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Comment by hodgehog11 | Hacker News Reader

How many "mistakes" are going to be made in this process, I wonder? A colleague of mine had his student's visa status suddenly revoked a few months ago. Fortunately, the student's lawyers successfully argued in court that there were no grounds for revocation. It still isn't clear why any of it happened.

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This isn't discussed enough. One argument I've heard is that "this only applies to people who break the law".

One thing to consider is how easy is to make minor mistakes that technically count as an infraction. When acting in good faith, the administration can acknowledge this and promptly fix it, as it happened to me during my immigration process.

Then there are random mistakes out of your control. For example, when I first moved to the US and tried to get insurance for my car, I received extremely high quotes from the insurer. When I inquired why, they replied that my file showed several traffic infractions years ago in a different state. Simply clarifying that they'd mistaken me for another person was enough to fix it. Imagine if instead they deported me to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to defend myself.

And this is not talking shadier practices, such as changing the rules so that certain things suddenly become offenses, or simply fabricating evidence against someone.

Is Freedom of Speech only meant for US citizens?

No, next they'll be reviewing citizenships too in order to make sure you haven't said anything mean about Trump or Vance online. Oh sorry, to make sure you haven't said anything that goes against the fundamental values of the United States.

They better be careful, saying something true online is less work than the renunciation process to demand the freedoms everyone else is born with.

Seriously, would love to have not had to spent 3 years backfilling paperwork, and paying $2000+CAD (after lawyer fees) to renounce.

You must dig deeper into US history. Citizenship was revoked or frozen en masse at certain period for different races. Actually the “free” USA only happened after world war 2 and it was probably because the US was becoming the super power.

This current administration wants to end interventionism which means the old US (100% white/all Protestant) might be coming back. If you are not in that category you must start planning accordingly.

It was also revoked for American women who married foreign citizens until the early 20th century - in fact, an awful lot of my parents' friends for some reason still assume that I lost mine and automatically became a German citizen when I married my husband.

Ha. Getting German citizenship has become easier, but it's still far from automatic, and at least the way things have been the past 100 years or so, I (native-born to native-born US citizens in the US, white) would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get rid of my US citizenship.

Yes the Germans are really strict with their nationality. One thing I cannot fathom is how the Germans kept honouring the citizenship given to SS collaborators from other countries after the war.

In Holland we've had some war criminals (Dutch collaborators) that leisurely lived out their lives in Germany because they received citizenship through SS membership as thanks for their war crimes. And Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens. Also they stalled local prosecution until the people in question were too old and frail to stand trial.

I really don't understand how the western world let them get away with doing that. Every SS-derived citizenship should have been instantly revoked in 1945, all wartime laws retracted and citizens with wartime crimes extradited.

Source (sorry in Dutch) https://duitslandinstituut.nl/artikel/174/hoe-duitsland-met-...

Ostracism was core of Athenian democracy, and yes it was politicized often.

No democracy for enemies of democracy.

It was reserved to highly ranked influential politicians, though. Also quite rare as far as we can tell.

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