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Comment by jmbwell | Hacker News Reader

Looking at public profiles is one thing… requiring people to switch their profiles to “Public” so they can be looked at seems like another thing. How is that even enforceable? What if they find some profile that happens to have my name and is private, but isn’t mine? To say nothing of the legitimate reasons to have a private profile in the first place. And who defines “hostility?”

It’s hard not to see this as another “freedom of speech (but only for the kind of speech we like)” situation.

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Yeah, I wonder how this is checked/enforced as well, it doesn't seem trivial and especially in the time at entry. Is it something they take action over retroactively, after correlating records from multiple companies?

Like everything else the government does they'll take you at your word and scrutinize it later looking for an excuse to screw you if you do anything they don't like.

Does/should one have freedom of speech if they are a non-citizen and not in the US yet? If so, should the US police around the world to ensure that?

But aren't they applying to be a student in the US? Who is US to decide if a non-citizen can or cannot have freedom of speech? What a tone deaf comment was that!

I think the gray area is that the student is not in the US. They are in another country, and are applying at a consulate/embassy.

Many of the rights US residents have don't apply to visa applicants.

In any case, there are plenty of examples in the past where the US denied people entry based on stuff they've publicly said/written. What's different here is requiring you to disclose all your handles and make them public.

This really shouldn't be a gray area, if we just actually applied the constitution. The first amendment doesn't grant the people the freedom of speech, it restricts Congress from passing any law that infringes upon it.

This ultra-literalist approach leads to the conclusion that nothing in the constitution prevents states from outlawing speech or establishing a religion.

They didn't just stop at 1 amendment. There's a bunch of others that have been interpreted as covering those eventualities and many more.

we don’t get our rights from our government. It can only recognize these rights. Free speech is a human right whether or not a government recognizes it. People under an authoritarian regime still have a human right to free speech even if that regime outlaws it.

This strikes me as a false dichotomy. There is a solar-system-sized gap between "my country should not impose speech restrictions on foreign visitors" and "my country should police every other country to ensure that they do not impose speech restrictions upon their own citizens within their borders". Was anybody seriously proposing that?

I was only asking questions.

But aren't some questions productive and others unproductive? And if so, should the US police the entire world to ensure that no unproductive questions are ever asked?

this is such a trope at this point that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions

Thanks for the criticism. In this case, what do you see as the "false or distorted claims by framing them as questions" that I was making?

Probably: > a false dichotomy

That's what you said, not me. Are you saying I presented a false dichotomy? A false dichotomy, also known as a false dilemma or either/or fallacy, occurs when only two options are presented as possibilities in a situation where other options exist. What are the two options I presented? I asked two Y/N questions and even if the answer to the first is Y, the answer to the second can still be Y or N, I'm not presupposing an answer.

Yes, they do. Full stop. The constitution is not ambiguous about this, at all. The Bill of Rights starts, right out of the gates with:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "

Note the wording. It's not in the business of granting rights (those are natural and inalienable). It restricts Congress's ability to pass any law that infringes upon those rights.

I like this take.

You don’t have a right to a US visa. You can choose not to comply with the request.

The issue is retaliating against free speech using the visa process. A person doesn’t have a right to a visa but they have right to free speech. Using the visa process to retaliate against free speech violates a foundational principle of our government the human right to free speech.

No, it only means that you enjoy your free speech back home. No rights are being violated or suppressed. You’ll find this to be true in every free country.

Actually most democracies extend freedom of expression to everyone including immigrants.

Withholding a visa by a government due to political statements is retaliation and retaliation is a method of suppressing someone’s free speech.

The violation of the constitution here is based on the fact that the government of the United States does not have the right to restrict free speech. The 1st Amendment very actively strips them of that power.

The rights of non-citizens outside the US are not well protected by the constitution.

There was case a while back where a border patrol agent in Texas shot a person in Mexico. No ability sue.

The constitution only restricts the government (some exceptions), and is therefore unusually silent in where the government isn’t the government.

This is unfortunate, because the US government absolutely operates in foreign countries.

Mesa v Hernandez was not decided based on the idea that people outside the US have zero rights in US courts. It was decided based on the insane principle of qualified immunity being applied to law enforcement when they violate somebody's rights in a way that is not absolutely completely identical to some prior case where a court determined that the action violates rights.

It is an insane case, but for different reasons.

To play devil’s advocate, this has more to do with the concept of sovereignty. A country can choose who gets to enter its borders. We may or may not agree with the rules they impose but they can set them. The constitution only applies to people that are already on US land.

The devil has enough advocates.

The constitution mostly applies to the government, carefully laying out what they can or can't do. And they tend to be on American soil.

You are mixing two things. Rights in the US jurisdiction and outside of it

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