U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
wsj.com
wsj.com
So just imagine, having a normal job in the US and you're asked to leave to renew your visa and this stuff happens.
That's no more appointment, not even a new date and you're now very likely unable to work and possibly can't even enter the country to get your belongings if you were to leave.
Just 'putting a pause' on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane
I do remember Canada telling my partner she wouldn't be guaranteed reentry while they were processing her PR visa until it was finalised if we left the country though so we just ended up doing the Australian half first and I never went back.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
People going from non-immigrant visa (H1B, F1 etc.) to Green card via i485 "adjustment of status" do not need to leave the country either.
Only consular processing (ds 260) are in scope of this pause
https://www.ellis.com/resources/immigrant-visa-pause-2026
Has more details than the paywalled article
https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/us-citizenship-...
I don't think the practice of the change is significant. Reddit has numerous stories of people who are still receiving it, so whatever that release says, things haven't changed. People seem to be receiving AoS based Green Cards the same way I did under the Biden Administration. It does seem to be a bit more uncertain which is always troubling.
My classmates who had gone to the US for PhD programs, even those who were fortunate enough to get multiple entry visas, had visas that allowed re-entry for only the first two years of the PhD program. After that, if they wanted to leave the US, say for a conference or to visit family, they would have had to apply for a visa from abroad and hope to be granted one. In Canada, I could apply for the visa and get it while in Canada. Even comparing like with like, the American system seems bizarre to me, looking at it from a Canadian lens.
This seems to have changed in the past 3-4 years, but as the GP said, the original process did involve leaving.
It’s a chore, but very common around the world.
The point is surely to get another chance to grill the immigrant and potentially bar them entry. Other countries don’t always do this: Canada for example has inland changes of status and I believe renewals.
Lack of real domestic enforcement would be an obvious one, so everything gets pushed to the border entry points.
Wait, what’s getting enforced here, anyway? They are getting a new visa, no? I don’t believe this rationale at all.
Most visas don't permit their holder to work.
> Wait, what’s getting enforced here, anyway?
The visa holder is forced to expend nominal financial resources and time in their home country (where they agreed they would return to.) Most people can't afford to maintain a facade of residency or two actual residences (and those who can aren't the intended targets of this type of restriction.)
Additionally, it doesn't really do that either, you don't need a valid visa (only valid status) if you don't plan to leave and re-enter US, so this mainly forces people to stay within US rather than going elsewhere for visiting family, vacation and whatnot. I'd not be surprised if the net effect was less time/money spent in "home country".
See the recent events and pushback on immigration enforcement, to answer this, with whole cities (with their judicial system and police) refusing to participate, and governors condemning enforcement.
Almost like what I have an actual problem with isn't deporting illegal immigrants, but armed thugs kidnapping citizens, harassing my neighbors, and murdering several citizens
Our police department hired a guy, did a background check, yup, he can be here legally. So of course ICE tracks him down and abducts him for a month. That drove our sheriff, who is not fucking liberal, to basically say "Uh, what the fuck, how can you possibly be this incompetent?"
If you have actual evidence of some kind that a human being does not have their paperwork in order, the correct thing is to give them a summons, get a judge to declare them not legal, and deport them. Very simple.
If your complaint is that too many immigrants just come back, then we should try enforcing the law against hiring illegal immigrants which we put on the books under Reagan, 50 years ago, and have never enforced because it hurts the profits of well connected Agriculture industry people.
Why hasn't Trump done that? Why hasn't Trump done the one thing everyone involved has suggested for decades, which is known to be the primary reason immigrants come here? Why did Trump tell Republicans to reject the Boarder bill proposed by democrats in 2024? One which absolutely would have provided more funding for the boarder?
Incorrect. They were "sanctuary" cities during Obama, as well.
> the correct thing is to give them a summons, get a judge to declare them not legal, and deport them.
Correct, and this is a popular right wing perspective. You should look into this more. These sanctuary cities and states are specifically against this. They release people with deportation orders back into the public, and ban city and state employees from helping. See "California sanctuary state laws" and "sanctuary city list".
> Almost like what I have
This isn't relevant.
For many visas, people are expected to maintain a home that they intend to return to in their country of origin. Forcing people to leave every once in a while makes this more likely (at least in theory.)
Most visas are for temporary guests: obtaining a visa doesn't normally give someone the right to permanently reside, and most don't permit their holders to work.
However, the in-country processing takes 6 months while the flagpole option (If you’re eligible) takes 15 minutes.
Except you had zero paperwork to show to an employer and they had no way to verify themselves. Even if an employer understood the process and accepted some proof that you submitted an application, they would have no idea if you were rejected and became out-of-status.
https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/what-we-do/workplace-and-skills...
I know stuff like this happens for digital nomads in southeast asia or Schengen but the US generally doesn't approve of "visa runs".
In many cases I've seen this is either a sticker on your passport (incl. possibly a visa) or a physical card, and does not require traveling abroad for it for "consular processing". This is the case for Schengen countries, Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, Thailand, etc.
I was on a proper employment visa 8 years, never needed to leave the country.
People who do visa runs are doing so to extend their tourist visas for cheap.
¹: I've done it before at Si Racha Immigration Bureau. In my case it was more expensive than doing a visa run or paying the fine for 3 days of overstaying, but it was less hassle and left a positive/neutral mark on my passport, not a suspicious one.
²: This can sadly also require bribery just to get them to do their job, even if you do everything by the book. People around us were bringing bribes in form of food. We weren't asked for a bribe, probably because the person I was traveling and applying with had an official passport.
This sucks but it isn't new, unfortunately.
Meanwhile I've got a tech lead who is 12 hours away from the rest of the team. He was at least willing to work US-East hours while in India (basically staying up all night and sleeping during the day), but there was a huge amount of management overhead and inconvenience for the employee involved.
