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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow. Eg. Hearing of cases where people from my home country were sent home when asked on entry "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-w...

This is definitely going to have effects for other companies in the USA. Eg. TSMC in the USA is currently being bootstrapped by a Taiwanese workforce. A similar raid there would just shut down the whole TSMC in USA project. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/50...

View on HN

The USA might as well put up a 'closed for business' by now.

Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS in spite of massive lock-in because the feeling that the USA is a trustworthy partner is completely gone. You can't just 'joke about invading Greenland' and expect everybody to move on as if it didn't happen. And I'm pretty sure that this isn't just local sample bias either, NL used to be pretty laid back when it came to silly details such as hosting providers and such.

How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?

AWS announced that they'd have an EU 'governed' region with only EU citizens working on it.https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-europea....

I'm not sure if that'd fully alleviate the risk for EU companies & governments, but I'd imagine it alleviates some of it.

Yes, they're panicking. And I'm not sure that this is going to be enough to offset the various concerns.

I agree that it might not be enough, but at the moment there also aren't good EU competitors in the cloud space. Good not in the technical sense, but good as in - people would be comfortable putting their eggs in the basket.

Plus, hiring for AWS / Azure / GCP experience is still much higher than for the smaller EU clouds.

Hetzner is pretty well established and has a good reputation - but they don't offer the same high level services as Amazon.

This isn't about reputation or high level services. Ultimately this is about certification and there are precious few alternatives with sufficient capacity that are certified and not somehow indirectly or directly owned by US entities. And there is a run on the ones that are.

The same way encryption at rest and encryption in transit checks the security box I'd imagine. Great until it can be admitted it isn't.

There was an interview with a high ranking Microsoft lawyer the other week where the lawyer conceded that even if the company would be a European subsidiary and the employees would be European then Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws. Of course the employees would be bound by European law, let’s see how that pans out.

Interesting, do you have a link to that? I can probably google for it but I'm being lazy. :D

i didn't check if the interview is linked but this thread and article talk about the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061153

thank you, appreciate it!

> Microsoft still would have to obey the new US laws

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone given that it is an American company. Being a multinational corporation like Microsoft or Mercedes Benz means you have to navigate rather complex legal situations, follow not just your home country's laws, but also the laws of the countries that you are operating in.

America is not even pretending to be a lawful nation anymore, so even if the executive had truthfully said the opposite it would be irrelevant.

The real question is where the CEO lives and whether their family and kids are susceptible to being kidnapped by the US govt.

The US uses extradition in countries with treaties and rendition most everywhere else. If you're a US citizen you might be safe in Russia or backwoods Africa,Myanmar etc but most anywhere else you're fucked.

If it’s in any way owned by a US entity, then no, then it’s just smoke and mirrors.

It's all a game of lets pretend.

The fundamental risk for the EU is the Cloud Act. Since that facility is still owned by a company that is owned by a US company, the Cloud Act applies.

Microsoft tried a similar thing in Germany and it failed.

Sadly there are more than enough entities in the EU, including states and other critical sectors, that are more than willing to play pretend too. We've seen it with privacy deals, I fear this will be similar.

I'm sure you're right, but having worked on both sides of the ocean, I can say that EU companies do keep the privacy angle in mind a bit more. I did work on medical devices though, so I might just have been in a bubble.

Medical, financial and insurance are all handling this quite well now, but many other fields are still - hopelessly - lagging behind.

I'd call it realpolitik. The eu doesn't write its own software. This is the downside case of that.

I personally would be open to trying to change that, but I keep looking at the EU and they don't want to. Many countries are actively hostile to entrepreneurs and eg can charge taxes/fees/exit fees on unrealized cap gains. etc.

Yeah EU is not competitive in tech. They missed the boat by.. decades. And the salary of engineers in EU is not good enough to make it attractive either for those who can and want to live abroad.

I’m an EU citizen, and think life generally was better in Belgium. But the salaries being so poor means I’m unlikely to move back.

Honestly, I think it's straightforward to fix. Requirements to attempt to source domestically (or at minimum try hard) plus loosening the rules on firing employees (yes it sucks, but hiring is super risky when it takes 0.5 - 3 years of salary to dispose of an employee, either a bad one or one that isn't the right person for a growing business) would go a long way towards jumpstarting domestic software production.

