here, and this very well might be of concern to them.

This thread has sparked a large discussion and I think this is in line with the submission guidelines as being intellectually gratifying.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Working in the tech field often means travelling to the States. More importantly, since many hacker newsers are American, you should be aware that setting up shop in the States makes it more difficult for you to do business internationally, that travelling to visit clients/customers/suppliers is easier for you than it is for them to visit you. So yes, this is relevant.

And flagging an article because of a little easily recognized hyperbole?

Your are picking on the one time he goes hyperbolic. Overall, there are good points in the post, even if he does make that one statement that is obviously false. Just read it as "many" and move on.

Business travel to the US is extremely relevant for anyone working in hi-tech. Esp. when carrying expensive/electronic equipment.

>Any suggestions for how to get back to having hacker news on Hacker News?

I try to go to http://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upmod tech-related submissions once in a while. I should probably do it more often. Also, flagging stuff that could be on TV or Reddit.

Does the tech world live in an isolated bubbled insulated from the rest of society?

I don't think there's anything to be done TBH. In previous discussions about the community's slipping quality I was always encouraged by the fact that submissions stayed approximately the same. That's not the case anymore. And what that means aside from less useful content is that a critical mass of news users and complacent old ones represent the majority on the site.

By having a mental gauge of what's too subjective and not posting those, as well as not voting on, commenting on, etc?

Maybe there is some sort of algorithm that can be established to determine the level of subjectivity of an article or post with a 95% confidence interval?

Turn off rep score, then people won't post crap just to get upvoted.

Band together (e.g. private mailing list) with like-minded people and upvote each other's submissions until the culture has changed.

EDIT: Hey, that's the only reasonable answer to the parent's question so far, as far as I can see. I don't like the idea either, but it's a reasonable idea, downvotes be damned!

Most Americans aren't seeing this stuff.

When I was married and my American wife got to join me in the queue I was in, and had to go through the same process that I went through. Well she was incredulous that she was being treated that way.

Until Americans actually experience this, nothing will be done about it.

I've considered that enough to think that a better way to approach it is to subject people to the kind of security that they subject others to. So that if Americans want to visit other countries that they are finger-printed, interrogated, X-Ray'd, delayed and otherwise harassed.

Then when they complain point out that what is being done to them is a reflection of what they do to others, that is the only thing I can imagine might make them consider changing their ways... and I really am not living in the kind of world where I think this is achievable since European border control isn't going to start implementing this stuff on a per nationality basis. So it's not as if I really think this is feasible.

As I've pointed out in the past, I also no longer go to the USA or do business there.

When I am forced to have face-to-face meetings with Americans, I force the venue to be in Canada at a location I can get a flight to that doesn't require going via the USA (tends to be Toronto as direct flights from London are cheap and frequent).

This works for me to the point that I no longer think about it until it appears like this on a forum and I remember that I don't go to the USA anymore... it's become subconscious. I just don't go to the USA because of the experience of doing so (not limited to border alone, but border is the initial impression and the worst).

Try Sea-Tac airport. 20 lanes at the border, 17 reserved for American citizens, of whom there are probably about 20 on a 400-seater plane.

I've traveled all over the world, US borders are the most unpleasant. I'v had border guards in FSRs point guns at me but hey, those guys are just doing their jobs. In the US they go out of their way to be rude, lazy, incompetent and just plain obnoxious.

When the nonsense is done at limo stands and private jets, you will see a change.

No politician is deaf to the voices of "the people", but it's a lot easier to get into speaking range when you can afford a professional lobby.

Basically that's the problem. It's estimated that there are somewhere between 3-7 million non-military Americans living overseas, but that's less than 3% of the population. If the US had senators and representatives dedicated to those people, we would have some clout, but because we still have to have "residency" in a specific state, we aren't really large enough to have much political clout.

Unfortunately most of the people who live in the US really don't understand the bullshit treatment that people get when entering the country. --It's not as bad for US citizens, but I still get questioned more coming into the US than any other country I've visited.