The main constraint is re-entry into the US and being able to travel outside the US. If one stayed here, there was no problem switching schools, programs, jobs, adjusting status to permanent residency or naturalization. On the other hand, for re-entry, one needs a valid visa stamped on a passport which necessitated a trip to one's home country. This stamping visit could be unpredictable.
Ideally, one would like to travel freely to see family and friends but I see a lot of comments implying that one is forced to leave. It might be true now but a lot of comments here are conflating several issues together.
Everything post-2025 has been a shit-show. There's no predictability or clear guidance, either from our lawyers or from the state department.
Predictability matters a lot in business. If you know what the procedure is and how long it will take, you can plan around it. If the rules change in the middle of the game you're left scrambling to keep up.
Hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off in the last two years. There are many skilled Americans on the job market. Foreign workers are here for the benefit of the United States, not as charity to the rest of the world, or as a source of cheaper labor for global employers seeking to undercut American wages.
But that's the point, isn't it? Some foreign workers who "worked the US for the benefit of the US" are now unable to come back to the US. Isn't that bad for the US too?
Is every natural-born American entitled to a job that pays what they want, for the hours they want, in the location they want, regardless of their qualifications for the job?
I would understand logic of bringing people from other countries when there is a shortage of workers but with current market it doesn't seem to be the case.
In the world you're imagining, is x+y potentially infinite?
There is no developed country on earth where labor shortages are addressed by "just increase the salary until you find a native-born person to take the job."
> "labor shortages"
This is a misnomer is _my_ point. A labor shortage has a trivial solution, "pay more". It's intentionally framed as "labor shortage" by capital who would prefer the labor pool be near-infinite so they can pick the best for the cheapest. No, no company is going to like it. And that's okay, immigration, and government policies more broadly, should not be about "what would maximize private capital profits?" They should serve the broader American public.
If companies can't find a farm laborer at 100k/yr then that sounds like it's an *incredible* situation for the average worker.
Whenever you think a solution to a problem that plagues an entire nation (especially one the size of the US) is "trivial", you should ask the question: if it's so trivial, why hasn't it been fixed after so many years? And if your answer depends on some sort of conspiracy, you know you're wrong.
There are so many problems with "pay more". Let's start with a simple one: it's based on the assumption that the employer's only alternative to paying more is going without the output. In a lot of labor markets, this just isn't the case.
Jobs get mechanized/automated. They get outsourced to a different country. The employer reduces output (reduces staff) and in many cases at the same time increases prices. Sometimes, as has been seen with restaurants and retail, hours get cut or they go out of business.
Another problem with your "solution" is that in many markets, especially those related to healthcare, it's not just pay that limits hiring. It's things like caps on residency slots due to Medicare funding, a lack of clinical placements, a lack of faculty, etc. You can't pay more to hire workers that don't exist because the market structure doesn't allow for those workers to exist in the needed numbers.
> If companies can't find a farm laborer at 100k/yr then that sounds like it's an incredible situation for the average worker.
Except this experiment has been tried. Look up the Bracero program, which was terminated in the 1960s to increase wages for domestic farmworkers. I'll give you a hint: a study comparing states heavily exposed to bracero labor against states that used little found basically no wage or employment gain for domestic farmworkers.
The farm doesn't survive with a bunch of recent university grads who studied CompSci picking fruit at $100,000/year. The farm mechanizes, where possible, and switches to crops that require less labor. And the market fills the demand for the crops that were switched out with imports.
And let's also be honest: the average 20-something native-born American doesn't want to pick fruit in 100+ degree heat in dusty small farming towns where there's nothing to do, the male-to-female ratios are out of whack, etc. This too has been tried: UFW ran a "Take Our Jobs" campaign about a decade ago and...wait for it...literally nobody wanted to.
That's because adding people to the economy creates more demand
In times of recession, things might be different - but immigration tends to take care of itself in that regard. When a country has unfilled labor demand, immigration goes up. When it has no labor demand, immigration goes down.
Will I ever be able to retire, doubtful. Have a family, probably not. Are these personal failings I need to take responsibility for, absolutely. Still my expectations are very low and my earnings and lifestyle reflect this.
Where do you want me to move? What job do you want me to take? What more do you want to take from me? Do I deserve less, more, just enough? Why do I have to listen to you about that?
You have _no_ clue what you are talking about.
That's entirely reasonable but for you or anyone else to get such a job, two things are required: you need to have the capability (knowledge/experience/skills) to fill an open role and a prospective employer needs to offer you compensation that you're willing to accept for filling it.
> Where do you want me to move? What job do you want me to take?
I don't want you to do anything. If you want a job, don't you have to figure out what you can do and where you can go to find one? I'm not going to suggest it's always easy, because it's not, but if you can't find a job that can pay a wage that meets your needs and expectations, don't you have to look at what you can offer and/or where you can go to find such a job?
What is the alternative?
> Do I deserve less, more, just enough?
How would I be able to answer that? What you actually get in today's market is a function of many things, including the skills and experience you have, where you live, the demand for what you can offer versus supply, etc.
> What more do you want to take from me?
Please explain how I have taken anything from you.
> Why do I have to listen to you about that?
You don't have to listen to me about anything. I'm not a prospective employer, and I'm not a politician creating immigration policy.
> You have _no_ clue what you are talking about.
With all due respect, you don't know anything about the personal situation of anyone you interact with online. You started your reply out with a discussion of your difficult experience, and while I empathize with your experience and think it's indicative of America's problematic economy, it doesn't make you uniquely qualified to tell other people that they don't know anything.
Demographics are real. Immigration is a given in developed countries with aging populations. The idea that there's ever going to be a way to guarantee every native-born American (or Canadian, or European, etc.) a job before an immigrant gets a job is just fantasy.
There are many problems in today's labor markets. Youth unemployment. Underemployment. Wages that haven't kept up with inflation. The cost of living crisis. But salaries just aren't going to grow without limit until employers find a native-born American to do the job. It doesn't work that way and it never has.
And it is uncontroversial in most countries that a country should do this.