They don't seem to want to :shrug:

There is an awful lot of software produced in the EU. The problem is that as soon as someone is even moderately successful with something a US (or rather, an SV) based entity will make you an offer you can't refuse.

That's not exactly true. There certainly are areas where US options are clearly the best, but even in cases where a local alternative is viable there is a massive push to use US based services instead, and unsurprisingly the local options then stay small when even their own governments refuse to use them.

That's not enough. The only thing that would be enough would be a change of ownership but that clearly isn't on the table. Yet. But I would not be surprised if AWS/Azure/Google ended up divesting some of their DCs in Europe as a result of the exodus.

how is this better than what the US is doing? at least in the US, they allow non-citizens to build

That doesn't help when every US company is under US jurisdiction.

If the US government decided to invade Greenland and ordered Amazon to cut off all network connections to Denmark, would this region still operate for Danish users?

If it did, and the US ordered Amazon to shut down the region, would it?

If the region kept on operating, and the US ordered Amazon to stop providing software updates, security updates, new license keys, etc. - how long could the region keep running?

You can't 'just' invade Greenland. You'd be invading the EU.

"B....b....but Trump can't do that!"

How many times have we heard that? He owns the party, the courts, the legislature, and the guns.

Then change the parameters slightly and imagine the US using the threat of cutting off Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple services to Denmark as incentive to transfer Greenland to US control.

That would be great if they did that.

So you understand that an "EU 'governed' [Amazon] region with only EU citizens working on it" isn't actually independent from the US, much less sovereign to either the EU or Denmark, right?

Who is a trust worthy partner? If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other. It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other

They dislike each other but my understanding is that, at least in the EU, they view each other as stable and trustworthy. No jokes about invasions, no deporting (or worse, imprisoning) legal immigrants, in general no caprice. Meanwhile the US simply cannot be counted on to be the historically stable and trustworthy partner that had defined us over the past 75-odd years.

> Who is a trust worthy partner?

Until very recently the USA was the preferred technology partner for many EU ventures and was seen as a trustworthy ally because of mutual history since 1945.

> If you talk to a European as an American they often have a lot more dislike for each other.

A lot more than what? And what exactly did Europe do in recent times that would give American citizens that feeling?

> It hasn’t been a century since they tried to genocide each other

This is a complete nonsense statement.

I believe the OP meant that European countries dislike one another, and the genocide refers to the Holocaust.

When you want to put aside your feelings and discuss facts I'll be around.

From my experience, anti-Trump Americans are still embraced and appreciated by Europeans. That doesn’t mean they can trust the US gov’t and probably won’t be able to again for a few decades.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out economically. It's like a repeat of Covid but only for the USA, and I expect it to negatively impact large corporations more than small businesses.

Greenland wasn’t a joke. Nothing that is said is a joke. It’s all real. If there isn’t push back of a substantial amount it will happen. With some pushback or indication that effort will be required personally on the part of the president then it gets delayed or conveniently forgotten.

> Outside of manufacturing all around me there is talk of ditching Azure, Google and even AWS

Lots of talk, but how much action?

People are still building things that depend on American cloud, American controlled OSes (especially for mobile), American supplied hardware, American cloud services (especially AI) and the moves away are tiny by contrast.

Plenty of action. This has gone way beyond 'mild discomfort but we'll just pretend it is all ok'. The last 6 months have seen a massive change in attitude.

some examples of action?

https://windowsforum.com/threads/european-governments-shift-...

Directly from the Windows Forum.

https://www.slashgear.com/1888658/microsoft-office-alternati...

Government's in Denmark, Germany, Spain (on the state level )

A couple more links for companies, but I trust the above is enough? The trend is definitely there and picking up speed.

Edit: a couple of days ago there was a post on HN about SAP spending 20b on cloud https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/sap_sovereign_cloud/

So over the last 15 years the solid examples of moves that have been committed to are:

1. Denmark’s Ministry for Digital Affairs

2. Two Danish cities

3. One German state

4. The Italian Ministry of defence

5. One Spanish region

They also say French education ministry advised schools to move off the free versions of the "free versions" of MS Office 365 and Google Docs. They do not say anything about how many schools followed the advice, or what they moved to (a paid version of the same? another American supplier?).

Not much for a whole continent.

