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Comment by derdi | Hacker News Reader

What if you're in the US on a work visa, so you do expect to pay income tax but don't expect to be conscripted into military service? What's the correct preposition for that case?

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Still "subject to the jurisdiction of". US law doesn't currently have a law allowing them to be conscripted, and it would be very ill-advised to do so and it would cause a lot of diplomatic backlash, but it certainly could pass such a law if it chose to.

So people on a work visa are "subject to", specifically because of two criteria (income tax and conscription) which must both hold, at least hypothetically? What if the US passes a constitutional amendment explicitly saying that foreigners on work visas cannot be conscripted, would that, by removing the hypothetical, have the implicit effect of making such people no longer "subject to" its jurisdiction?

I think your take on this is overly complex and silly.

I think this take is overly complex and silly. If you're subject to the laws, that's that. As an exercise, go read the Federal code and put each law that might potentially be applicable to people on a work visa into a pile. I guarantee that pile will be taller than you are by the time you're done. It will certainly be larger than two random examples.

Yes. You are correct. You completely missed the point of what this subthread is about, but yes. It's clear what "subject to the laws" means to normal people.

The thread was about someone misunderstanding what "subject to the jurisdiction" meant. Someone suggested that it meant subject to US laws including conscription and income tax, another person said "what if the law in question doesn't mandate conscription of foreigners" and then Telemakhos gave a pretty confusing answer to that. At some point you dropped in to make a further confusing and argumentative comment in response to that, so I tried to clear it up. If you were just disagreeing with Telemakhos, then I apologize for misunderstanding.

I hope that's an accurate summary?

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