So this isn't a contradiction. Indeed america is capitalist. And it is also prioritizing its own citizens. There is nothing weird about that.
You must have responded to the wrong post as it has nothing to do with my statement.
That statement is that there is nothing about capitalism that prevents a country from prioritizing its own citizens. That is a perfectly normal and rational thing to do.
Additionally, the exact percentages of unemployement rates also has little to do with capitalism, nor does the uncommonness of fully achieving a lofty but possibly valuable goal also has nothing to do with what capitalism is, nor does it say very much about how valuable that goal is or the value in attempting to aspirationally achieve it.
OK. You can't handle context, noted.
>That statement is that there is nothing about capitalism that prevents a country from prioritizing its own citizens.
The free market is what prevents it. The purpose of capitalism is the creation of capital and its transfer to the capitalist class, and the purpose of corporations is to maximize profits to facilitate that process as quickly and efficiently as possible. Neither capitalism as a system nor corporations have an obligation to improve quality of life for their employees beyond their market value, or to "prioritize" the social welfare over profit, or to hire more people than they need.
It's simple supply and demand and there isn't a demand for American labor.
>Additionally, the exact percentages of unemployement rates also has little to do with capitalism
which is weird because you're arguing that capitalist companies need to prioritize "citizen" labor in order to reduce unemployment, or that governments need to force them to.
If by capitalism as a system, we are refering to countries that are capitalists, it seems fairly uncontroversial to say that such countries can prioritize their own citizens.
It is not weird or controversial to say that countries, even capitalist ones, prioritize their citizens in certain cases, nor is it weird to suggest that they aught do so.
> which is weird because you're arguing that capitalist companies need to prioritize "citizen" labor in order to reduce unemployment, or that governments need to force them to.
I am suggesting that it is compatible with being a capitalist country, and is not weird, unusually, or bad to do such a common thing as prioritizing your own citizens.
I wouldn't say that they need to. Merely that it is a normal and compatible, and in many cases desirable goal for said citizens.
Do you... think that people who are pro capitalism believe that their own ideology is harmful? Obviously proponents of a belief think that their ideas and philosophy help their own citizens.
> I'm all for socialism
Thats only because you have definitionally defined socialism as "When you do things that are good", not realizing that other people think that their ideas are also good.
The reason why people support capitalism is specifically because they think it is a good idea and benefits a country, and its citizens.
Capitalists come out of the woodwork to denounce things like the minimum wage or unions that distort the fair market value of labor because they want to pay as little as possible and not a cent more. Why do you think automation and outsourcing exist to begin with? Why are we putting Manhattan Project scale effort into AI? Wages are an inefficiency in the market that capitalism has always sought to ruthlessly optimize away.
Globalism has ruined that entirely, and there’s no amount of implying these people are closed minded or incurious that will make them change their mind on this issue.
Let’s say that tomorrow we need 1M nuclear physicists. How can money help? You still need to wait for the talent pipeline to divert.
One of the math problems recently publicized as having being solved by was actually just discovering that a German mathematician had published a solution in the 1950s.
My point of your thread was disagreement with the immediate transfer of knowledge: “Most every job can be easily trained or cross trained.”
I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained, there is more of a time sync between that.
>I disagree with most jobs can easily be trained or cross trained
People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important. If anything immigrants take longer to get up to speed which is why companies usually only hire them when its cheaper. Or nepotism.
“People just overestimate how complicated their job is because it makes them feel important.” I do hate to say but I also really doubt this anecdote for majority of workers. Wasn’t there a ford factory that laid off workers in favor of llm (that were trained to replace them) only then to be rehired? 2
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/09/child-lab... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/30/ai-backfi...
*you know what practice takes? Time
I.e. how long would it take to train a regular driver to drive the inde 500 vs buying a racers contract
People in the recent past were not so short-sighted.
Edit: actually, what job do you have in mind that never changes? Honestly it sounds relaxing
*let alone anything tech wise
Just a generation or two ago we went to the Moon. Now, you refuse to train an intelligent person with overlapping skills.
Not just a closed mindset, but pure defeatism. Why even get out of bed in the morning, right? Might as well give up now.
Back to reality—I have an acquaintance who started work at JPL and finished her degree while working there. But according to you it’s just not able to be planned for! Thankfully defeatists are not in charge in Pasadena.
This is not me refusing to train someone, but acknowledging there is a time sink cost for training that may not pay off in the need to make a project, or the person could up and leave which good for them.
Thank you for accelerating my argument to 1000 when I was just going the speed limit and seeing the warning signs for the problems up ahead.
Others discounted the exaggerated emergency above so no need to repeat. And we know training worked for centuries up to my example of two years ago. Most people don’t study exactly what they end up doing and learn as they go. The US has a couple hundred million workers. All which point to training being more economically efficient than importing from abroad except in extreme cases.
Your closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas and position continue to harm the economy and wages. Enjoy the fruits of your war on the middle class, having to live in a luxury bunker.
(Oh and gas and steel prices don’t materially affect tech either.)
Training does work, and I agree most people don't study 1:1 what they end up doing. For cases where work is immediately required however and an Inde car needs to be driven next week (say the og driver got sick), a pre-trained Inde car driver would be better to be hired then not race and take months to train the replacement.
My "closed-mindset, anti-worker ideas" of wanting unions, the best people for a job, and wanting diversification of staff I suppose do go against your "halt everything and only train Americans" conservative position.
I suppose you have nothing new to offer to this conversation and will never hear me out with an open mind, so I bid you and this thread adieu.
(Gas && steel prices affect construction of llm data centers, regular data centers, fuel for travel to work, expansions of hardware, supply chain for ordering technology, and so on...)
Also your phrasing needs a lot of work. I recommend the Dale Carnegie books on communicating with others.
We saw how well the American bootcamps filled the market with completely trash talent when the market demanded a big number of SDEs.
So no, money cannot generate infinite specialized talent overnight as you naively assume.