Part of it is the motivation to return home. I'm Australian, and we've got a fairly intensive customs procedure, but I could care less, I'm an hour or less away from home now.

Visting America was a different story though: I'm getting fingerprinted, and people are jumping queues, and the security is crazy... and all I'm thinking is "Why did I bother?"

Waiting for americans to care enough about the discomfort of vistors (relative to motivation to be there) might take a while.

"I usually have to spend a lot of time being interrogated for my lack of a huge suitcase" he is bothered at the border. He is talking about the whole experience not only about the cost.

By the law of averages, all insurance is a waste of money. Insurance companies make money. They do this by collecting more fees than they pay out. In aggregate, they win and you lose.

The real question to ask is, "can I afford this insurance" and "is it worth it to me". If you buy a $250 mp3 player and the "insurance" is $300 and lasts for 6 months, it's a waste of money, because you aren't going to break your mp3 player twice in 6 months. But if it's $20 to insure your $10,000 of camera equipment which has a replacement cost equal to a month of income, then you should probably go for it. It's a bad deal, but $20 is the cost of a few beers, which is also a bad deal.

Anyway, someone makes money on every transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't be a party to that transaction.

(And I'm a white guy from northern EU. My sympathies to those from more targeted regions or ethnicities.)

Refuse? Refuse? You can fly to the US - some 4000 miles away in 7.5 hrs for the East Coast and 11 hours for the West coast. You then may have a little bit of a wait at immigration (or not as the case may be). I've gone through in 5 minutes and one time it was 45 minutes. Seeing as you state you're in the UK, you also eligible for the VWP which means you can travel to the US whenever you like.

Just consider what it was like to travel before the invention of the airplane, or the steam ship. Please appreciate that you live in a time when travelling the world is very very easy. And please watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

Does he really have to own the gun or does he just have to declare his camera as a gun?

The US just became unaffordable, it was probably not a choice on the OP.

I'd imagine that a photographer doesn't have the time to require looking for clients across six continents.

I am a USSR born Australian citizen (I have Russian and Australian citizenships)

Last year was the first time I traveled outside Australia since 2001, but my Australian passport was issued about 5 years ago. So there was not a single stamp in it.

On my way to Russia I had a stopover in Amsterdam for about 4 hours so I went out to have a walk around the city.

The customs officer had a look through my clean passport and asked "Travel much?". We had a laugh and in a few seconds I was in Amsterdam.

I flew to Madrid from St. Petersburg and then drove from Spain to southern France to Rome and flew back to St. Petersburg. Well, when you drive from one EU country to another there is technically a border but nowhere I was even stopped. In the airports they generally ask you to open your laptop but that's it. The most strict one was in Warsaw - I think I had to take my shoes off and place them on the conveyour. And you walk through a metal detector, but if you put your watch and wallet on the conveyour it generally doesn't detect anything, unless you have a huge belt buckle or something like that.

Well, with a Lybian or Iranian passport the experience could be quite different I assume ...

What exactly would you like to know? I've traveled to about 10 European countries. I've never been photographed, had my fingerprints taken, been interrogated about my intentions. But every time I visit the US, all of these things happen. I should note that I'm a European Union (EU) citizen which gives me the right to travel freely between countries in the EU. But my American friends have only ever been hassled when they broke the conditions of their holiday visas (e.g. overstayed their 90 days).

I'm a non-EU citizen living in Austria for the past 6 years.

I travel extensively through the EU (probably cross an EU border at least 10 times/year on average) and never had any issues except for 1 time in Berlin where the immigration officer asked why I have been in the EU for so long.

I showed him my Austrian residency permit and he waived me through.

The EU is a dream compared to the US/UK.

My girlfriend is English and I'm American. For the first 3 years we were together, it was impossible for me to live in England or for her to live in the US. Instead we rented an apartment in Spain and lived there with never a word from EU immigrations about my coming or going.