There will be a lot of resistance to any change. There will be a lot of people like this making the same arguments made here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/13/debate_for_microsoft_...

Microsoft has successfully had such decisions reversed in the past:

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Munich-Plans-to-D...

This is exactly the same as what was being said during the first Trump term though.

Yes. But things really are different now. I think there was some expectation of checks and balances kicking in if things went really crazy and they didn't. So the trust factor is in the freezer right now, pretty much all over Europe. Yes, people still trade, yes, there is still traffic back and forth. But it is now because you have to, not because you want to. Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.

We were told that things really were different then too. And they were different by definition because they weren't the same, but that is not really evidence of anything. We were promised he colluded with Putin to hack the election and would become a dictator, that WWIII would be started, economy would be ruined, international trade would be stopped, undesirable citizens would be put into camps, etc. He really did not need courts or legislature on your side for that if you can control the military and a sizable portion of the country is on your side too. So that all turned out to be another cry wolf situation.

Things are different now too because they are not the same, sure. I don't know that people who got it quite wrong are the ones to trust when it comes to predictions of trading and economics this time around.

> Just look at the tourism figures for an idea of the current sentiment.

No doubt a lot of people have changed their minds about visiting US due to Trump -

"Overseas arrivals fell 3.4% in June compared to a year ago, bringing the YTD decline to 1.2%."

But I don't think those kinds of swings are much evidence for larger trade and investment and data sovereignty etc issues.

Everybody, EU, UK, China, Japan, India, Australia, well really just about all countries -- have made a lot of noise and care a lot about relying on US tech, having US companies and by extension the US government control their data, etc. This isn't something they've just started to try fixing in 2016 "because Trump", or in 2025 "because this time he means it". It's been much longer than that. With the exception of probably only China, nobody has been able to make a great deal of progress on it.

> How long until the .COM registry becomes fair game for the nationalists?

What does this mean? Like “the nationalists” would start taking away domain names of people they don’t like or something?

"Confused" or they're incentivized to meet a quota to hang on to their jobs, and in many cases are themselves explicitly motivated by racial animus, and are fine with trampling over the law?

https://newrepublic.com/article/196154/stephen-miller-erupts...

The surface details are irrelevant deportation numbers are below Obamas. These are scattered operations in search of two things roughly. The purpose is to have a paramilitary operation directly lead by the Oval Office without buffers - remaining in power extralegally and without elections whether they are held or not. When you need to arrest and harass anyone without a warrant, the easiest thing to do is claim they are non-citizens. Countless citizens have been arrested under this pretext already. And to be able to extract wealth extralegally. Every act falls under these two concepts, and Project 2025 was a pre textual conduit for this that uses political ideology as a path to feudal dictatorship.

> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about

- what a given visa allows

- whether or not someone is a naturalized citizen

- whether or not someone is a citizen by birth

and all kinds of things that seem like they should be core, table stakes knowledge of the job they are supposedly doing.

They’re too busy turning and burning to study laws!!

Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it.

I'm sure ICE would be the first to point this out in court -- so it's kind of ironic having to point this out here.

Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.

I'd usually agree but tbh law isn't really a thing anymore, it sucks but we all have to adjust to the new order

How does one adjust to living entirely in a military reservation?

> Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from having to follow it.

ICE agents and other Federal workers are largely insulated from consequences due to Sovereign Immunity protections. only egregious, malicious violations cause them personal liability. and Trump can dole out pardons if it comes to that.

> Thank goodness for the ACLU, Amnesty International, Democracy Forward, various state AG offices, and the American Bar Association.

it's nice that they're fighting, but the Supreme Court has shown a remarkable tolerance for flagrant lawlessness by the Administration (e.g. DHS v. DVD.) sometimes because the Court is sympathetic to Trump's objectives, sometimes because they fear he'll ignore them and do it anyway, and they'll lose the resulting power struggle (nine sedentary septuagenarians vs. the US Armed Forces.)

Visa just gives the officer the option to let you in. He can deny you entry virtually at will. CBP officer is god at the border. I have been temporarily denied entry even as US citizen, until they checked with their superiors for a few hours and found out they could not in fact do that.

Odds are they just wanted that person gone and the real reason can't be spoken out loud.

I think more often one can attribute incompetence rather than malice in 99% of cases like this.