Then it makes sense that they go to help the USA develop to that same level.
A nuclear engineer surely improves his country much more by sending home some money to his mommy and aunts than by building a new power plant.
Why should anybody be sympathetic to the so called "needs" of US companies hiring immigrants, but not be sympathetic to the needs of their home countries?
Sympathy for companies is usually conditioned on the fact that they give jobs to locals, or at least to citizens. If they're not doing that, then who gives a fuck if they aren't able to expand or profit at a rate that shareholders prefer?
But there is a class of people - most hackers included - who have had such comfortable lives that they aren't capable to even pretend anymore to sympathize with the producing class.
Many can’t find locals.
*for the price they want to pay.
All of the big tech companies I’ve worked for were founded by immigrants, and had many key immigrants in early Sr positions building the company.
still couldn’t answer a basic question. I know I wouldn’t be hiring you with this communication track record
And FWIW most of the people I worked with were from Europe, with advanced degrees
At these levels you end up doing a very broad range of stuff.
Tons of Americans are out of work. I’ve personally seen my wages drop by at least 20$ an hour as well as the work being less stable.
Gasp, you might need to train someone a bit or have employees that will say no if you ask them to work on Christmas.
If I ran the H1B program it would be an unrestricted work permit with an automatic pathway to a GC after 5 years. Don’t get *convicted* of a felony and here you go.
Why would this policy be beneficial to Americans?
Not everyone is capable of building FAANG levels of talent pipelines to convert interns into eventual staff eng
2) This posits that there must be a large pool of highly trained and specialized Staff Eng sitting idly in other countries just waiting to be poached. What are those countries doing which is generating a huge untapped pool of labor? If that _is_ the case, then why aren't entrepreneurs in those countries capitalizing on the idle labor?
---
Maybe I'm entirely too cynical - but I simply don't believe that #2 is true. There isn't a huge Indian talent pipeline just pumping out hoards of incredible world-class engineers worthy of poaching, yet America is entirely incapable of producing the same tier of engineer. I think it's purely a function of depressing labor costs at the lower end of the labor ladder and over the last ten years has actually just been an immigration pipeline with pay-to-play schemes on both ends.
However each company would have to weigh the risks of bringing someone to the US and they then walking away.
We could even change it so instead of a 100k fee, you have to invest 200k in US bonds which only mature after 5 years. Of course even if it doesn’t work out you still get your money back.
Preferentially treat one group of people (non-white/women/Americans) even if in the short term the revealed preference of businesses is to hire a different group of people (white/men/immigrants), such that, in the long term, the first group of people can develop the necessary skills to compete with the second group.
Short term pain for long term gain.
Also, this ignores that the government works for citizens, no matter their race. Promoting racial equality among citizens is a function that the government might undertake. Pursuing policies that favor citizens over non-citizens falls in line with that same reasoning.
[CHAOS] [CORRUPTION] [CRUELTY]
imagine what's tomorrow or next week
meanwhile let's all enjoy the billion spent on making statues gold plated in DC and the ballroom and the arch and his drapes and his reflecting pool and 100 foot banners of his face on federal building and his face on gold coins, passports, park passes and the $250 bill
it's surreal
If anything, these policies harm the citizens of the US in a myriad of ways. There's zero benefit to be had from any of this. Except for the joy tha tthe cruel feel in causing others misery, but that's not citizens, that's just a few sick people.
From the article:
"Updated guidance and training were being put in place to ensure that visa applicants don’t become a public charge under U.S. law or depend on government benefits intended for Americans in need, a spokesman for the department said Wednesday."
Whatever updated guidance and training is needed here is one of two things, 1) something that could be handled in a matter of days or weeks, or 2) "We have no idea how long this could take so we're suspending it indefinitely" (which is what they're doing), and the "updated guidance and training" is a smokescreen for Steven Miller's agenda of becoming a closed nation.
It's very clear what the motivations are, and just because they don't seem harmful in isolation doesn't mean it's going to have no consequences for everyone else.
It's not ideal but a lot of us basically didn't leave for several years (even pre-Trump 1) to avoid the hassle of a new stamping.
Prior to the mid 00s you could renew at any consulate but they changed it so you could only renew in your home country.
The recent policy change ended that possibility altogether.
US is unique in that the visa sticker and your right to remain in the country (status) are two different things. The only purpose of the visa sticker is to allow you to travel to a U.S. port of entry, where you apply for admission, and therefore legal status. You can have legal status in the U.S. while the visa sticker has expired, and your status can be changed or extended domestically. However unless you have a valid sticker you cannot leave and return.
For non-PR, I don't think Australia distinguishes visa and status like US (i.e. you can't have valid status while your visa expired)
There are some technicalities -- your passport has to carry the re-entry permit, but it's affixed to everyone who requests it at the port of exit, granted it's up to 1 yr.
(You might have known that, but I thought it's worth clarifying).
I say this as someone who just sent their daughter to NYC explaining how we used to try to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to poor immigrants who just assumed this was a land of kind people, WTF? Could we not take a decade off from being prissy about our democracy *and* total cocks about how we actually act?
It’s like saying that it’s “cruelty” to remove someone who uses a 2 hour parking spot as their permanent car parking.
> The State Department and Department of Homeland Security are reviewing all B-1 business and B-2 tourist visas, he said.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... (“B-1 Temporary Business Visitor”)
“A strong aversion, antipathy, or fear of foreigners.” Simple as.
It wouldn’t be wrong if you admitted that you want some degree of xenophobia. But I suppose that sounds even less convincing than your preferred abuse of terminology.
Yes, it's antipathy to foreigners in and of themselves. It's antipathy based on the mere fact that someone is a foreigner by stereotyping them based on nationality. Antipathy based on actual cultural differences.
I think that no one should be persecuted[0]. Persecution is unfair harassment/injury/punishment. Perhaps you meant prosecuted[1] instead?
