US immigration enforcement used AI-powered tool to scan posts derogatory to US

Disclaimer: Not a legal expert.

Ex: Mathews v. Lucas, 427 U.S. 495 (1976)

The Plaintiffs argued that they were denied Social Security benefits because they were "illegitimate" children of their father even though the plaintiffs were able to prove that they were related.

The court held that among other reasons, because as defined in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal", that there was no differentiation between a "legitimate" child and an "illegitimate" child in the eyes of the government.

There's a few other cases, but that's one that I've studied the most.

The first 7 words of The Constitution are “We the People of The United States.” Later in the same paragraph they specifically state that they are doing that for “ourselves and our posterity”

There is no ambiguity that the framers were creating rights and laws for “People of the United States”

Otherwise, what does it mean to you? Is your view that simply being physically capable of doing something means you're 'free' to do it?

Do you think people in North Korea have freedom of speech? After all, they can say whatever they like. It just comes with a cost (life in a labor camp).

It's possible that you're often similarly misreading statements from others as implying causality. It's absolutely faulty logic to say I have relationship X to Y so I can't be Y. However, P(Not against Y | my relationship X to Y) > P(Not against Y) may certainly be valid reasoning.

I certainly can't think of any Y where I'd take a tonights-bar-tab bar bet against the statement that people married to Y are more sympathetic on average toward Y than the average person.

It's preemptive defense against inevitable knee-jerk "you're anti-immigrant" ad hominem attacks. I wish I didn't feel the need to preempt such diversions, but that's the world in which we live.

Is every other country going to follow suit? Would you have the US disband their military as well? Or should they just deploy it without any sort of intelligence gathering?

Most Europeans get to use the quick and relatively cheap shortcut of ESTA/VWP rather than needing to apply for a full tourist visa, though indeed there are exceptions based on nationality or personal history.

> while all y'all need is your passport because our dumbass politicians didn't insist on reciprocity.

The EU has been working on their own version of ESTA called ETIAS for many years now, which has been repeatedly delayed for EU-internal reasons that as far as I've read have nothing to do with US pressure, like technical/IT delays and a request from France for the related Entry/Exit System not to begin before the Paris Olympics. ETIAS is currently expected to begin operation in 2025 and will apply to US citizens just as it will to every other Schengen-visa exempt third-country nationality.

Since you said "Europeans" rather than "EU citizens" or "Schengen citizens", I'll recognize that the UK is still in Europe and note that they're preparing to do the same kind of thing, with their system to be called ETA and also intended to include US citizens once fully implemented.

So that will bring approximate reciprocity, again with the exception of those Europeans who don't qualify for the US ESTA/VWP system.

But there’s a vast possibility space between no vetting and the systematic analysis of all public information about a person. Especially when social media - a place where people are rarely their authentic selves - is a primary source. There is far more stupid stuff being said on social media than dangerous stuff. But the two can be nearly indistinguishable without appropriate context. People will be denied entry for being spicy far more than for legitimate reasons I’d imagine.

Not to mention that there is a significant amount of public information that should not be public in the first place. Its availability is not a justification for its use in this way. By > If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts.

I can’t get on board with this framing. It feels similar to the arguments for more cameras in public places. Put a camera on every corner. They’re public after all. But once you start feeding those cameras into a central AI that can track your every move, they’re no longer just cameras, and the very idea of what it means to be in public no longer means the same thing that it did for most of human civilization.

Again, I’m not saying they should look at anything. But I think it’s also necessary to raise red flags when emerging tech will be used in increasingly invasive ways by governments.

A country is allowed to deny a visa for any reason.

To put another way, there is no fundamental human right for a non-American to enter the United States.

The thing about America is that it's very good[1] at passing on its politics to immigrants and their children. This is why you get lots of immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind themselves and ban immigrants, which is a hilariously illiberal policy that would actually harm themselves. The far-right Islamofascist nutters who want to kill heretics and forcibly mutilate women's vaginas will, given enough time, absolutely break bread with the far-right Christofascist nutters who want to ban books they don't like from schools and ban trans people from public spaces[2]. Given enough time, even tankies[3] could get in on this and form a pan-authoritarian cult of illiberality and oppression.

Insamuch as this necessitates any compromise of liberal values for the sake of the continued existence of liberalism in the United States, such a compromise should be limited to the least invasive change necessary to preserve human rights. Banning immigrants for having grumbles about the US smells like collective punishment, and we don't actually need that. Illiberal and far-right thinking is spread by very small numbers of influential and socially connected grifters, and targeting just them would be less invasive.

Furthermore, we don't actually know what speech US ICE is using to deny visas, just that they're using machine learning to scan for some kind of speech. They might be solely targeting foreign liberals because that's what they consider a security threat to themselves.

[0] Aided by Elon Musk selling bluechecks and algorithmic boosts on Xitter for $8/mo

[1] Relative to other countries, of course, who basically don't even try

[2] We don't have to get into why they would do this - or how they'd excuse it given their mutual hatred for one another. Crank magnetism is a powerful force.

[3] Far-left authoritarians.

Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. No individual gets to choose the genes they inherit, but they do have some level of agency over how they choose to operate in the world.

> The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.

True, but the system in place that enforces the first amendment and the entire Constitution ultimately depends on the vast majority of people to agree and comply with that base ideology. The system of governance isn't omnipotent or omnipresent enough to defend against a large enough minority of the population becoming hostile to these ideals.

This is the big reason why Trump's violation of the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is so horrific, because it threatened the foundation of consensus that lets our system operate as a democracy that non destructively lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top.

There is massive variety of culture and ideology between people that share the same phenotypes. And some of that culture and ideology is incompatible with the preservation of our democratic norm of peaceful competition of ideas and peaceful transfer of power.

This is also why racial profiling is not only morally wrong, but practically problematic. It's lazy and sloppy guardianship that's targeting a perceived proxy for the threat rather than the actual threat.

The threat is not the genes, it's the memes. And if our societal defense system is targeting genes, then the memes will eventually figure out how to find different hosts that can bypass those defenses.

But some of the restrictions may be on how the constitution was worded. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," implies that that person has an interest in the United States, instead of being a visitor. So only nonimmigrant visa aliens have a hard time, but there are exceptions.

Even so, law that exists does not imply that it is correct or just with other laws. The AI tool in the article or some of the restrictions are up for debate on their legality. The same way why people debate gun restrictions on their constitutionality.