911 was an inside job! Or maybe the us of a had an oopsie.

It's a possibility. It's why I've always thought the bribery or commission model makes for fairer and more efficient immigration. There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards.

Right now they only get rewarded if they deport or collar somebody, so that's all they seem to care about, and letting in good people is seen as more of a nuisance they must do while trying to get notches for their promotion.

> There has to be something in it for the border guard to bring in good productive people, so that's what they work towards.

Doesn't seem like much of an incentive to identify good productive people if the incentive scheme is defined as "accept a couple of hundred dollars" vs "don't accept a couple of hundred dollars"...

You can't bring in good people if there's not people.

There are already a few sprinkles here and there to reward them for stopping some of the bad people, but nothing if they let in a good person. $200 is better than nothing...

I don't think there's a shortage of good people trying to get into the US or the West...

Or that people responsible for processing visas and checking papers have been restricting numbers despite what their bosses and the wider public ask for. If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.

So what is your solution to get the border guard to have as much incentive to make sure good people, who mind you already have a visa, get in just as eagerly as he wants to collar the criminal who will bump up his chances at promotion?

I guess another option might be to give the similar kind of promotional awards to metrics of good immigrants being let in as they do to collaring criminals.

>If you want more immigrants than the guidelines and quotas permit, the route to it isn't legalising bribery.

I'm talking about the officer having an incentive to actually follow the "guidelines." His cost to reject someone is basically zero. He gets rewarded nothing for letting you in. I'm not talking about the officer getting paid to let in people without a visa, I'm talking about having an incentive to actually do his job and not just chase reasons to reject people with no cost to a bunch of false positives.

Edit:

(As an aside, the US actually has a loophole that allows US businesses to bribe foreign officials, including for immigration, to get them to do their job that they were already obligated to do. So really they would just be legalizing it for "them + the rest of world" instead just "the rest of world." Pure American exceptionalism to realize grease payments are legitimate and helpful everywhere but magically the US)

   Regarding payments to foreign officials, the act draws a distinction between bribery and facilitation or "grease payments", which may be permissible under the FCPA, but may still violate local laws. The primary distinction is that grease payments or facilitation payments are made to an official to expedite his performance of the routine duties he is already bound to perform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

I'm not sure what I find more baffling, your continued insistence that some people's difficulties in getting into other countries are a matter of border guards needing incentives as opposed to very public top down hostility to immigration and obsession with perceived threats, or the suggestion that empowering border guards to extort people for bribes if they wanted to get into the country would somehow lead to fairer immigration routes, as opposed to more money being extorted from vulnerable people.

You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone...

>You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone...

While we're telling stories, here's two tales from me

1) Robbed at the Mexican border by police. They didn't even bother asking me, just took it. They get no real reward for jailing people so they were very happy for the $180 and then left me the fuck alone.

2) Enter USA. Passport, everything good, everything legit. Insane border patrol degradingly strip searched me, watched me as I performed bowel movements, jailed me, took me halfway across the state in a prisoner van, and then ran up $1k in medical bills while they search my body for drugs that didn't exist. Unceremoniously dumped at the border with no apologies when absolutely nothing unlawful was found. Still debt collectors chasing me for this.

Now, which was fairer? Definitely getting robbed. The Mexican just wanted his reward. The US CBP could only get a reward by getting me arrested.

Now do both societal models suck? Yes they do. But as a guy on the street, I cannot change society, especially if I am an immigrant presenting at the border to a country I've never been to in my life. What I can do is get robbed of $200, and be in a fairer position than getting robbed of $1k of medical bills and a day in jail I'll never get back, or deported while some officer tries to win some dumb metric.

I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges.

That is the reality I am dealing with. Not a made up la-la land where top-down society is going to be changed by the immigrant presenting at the border. Legalized bribery is relative fairness in this world we live, compared to many of the actual alternatives many people have on the ground where they are staring at someone who gets to play god and the only question they have is how they can maximize their rewards.

> I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges.

I mean, why on earth wouldn't he do both if there's any incentive to do the latter, especially if he's dealing with individual immigrants rather than a people smuggling racket that might offer repeat business? You're accusing me of talking about "made up la la land" (i.e. the majority of the civilized world where border guards are paid flat salaries, not deportation bonuses) whilst inventing a society in which legalized theft from immigrants somehow results in border guards defying orders and incentives to scrupulously ensure all the "good" people get in.