[0] from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/persecute
Persecute: transitive verb
1 : to harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict specifically : to cause to suffer because of belief
2 : to annoy with persistent or urgent approaches (such as attacks, pleas, or importunities) : pester
[1] from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prosecute
Prosecute: transitive verb
3 : to bring legal action against for redress or punishment of a crime or violation of law b : to institute legal proceedings with reference to prosecute a claim
Treating the hard working and generally cool people that come to the US as being in the same boat as all us humans but bringing interestingly different solutions for how to conduct our affairs is not cultural relativism, it's being realistic and open to the goodness of creation, to seeing each person as bearing the image of God in my own religion's terms.
Seeing the current crop of immigrants as being lazy, criminal, disease ridden or a source of decline in the quality of life for the people in the US is xenophobia, it is irrational and not-truth based.
Prefer whatever you prefer, that's the bed rock of a free society, and welcome the people who value freedom and hard work so much they have fought to join your country. Or you condemn your country to a period of diminishment, superstition and other forms of backwardness.
> The countries that most immigrants come from treat that principle as axiomatic.
Haven't spent much time overseas? I have, and I don't find this to be the case - most (tho not all) likes their family ways more than others, and many many places have built cultures built on the idea of syncretism, of one culture out of many. In a way the very genius of India is that it's made of hundreds of cultures work together as a pleasing whole greater than any part. And of course "E pluribus Unum" has proven to be a potent idea in the history of the last few centuries.
The very stereotype of the sophisticated Muslim who quotes Maimonides and Jesus as readily as the Prophet, and is well versed in scientific arts and is great in his or her career is a stereotype based on a millenium of encouraging arts and sciences and great cities built on many cultures working together.
Denying the plain reality of immigration because of fear of some made up "cultural relativism" is irrational xenophobia, in my book. No one is trying to shut down your church dinners and NFL games.
US immigration can be very slow and bureaucratic (even pre-Trump). I hesitate to say but generally, it's not as arbitrary as people think. If things are clearly above board, it works out.
The US still is a destination in very high-demand. There are a huge number of qualified and unqualified people, who would come here in a heartbeat (and it goes without saying, there are a huge number of people who have no interest in moving here).There are clearly agents like the H-1B body shops who have exploited the system. Similarly, masters programs were launched effectively to trade full tuition for an opportunity to enter the US labor market (e.g. all the masters in financial math programs). This doesn't mean we don't get amazing people on H-1Bs or in masters programs but these pathways have been exploited.
Many people desire a sane immigration policy and experience. One that allows promising candidates into the country. The exact definition of a "promising candidate" was outsourced to universities and companies sponsoring these visas. A lot of people have lost trust in those institutions. I don't know what a good solution is but the rise of these policies is a symptom that the current system is not working.
Americans aren't "xenophobic." I just got back from two weeks in rural Texas and everyone was super nice to me. Nobody was "afraid" that I'm a foreigner. They just don't want me to bring my entire extended family over and in numbers that changes the culture of their home. And people in my dad's village in Bangladesh would hate if some other group did the same thing to them.
People throwing around “phobia” and “ism” is just a way to obscure what they really mean, which is cultural relativism and erasure of the distinction between citizens and foreigners.
At the same time, it is reasonable for people to point out the unpredictability of the system. Going to get a visa renewal and getting stuck for several months is unpredictable. Having to make plans at the last-minute is stressful. One can take the stance that the America doesn't owe anything to a non-citizen and, while I lean towards a similar stance, some of the arbitrariness is unreasonable.
> protect american culture from foreign influence
what culture? what foreign influence(s)? i posit foreign influence is what makes the US better and always has.
“The Trump administration has paused processing of immigrant visas, which allow recipients to move permanently to the U.S., to train visa officers on new guidance ensuring that applicants have enough financial means to support themselves after they arrive.”
That's a very weak analogy for the moral issue here.
The consequences are radically different; losing a parking space is a minor inconvenience; losing immigration status can/does involve relocation and upends employment, family, property, and years of life planning / general stability.
Legally, there's very little the state can't do, there could be a bill passed tomorrow revoking all immigrant visas. But businesses, and by proxy the nation, benefit from work done by these workers.
Sudden unilateral moves like this are stupid on a social level (cause damage to businesses and communities), and on a moral level. "First do no harm" is a principle just as suited to government as medicine. Even if there is a broad consensus for reducing or eliminating H1B visas, why punish people who followed the system as it exists and contributed? It's perfectly possible to pass a bill, stop handing out new visas, and sunset renewals after some 1-2 year timeframe.
It's legal to invite a bunch of guests over and kick them all out after you open the wine, but you're going to lose friends. And ultimately it will be businesses and individuals paying the cost for these needlessly volatile course changes. Tourism and high skilled immigration rates will face lasting harm.
Not when the norm is open defiance of the rules for decades.
> An immigration system governs people making major life choices, and companies making large investments.
And it also governs the right of people to decide who they want to invite into their country and, ultimately, with whom they want to share democratic governance of their home. Those are important stakes, not to be minimized. But you neglected to mention them.
To be clear, while a person who enters the US on an H1-B is a temporary worker, they are not prohibited from also seeking a permanent status. So it's fully within the rules, which is why it becomes a question of norms. In the present, the H1-B is (was?) the most popular route to permanent immigration to the US besides family sponsorship.
I specifically said that the government (and the citizenry by extension) can decide who it wants to enter and stay, how much immigration, whatever. But changing the rules suddenly, upending peoples lives who have not broken any rules, through a pathway the US state itself freely established, is immoral and short sighted.
It should go without saying that there are experts across many fields in industry that any country would benefit from attracting. The US is harming its capacity to attract and keep that talent with these ridiculous theatrics.
Incorrect. H1B still requires non-immigrant intent. The only thing that was struck was requiring the government to presume non-immigrant intent automatically upon some filing for permanent residency. That was not intended to change the system into a de facto permanent residency pipeline.