Granted, getting a visa to live there legally as an American is next to impossible. But at least in Spain, they just plain never check.

The EU borders are very professional and straightforward. They don't ask you personal questions or base any decisions on how you look.

Usually separate lanes for EU-citizens. In some countries, if those are empty, officers from those lanes may call you over even if you are not an EU citizen. If it's a passport they are familiair with and no visa is required, you basically get treated the same way as everybody else: a quick glance and off you go.

In my limited experience, painless. I'm Canadian, and I've been to Switzerland twice: first as a tourist, then on a work visa. Both times I entered the Schengen area via Charles de Gaulle, then flew to Geneva or Zurich respectively.

Both times my passport was checked in Paris... just a "what's the purpose of your visit", a look at the passport and visa, and a wave through. In Geneva, there was no border control (just a "go this way if you have anything to declare" or "go this way to the street" fork). In Zurich, there was another border guard; same deal as in Paris.

I'm a South African living in the UK, so I need Schengen visas when ever travelling to the EU. I have found the staff at the borders fine (have travelled to the EU about 10 times); I've never had any problems. Sure, they're not the friendliest, but I've never found a country that did have friendly border staff.

My issue with the Schengen scheme is the process of getting the visa itself. The requirements are a bit over the top, and it's expensive, think its's about £80 for a French Schengen.

My understanding (though as an EU citizen) is that it varies ridiculously from country to country within Schengen. As much as I'd hate to revert to national stereotypes... they're likely accurate ^^

The UK, however, is pretty well known for being rather strict with immigration procedures and border controls.

Fun fact: Finnish Frontier Guard is currently training their Turkish counterpart in border control / illegal immigrant prevention. I heard it yesterday in person from Finnish Minister of Interior. Geographically it makes no sense, but immigrants become everyone's problem after they reach any EU country.

I guess this means that Schengen countries have extensive cooperation and will adopt joint standards in time.

"For example: After an incident involving an American in Brazil [1], all Americans were out of a sudden required by the Brazilian authorities to get pictures taken at the Brazilian customs. The situation got so ridiculous, that at some point the airports ended up with 3 lines: "Brazilian Citizens", "Foreigners", and "Americans". In other words, Americans were singled-out from the rest of the world. Would the OP describe that as a "pleasant experience"???"

Why should Brazil treat US citizens any different, than the US treats Brazilian citizens? If the US harasses Brazilian citizens with such procedures, it is IMO perfectly OK if Brazil does the same to US citizens.

Brazil isn't part of the Visa Waiver program and felt that its citizens were being treated unreasonably. Thus, they began being rude to Americans. (IIRC)

Kind of an asshole move, but highly entertaining to watch from the outside.

> this sounds very over-the-top

It is from reddit, which pretty much thrives on over-the-top, especially if it's about how EEEEVIL the US is.

"In places like Brazil your entire trip is at the hands of chance: Most times you get a nice officer, but sometimes not."

In my experience, this exactly sums up travelling to the US.

>> all Americans were out of a sudden required by the Brazilian authorities to get pictures taken at the Brazilian customs

I'm curious why this would be such a hassle. I work in China right now and every time I go through customs, there's a little web cam there that takes a photo of me while the customs officer looks at my passport and stamps it. I think both foreigners and citizens experience it. Adds no time to the process at all. I even see my photo on the computer screen if the screen is angled right.

Unless Brazil simply doesn't have the ability to set up this kind of tech....

I think that's kind of the point. The unpleasantness is institutionalized in the US, whereas it's random/haphazard in most other places.

Don't accept the protocol! It is degrading, the scanners pose a health risk, and it is all a waste of money with no benefit to security. America spends several times more on TSA that the entire FBI counter-terrorism budget.

I would say as a non-USA person travelling to other countries is quite pleasant vs going to the USA, his statement is not over the top.

I would the experience of a USA person travelling to other countries wouldn't be quite as pleasant as their is a lot of pent up rage against USA in other countries and when they get to meet a yank they have a chance to express it.