Officers don't get a payout generally just for falsely arresting people and it eats up time they could be robbing someone else. It's generally more profitable to take $200 from a bunch more people than to burn a bunch of time falsely arrest someone, but more profitable for their career to arrest someone actually guilty than to do a bunch of robbing.

Therefore in the USA corruption model you end up with a bunch of false arrests while in the LatAm corruption model you end up with a bunch of fast robberies but not so much the lengthy deportation/arrest of innocents based on the officer thinking that's the bigger reward.

The way I've had this play out time and time again is my shit gets robbed in the third world but I have no problems entering, and the exact opposite issue with the USA.

Of course you could point to say the Swedish model where as far as I can tell they have no incentive to do any job whatsoever. I've entered Stockholm straight on a flight from a sketchy part of Iraq and no one even bothered to look at me or even question where I was coming from or what I might have with me. Their border guards must just lounge in a room drinking tea and draw their salaries or something.

The bit where a bored person checks your papers and maybe asks a basic question to gauge the awkwardness of your response is the norm for the civilised world and many other parts too, and doesn't seem less secure than shaking down arrivals from sketchy parts of Iraq for $200 but having no incentive (or other staff) to do anything else afterwards...

But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.

Look I don't expect to convince you at this point because we obviously come from two different realities.

Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time.

Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.

I'm perfectly happy to believe that in your actual reality the world's most paranoid, politicised and expensively resourced border control had more time to make your life a misery than frontline guards (apparently without any backup to deal with jailings) in another country whose interest in foreigners began and ended with the assumption most of them had more cash than them. I just don't believe the theory that if only US frontline border control staff were given leeway to pinch the contents of wallets they'd completely forget the national 'security threat' obsession, and all those people hired specifically to deal with alleged smugglers and terrorists sent to them by frontline staff would sit and twiddle their thumbs and absolutely nobody would care at any level.

Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.

I have a genuine question -- how do these "non-paranoid" countries incentivize their staff to let people through while still catching true threats? That's ultimately the problem we're trying to solve. The 3 main models I've seen thus far are following

1) US model, guards only rewarded for catching criminals or deporting. Lots of false negatives at no cost to guards so they fuck with you a lot for no apparent reason. Canada somewhat similar.

2) LatAm model, bribes/theft to incentivize the to not burn up time with false negatives, but they sonetimes are rewarded enough for true positives to not just let them go.

3) "Swedish" model. Straight salary and then not give a fuck. Seems everyone gets through with not much thought.

LatAm model seems most practical of what I've seen but I haven't spent much time in Europe or Asia, mostly middle east, the Americas, and southeast asia.

I mean, "Swedish" model works pretty well for the majority of travellers, especially since the US and Mexico famously don't succeed in stopping drug trafficking across their borders anyway. If you want border staff to be more thorough in vetting threats, you hire for competence rather than corruption.

LatAm model where they're too busy robbing people to care about actual threats (who are generally particularly happy to pay them off, including offers of recurring payments) seems like obviously the worst of both worlds. Though frankly my own LatAM border highlights were watching Ecuadorian airport staff meticulously searching the multiple suitcases every local family brought with them from Colombia and then not even bothering with a token gesture at my bag, and having no real issues at land borders despite crossing them with a strikingly different-looking temporary passport. Apparently the Bolivian border guard was enthusiastic enough about his job to give US Americans a lecture on why they had to pay to arrange a visa-on-arrival everyone else got for free

I think this is very much a false dichotomy. Of course it would be much better if neither of these things happened.

A false dichotomy is thinking the alternative is border guards who respond without incentives, one of which is cash.

There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. The question then is how to game their robbery to best help the rest of humans, not just hope magically they will be nice.

> There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes.

I've lived in that world for many years.

In America's case, it often seems to be both at the same time!

No. People are just chronically online but it is more popular to call xyz group abc term. Perhaps i have too much faith in humanity though.

Humanity overall is great. I don't know what else to call hundreds of South Korean "oopsies" other than malicious imprisonment, though.

Yeah, but you are also protected by most rights, such as those against unlawful detention, if you are legally inside the U.S.

Of course, what the law is doesn’t really matter anymore.

> He can deny you entry virtually at will. CBP officer is god at the border.