Yeah, law is about semantics. And semantics reflects underlying politics. Immigration proponents never had the political capital to enact a law that actually reflects current practice.
Reagan, in 1986, signed a bill that legalized any illegal immigrant who came here before 1982 and 3 million people applied, of which 2.7 million were granted.
This was a bipartisan bill. Democrats and Republicans worked together to do that. This was literally the bill that established the requirement that an employer cannot "knowingly" hire an illegal immigrant. There was zero enforcement from day one. Because the bill was pushed by agriculture groups.
Reagan said, "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans."
Go ahead and tell me recent democrat immigration policy, under "Obama the deporter in Chief, was somehow more lax than that. Than literally legalizing 3 million people with the stroke of a pen and a smile and doing nothing at all to actually implement the disincentives that would prevent future immigration.
Reagan signed a law that made it illegal for hospitals to deny emergency care based on immigration status.
The nation did not have any immigration law at all until after the civil war. Then we banned all chinese laborers for 30 years.
What's funny, is that Reagan's amnesty happened after* Mexican immigration had gotten federal attention as a serious problem and we ran "Operation Wetback". That program is somewhat of an analogue to what Trump and ICE are doing right now, including the part about deporting legal citizens. Operation wetback was pushed for, again, by agricultural interests.
Depends on the rules.
"You have no rights and are someone else's property" was once a rule, and it was absolutely cruel.
I have a Republican friend who appreciates the Supreme Court Justices, and then suddenly has zero clue about any news story involving the administration, and shrugs off the war. This despite meticulously following Benghazi hearings when it was someone he wanted to dislike. He would rather Trump be Romney, but he's not going to do anything about it whatsoever.
I blame myself for teasing my Italian friend in college over Silvio Berlusconi, and now I've found myself in the same position :(
"Leave to renew" has been policy for decades.
What about the sweeping halt of all legal immigrant visa processing?
The point is maybe signal to people that we will soon be pausing all visa renewals so people who trivially have good jobs and good records know they ought to literally just plan on moving out of their apartment rather than have to deal with paying thousands of dollars to have someone else move their shit overseas, just to maybe get their visa renewed right when their shit arrives and they have to do the same thing all over again.
This would literally just helping law-abiding folks follow the law. But no, the cruelty is the point.
I mean... "leave to renew" is a horrible policy, it's just one that we've normalized since 9/11. It's incredibly wasteful and disruptive, and serves no purpose. There's no legitimate reason why a long-term residential visa like an H1-B can't be renewed by mail or electronically. I can renew my driver's license by mail, and I'm a hell of a lot more likely to cause serious damage with a car than my foreign coworkers are by continuing to do their jobs well.
The reason the State Department hides behind, by the way, is that domestic offices don't have the ability to take biometric data (fingerprints), which is self-evidently pretextual.
But also, it's only been "the policy" since 2004. That's technically "decades", but only just, and it was also introduced for idiotic pretextual reasons. The ostensible reason is that domestic State Department offices don't have the equipment to capture biometric data. Seriously. That's the argument. The law doesn't say "you have to leave to renew", it says "you have to get fingerprinted to renew", and conveniently there's nowhere in the United States that can do that, despite every police station in the country having that equipment at this point.
So what do we do? I don't want good people disrupted. But I also morally disagree with everything the abuse of the H1B program represents. What's the solution? It doesn't seem that crazy to me that "tax the companies so they can't undercut local labor so easily" is a reasonable first pass. But we know how that went.
I can't help but think if instead of shouting across the isle there were some amount of bipartisan accountability and shared understanding on the topic then the previous attempts by this administration to curtail the problem would have been more effective and we wouldn't be at a point where people have to take the gloves off.
In 2015, Trump took a position on excessive immigration and illegal immigration that made him very popular in the Republican primaries, even considering his very obvious character flaws. Like Ross Perot before him, there was a groundswell of support from people who (rightfully or not) feel like their country and their inheritance they are leaving younger generations was slowly being destroyed (the social fabric that makes America a great place was being shredded).
This policy decision is a continuation of that political shift. This is, quite literally, Democracy in Action. The people wanted to see a change and elected a very unorthodox political leader to enact that change.
The reality is the program has been abused and stretched far beyond its intent by corporations in pursuit of cheap (I’d argue slave) labor. You cannot, with a straight face, argue that the spirit of the program is being upheld. Come on. People are upset because they are realizing that they haven't been playing fair--the game's been rigged this whole time. I think that's a very understandable and normal human emotion all things considered.
Fraud is illegal. And when people enrich themselves fraudulently it does tend to feel like something has been taken by someone not entitled to it, yes. That works for both the corporations fraudulently hiring H1B and the fraudulent credentialing rings being operated to supply the labor.
It is sad that good people and valid visa holders are swept up in this. Aim your ire at the fraudsters, not the people trying to enforce the law and fix the problem.
The system is set up so the casino wins. You cannot, with a straight face, argue the odds are in your favor, but there are rules about how the casino works, both formal and informal.
When a casino only investigates cases where someone wins $1 million on the slots, to see if there's a fault in the system, while never investigating all the times that people lose, that's technically within the legal system, but the spirit of gambling is not being upheld, and people get upset. Just ask Katerina Bookman.
The immigration system, with the thumb firmly in favor of the interests of capital, is still based on the expectation of good faith by those running the system, as doing otherwise results in orders of magnitude more rules, or an alternate set of unspoken rules based more on vibes.
"Pausing" is a bad faith breaking of the spirit of the system.
It's not simply a pause on immigration by people applying for a category which requires special expertise.
How does reading up on the history change how the stated reason for this pause has nothing to do with the meritocracy issues, fraudulent H1B visas, etc. that you complained about?
Do you think those labor issues will be improved after the training is finished, and if so, why?
How does your earlier comment explain why visas based on family preference are also apparently on pause as well?
