2020
In November, in the middle of Covid, I finally got a US visa.[1]
[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days...
Edit: formating
In November, in the middle of Covid, I finally got a US visa.[1]
[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days...
Edit: formating
International conference organizers ought to plan a bit in advance if they want to schedule things in the US.
… or just don't organize stuff in the US.
Of course, it's not as easy if you're not from one of the 40 countries eligible for the Visa Waiver Program. But from what I can see, Daniel is in and from Sweden, which is one of those countries.
It's apparently not that easy when the US decides it's not enough.
It's not like bureaucrats actually understand what curl does, but they have heard about "hacks".
There are a ton more people for whom it is very bad. ESTA only includes maybe 600-700 million people. There are probably 7 billion people for which it is hard to very hard to get any US visa.
But I should not have said "most people". And now knowing the context of Daniel's situation, my comment was probably unnecessary in general.
That was not really my intent.
My comment was quite snarky, this was the intent. I got a visa myself quite easily, but a lot of people actually argue for not organizing conferences there because of visa issues.
A former colleague of mine wanted to present a paper and got his visa issued after the conference, most likely because his passport is a Lebanese one. He's been living in France for years. His PhD supervisor had to present for him instead. This colleague wont best paper awards but no, he is not going to present them in the US.
My (more) serious argument is yes, it is this bad, and good enough for a lot of people is not satisfactory. We need places that don't arbitrarily exclude people so much. The US needs to fix this visa issue and until then, it would be best if events were organized elsewhere.
Not all interesting people doing research or involved in programming are American or EU citizen. This happens everywhere, including from countries if you happen to leave have set foot in or lived, you are practically banned from going to the US.
If I ever go to Iran, I can say goodbye to ESTA for the rest of my life. Even if it's because of a plane issue and the plane needs to do an emergency landing.
The US are too unreliable.
Of course.
So don’t.
Bringing this up unmprompted is a bad-faith response. As if someone needed to be reminded that two unrelated things are indeed unrelated.