Do you know what the actual laws/regulations are for this stuff? My understanding is that there are in fact valid and invalid reasons for denying entry to a valid visa holder, but that the valid reasons are in practice broad and subjective enough that a CBP officer could nearly always justify their decision (something like "I wasn't convinced they would abide by the terms of their visa").

The reason, even in the article, is clearly stated - immigration without a valid immigrant visa. It's a valid reason and no amount of reddit upvotes over "iTs DuAl InTeNt!11!!" makes a difference.

There are just two kinds of US visas: non-immigrant and immigrant. You are not allowed to immigrate on a non-immigrant visa. "Dual intent" applies only to the issuing of a visa: by default a non-immigrant visa can only be issued to someone who has proven the lack of an immigration intent (which is assumed by default, so one has to prove the lack of thereof in order to get a visa) but there is an exception for some non-immigrant visas, which can be issued without such a proof. This is all "dual intent" means. Not "it's an immigrant visa if I intend it to be one!". These visas are still non-immigrant and carry all the restrictions of other non-immigrant visas i.e. they don't allow immigration. So while it's fine to have an intention to immigrate with such a visa, it's illegal to actually immigrate. This is not some esoteric knowledge and can be found within 15 minutes of internet search and reading.

I imagine the protagonist of the article said something that showed he has immigrated, at least the article describes him as an immigrant - he lives in the US and has nothing to come to in the home country. Thus the reason for denial of entry.

> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow.

ICE folks seem to be sometimes confused about citizen versus non-citizen:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...

* https://globalnews.ca/news/11309378/kenny-laynez-ice-detaine...

"confused" is a pretty generous reading of the situation. They just don't want anyone here from outside the US. Or anyone who isn't white, really. If they don't have a justification for kicking someone out they'll make one up or just use it as a way of scaring other people. Too many hispanic people are being picked up outside their immigration court hearings or lawyer's offices while trying to immigrate "the right way" for it to be confusion or coincidence.

> There's been many many cases where ICE has been confused about what VISAs allow and don't allow.

Hah, I totally believe it. When I moved to the US on a K-1 fiancé visa, I stood in the non-immigrant line at LAX (moving at its usual glacial pace, well over an hour or more in line), only to be "told" that I was in the wrong line, because I was immigrating to the US (It's not: it's a non-immigrant visa with a defined path to immigration: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...).

So after realizing I was arguing at a brick wall, I schlepped over to the (thankfully shorter, but still notable) immigrant visa line, waited, waited... with the absolutely predictable result that when I got to the counter I got a withering look and a tone that made it clear the agent felt she was speaking to a slow-minded child. "This is a non-immigrant visa. You need to go to that line." "I know, that line sent me here." "You need to go to that line." Thankfully that time I got a different agent. Nearly missed my connecting flight to Seattle, even though I had planned for a 4.5 hour layover for the visa process.

Ya, its a good bet this is what happened to the South Koreans on site. Since this was under construction, and the construction industry contractors and sub-contractors are known for using lots of undocumented immigrant labor, ICE was probably there to catch them.

ICE has been widely accused of working on internal quotas. It's likely that they just don't care. They found foreigners working, so into the pens they go. The fact that these are engineers brought in to supervise construction doesn't enter into the picture.

In fairness, it shouldn’t. I think it is acceptable that the foreign workers have valid US work visas and can demonstrate that. Maybe constitution plays sometimes fast and loose with work visas, but that does not automatically make it ok.

I have worked abroad many times and work permits were always under heavy scrutiny by my own company, to the degree that we send one unhappy soul home mid week because some regulations were not met and he came back week smiling because he got a pay rise as comparable rated as local was a requirement.

So I completely agree on principle. But nonetheless the political job being done by DHS/ICE is not to uniformly and fairly scrutinize all visa holders in the interest of justice. They're supposed to be locking up the "illegals" constantly being held up as an enemy class by the ruling regime, and in practice that means "Latin American laborers", and not "Korean engineers".

No one was sold on throwing international professionals in jail just for showing up to do a job they took in good faith. That's clearly wrong, in a way that rounding up the "bad" people isn't. And so it shows up the horrifying implications of current policy.