Of course if we look at the history of US immigration we can easily see how for over 150 years it was explicitly set up to support a white supremacist race-based culture, which broke down with the civil rights movement and the incoherency of "whiteness" as a legal or scientific definition (are Arabs white? Are Asian Indians white? Are Chinese immigrants in Mississippi "white"? - https://archive.org/details/mississippichine0000loew/page/n7...).
With the current reactionary administration's antipathy towards nearly all immigration, except seemingly white South Africans and Nordics, it's far easier to interpret this action as deliberately gumming up the works and causing distress, rather than some systemic beneficial labor reform like what you want.
I assume that's what you mean by reading up on how we got here?
I don't think so, as that would be a silly point to make. I mean, it's absurd to assume a hiring round should't extend offers to other candidates if current applicants can just barely meet the hiring bar. This is a contrived scenario intended to rationalize excluding better candidates on technicalities that only serve the interest of low-skilled, low-competence applicants that can't compete.
And by the way, I've worked with my fair share of US emigrants, both veterans and juniors fresh out of college, and I would hardly describe them as raising the hiring bar. Nevertheless it would be colossally stupid to argue they should have not been considered for the position just because they were foreigners.
But the interesting thing is that there's a simple solution that we should both be able to agree on, in spite of having quite different views. If you genuinely believe they're super-world-class workers, then you should certainly be enthusiastic about, for instance, rules that would require they be paid wages well above the median for their role. In both of our narratives, that goes a long way towards righting an injustice, we merely disagree on for whom.
But this solution solves it in all cases. And the companies using, but not abusing, H1-Bs certainly wouldn't mind since they'd be mostly unaffected. Finally this would also help prevent wage stagnation. There are many hundreds of thousands H1-Bs and them being paid such low wages is going to have an affect on the market.
[1] - https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
The problem with visas such as H1-B is not salaries. They are a consequence of the exploitation conducted by US employers. The problem with H1-B-style visas is that in practice they work as a modern day take on indentured servitude, and they are designed as a oppression tool where employers can coerce employees to remain at their service under threat of seeing their life uprooted.
So,framing visa discussions on how they make it hard for incompetente locals to compete for jobs completely misses the problem, and helps perpetuate systems of abuse.
Some companies employ systems based on sponsorship that help attract skilled labor whose skill levels are above and beyond what's available in the country's job pool. That's something that helps grow the local industry. Framing this discussion on H1-B visas being coerced into working for meager salaries indicates that the real problem is not being identified.
I'm not going to say this has never happened, but in general I don't think it's common or widespread. Generally, businesses going to the trouble of bringing in foreign labor through the various programs are trying to fulfill labor shortages.
You should be able to see evidence of it happening in jobs and unemployment numbers. You'd see it higher unemployment among American citizens than the workforce as a whole
Towards the end of the Biden admin, there was a great jobs report, but right-wing media and MAGA pundits spun it by saying the vast majority of all the new jobs were taken by immigrants.
That wasn't a lie, but it wasn't because immigrants were taking jobs that would have otherwise been filled with Americans as they tried to portray. If you looked at the employment numbers by citizenship status, citizens were sitting about as close to full employment as we could ever be. The only way to fill those jobs was to expand the labor pool.
If not, then using words like "rigged" and "meritocratic" as a complaint about the current system can only mean that you want no border controls.
If so, how? Every system I can think of can be rigged, and exclude people who have merit, resulting in a system which favors the rich and powerful.
I guess I will remain unenlightened.
Right, The concept of a "meritocracy" only works if everyone is agreeing to the core tenets. If any group starts expressing in-group bias, then that group exponentially grows and will end up displacing all other, more meritocratic, groups.
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H1Bs visas allow for corporations to sidestep meritocracy because they can leverage the foreigner into 70 hour work weeks.
F1 visas allow for corporations to sidestep meritocracy because they get a five year exemption on some taxes for that employee.
etc for all the programs.
I've been hearing the complaining for over a decade I think, and it's been steadily growing the whole time. It's just only now that it's reached you, and from others' comments on here I feel like it's reached a tipping point where it's finally breaking into their filter bubbles and they're surprised and confused about how strong it is.
This is true for both the citizens and the immigrants.
Nobody feels entitled to a visa. It’s aspirational, like applying to a job. People do it because they want a better life, knowing full well they could be denied, or that it may well be temporary.
But if you believe immigrants could take something from you, like your job or housing, then it makes sense you’d project this idea of entitlement onto them. As if by applying they’re implicitly laying claim to something owed to you, a citizen.
In reality the economy is not a fixed pie and nothing is being taken from you. Immigrants take jobs, but they also spend money, pay taxes, start businesses, and need houses built, all of which leads to more jobs. It’s a positive feedback loop that benefits everyone, and a big part of how America’s economy grew into what it is today.
I stopped traveling to US, because during covid goverment, could not be even bothered to clarify entry rules (what sort of booster shots were needed etc). At the same time south border was widely opened. Clear rules and fair game, are the bare minimum!
There are fixed number of jobs, fixed number of houses to rent... it is not infinitive baloon.
Except it's not. It's just an observation of these comments. I don't have a dog in this race. I am not a citizen or a resident. Both residents and citizens are sounding entitled IMHO.
> Nobody feels entitled to a visa. It’s aspirational, like applying to a job. People do it because they want a better life, knowing full well they could be denied, or that it may well be temporary.
For those applying for a new visa I would mostly agree. For those extending their Visa I would disagree heavily.
> But if you believe immigrants could take something from you, like your job or housing, then it makes sense you’d project this idea of entitlement onto them. As if by applying they’re implicitly laying claim to something owed to you, a citizen.
If there is no genuine concern over this then why are applications/quotas for work Visas even a thing? Just offer automatic residence to whoever in the world can get hired by any company that operates in the USA. Infinite GDP glitch.
You are right that government of the USA doesn't owe citizens a continued quality of life. The preamble is very clear on that. When it says "promote the general Welfare" that is interpreted as the welfare of residents and citizens alike.