The problem is, US Visa Waiver Program do explicitly allow business trips using "tourist" "visa"(it's not a visa, it's a waiver. So you won't even have a visa. You also won't be a "tourist", you're a "visitor" under VWP). So it's completely normal for them to be totally unable to demonstrate anything issued or approved by the US government whatsoever other than the oval stamp. They wouldn't even have a visa, and it's legal, as far as how the laws and regulations and official guidance read. I haven't heard that's changed, at least yet.

>Some crossed into the US illegally; some had visa waivers and were prohibited from working; (Steven Schrank, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge)

If the visa waiver suddenly no longer allows working business trips to the USA this is huge news. The terms of the waiver explicitly state it's allowed but it seems not in practice.

This is a definite "get out now" to anyone on a ESTA in the USA right now. Attending a conference, trade show or consulting on a build out of battery plant?" Get out now.

Yeah, makes me wonder if it's just way overblown or if those are graphite pieces scattered on the ground.

The ICE agents have an overly strict and often incorrect interpretation of visa law. It wouldn’t be the first time this week where they decided to deport someone without adequate cause (and tourists aren’t really guaranteed due process).

"working business trips"?

Have you read the requirements? Business visas or ESTA waivers have never allowed "work", there is nothing sudden about it. You can attend conferences and trade shows and have meetings. You can not "work" though.

I'm not an immigration lawyer so I don't know exactly what the requirements cover and what they don't. You are not allowed to "engage in active employment", but I have been permitted in paid for by my employer to attend meetings with company colleagues which is apparently okay.

I imagine a Korean engineer or project manager visiting to meet colleagues and inspect the site should be okay on a business visa or waiver. One who was there working on plans or overseeing construction might not be. You would hope the company had carefully checked these things.

The obvious goal is not to police illegal immigration but to purge the US of as many immigrants as possible and halt immigration in general so that "native born Americans" can get all of the jobs they think immigrants (and "DEI" hires - it's so difficult not to read all of this as code for "not white") have "stolen" from them. The ham-fisted arbitrariness and cruelty is the point.

Ya, but it is sad in both cases. Sad for the South Koreans that are unfairly being accused of working illegally, and sad for the un-documented immigrants who are exploited at both ends by Republicans (they run the construction companies so take profit in their work, and then they use them for political advantage via scare tactics).

Not just quotas, but there's also plausible evidence that agents get actual bonuses per arrest or deportation.

There also happens to be a large Korean population in certain areas of Georgia, and many companies have been caught using undocumented workers there.

Take a drive through the streets of Duluth and you will see more signs in Korean than English.

Minor note, but "visa" is just a word. It's not an acronym or something. There's no reason to put it in all caps.

People do that because VISA credit card brand is spelled all caps on its logo.

Perhaps they're discussing the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture

That’s not an accurate description of the case you linked. No reason was given for the denial. The subject of the story was asked about work by the immigration officers but nothing indicates that he was removed from the country because of work. He seems to have been removed because they wanted to remove him, not because of innocent confusion about his visa.

Everybody just has to stay out of the US, ideally citizens too.

Orders given to ICE at times have been to just independently go out and find people "you know where to find them". I don't think they so much do, any given agent isn't some super detective.

Visa is not an acronym.

> "why are you coming to the USA?" and they answered for "work". Immediate deportation despite the VISA explicitly allowing that.

Reading the article it looks like the problem is he said he "lives" in the US. Technically work visas are for working temporarily in the US, living permanently in the US requires a green card.

Of course they probably wouldn't have deported him for that under Biden, the current administration is just trying to find every excuse to deport to meet quotas.

This is not a technical problem at all, the law is not that stupid. Non-immigrant visa means you have an intent to return to your home country at some point, it's not like you can't say "I live here" despite actually living there..

I'm sure that's great comfort to the guy who was deported.

I'm just saying that I advise all my friends on similar visas to say they're "working" in the US if asked, rather than say "living". Don't give people with power over you any excuse to ruin your life.

Oh sure, your comment came across to me as implying that the agent had reasonable grounds to deny entry even if that reason was a technicality. I'm just saying he didn't, not one iota, not even on a technicality. It was 100% bullshit. I have had the displeasure of going through US immigration myself many times and understand the caution and deference, maybe it would have helped but it sounds like they had made up their minds.

He does live in the US, as his visa allows. Living somewhere and living somewhere permanently aren't the same thing.

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