> In reality the economy is not a fixed pie and nothing is being taken from you. Immigrants take jobs, but they also spend money, pay taxes, start businesses, and need houses built, all of which leads to more jobs. It’s a positive feedback loop that benefits everyone, and a big part of how America’s economy grew into what it is today.
I mostly agree but "benefits everyone" is not true. There are winners and losers and negative externalities. GDP isn't a happiness score. Cynical me thinks that the difference between a USA resident and a citizen is basically non existent for the average USA citizen in terms of rights (arguably worse in terms of responsibilities for non politically active people who don't work with/for the federal government) but the permission to reside indefinitely is one of those rights so a government denying residency is a way to artificially give value to the citizenry without actually giving or improving anything.
All of that is in the open, if you listen to what they say and watch what they do.
1. Make it illegal to hire undocumented immigrants. 2. Foreign specialists need to earn at least an x% above industry standard (to prove they are specialists).
These laws will obviously not fly among corporate donors. Trump will also never deport all illegals because of how much hospitality and agriculture rely on them. In the end it is all show and spectacle. That's what all the tactical gear is for.
It is, in fact, illegal to hire undocumented immigrants. Federal offense actually. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1324a
>2. Foreign specialists need to earn at least an x% above industry standard (to prove they are specialists).
The current standard is that they should earn the pervailing wage, so at minimum average. I agree that they should earn at least 200+% more, however.
I don't think your cruelty argument holds.
So then where are all these illegal immigrants getting hired?
"Law on the books" and "Law enforced" are very different.
It's a canonical example of cruelty being the point - both as a distraction and as a lesson to observers.
Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and most EU nations generally require non-EU citizens to return to their home country to change visa types.
The issue here is that, if you just left the country to do everything the country asked you, you are now in limbo.
For how long? No one can tell.
Does this mean you lose your job? Maybe.
And when you decide it's no longer worth it, you might even have issues getting back in to get your stuff...
Retraining your people CAN be done without it being so disruptive, they chose not to.
I feel like I’ve said it a few times but - Yes, exactly. The country wants you to leave and then get’s to decide if you can come back. That’s how it’s designed. On purpose.
You’re approaching it from a perspective where you’re being asked to leave and your reentry is a right. It’s not. They never said, if you leave you can come back. They said, leave and we’ll see. The risk of being blocked out is inherent by anyone residing in a country that has this similar process; there are many.
That is how it's designed, and that's fine.
But make a decision... They're pausing the decision making for an indefinite amount of time. That's not how it was designed, but it sure does look like that's on purpose.
Can they? Because one of the questions on these questionnaires is almost always 'have you had a prior request being denied'.
> But they’re not advising when that may be happening. To me, that tells you everything you need to know.
These are life altering decisions for people that might have put decades into doing their best for the US. This is not about what to have for dinner.
This causes a LOT of uncertainty and chaos for no real reason. If they're so convinced it should all be denied, then issue those denials so they can be challenged.
I get the human component but I can separate that from policy. I have my own risk assessment on it and it’s that I couldn’t imagine ever making any material investment financial or community in a place like this. I’ve thought about doing the digital nomad thing in the past, and I don’t think anyone would be surprised if some random South East Asian country did this same thing and nobody would bat an eye. It to be expected that other countries can have wavering policies, it’s when the US does it that people cry about the humanity of it.
I don’t think it would have hurt much to put some advanced warning out there. Let people plan for it. But I also know that probably has some blow back towards the intended outcome of this.
Also, I don’t think you can challenge a blanket policy. I haven’t really dove into this but it doesn’t sound like they’re making any exceptions.
The current administration loves creating chaos and uncertainty. Exactly why this should be less of a surprise to those that know how things work and that they may actually get locked out. Anyone who reads even just the headline of this and is perplexed by it has been living under a rock. To me, it is 100% on brand.
As with a lot of things this administration does, this is where the cruel part comes in. That would be the sensible thing to do, it's just a choice not to.
> I don’t think anyone would be surprised if some random South East Asian country did this same thing and nobody would bat an eye. It to be expected that other countries can have wavering policies, it’s when the US does it that people cry about the humanity of it.
Because those countries would typically do it with a warning period of some sort, the fallout won't be as much.
In general these countries typically don't do this because the legal immigration system is how they pick and choose who to allow in, as the US does. So typically this would be to their advantage.
Also, the US is the country that used to call themselves "leader of the free world and all that". So maybe they should hold themselves to high standards?
> Also, I don’t think you can challenge a blanket policy.
There isn't a policy here that has been changed. It's the executive branch stopping some function it was tasked with. We've seen in the past that they've tried such things many times for the courts to then come in and say that the law says they should do XYZ and so they're forced to resume their work. DOGE stopped a bunch of things that the courts later reinstated, including rehiring the people they fired. Thankfully the executive branch isn't completely unchecked, yet.
> Exactly why this should be less of a surprise to those that know how things work and that they may actually get locked out
So you would suggest that people cancel their lease, pack up their stuff, don't sign their kids up for school and all? Just on the off chance that this hits right when they're abroad? I think that's just arguing around the issue created here.
You quoted me without the “but…” part I already wrote.
I don’t think it’s a given another country would give any notice. Political regime change and general volatility are higher in some other places. Big assumption on your part.
Lack of policy and executive mandate is exactly why there’s really no formal dispute process either. Yes, it means you have to let the courts sort it for you. And that means hoping someone leads the charge.
I have suggested that I never would have created a rooted life, with school aged children, financial obligations, assets, etc based on a visa that inherently has such weak grounding in my existence in a country. Those that have chosen to do so, have chosen the risk. They probably hoped for the best and considered historical precedent but we all know the past isn’t a crystal ball for the future. It’s like joining the armed forces after a long period of peace expecting peace to persist. But armed forces are kept because shit can change. Wars can start. And you’ll be involved if it does. The benefits that come with it are provided because that risk exists. Whether you serve at a time of peace or see active duty is not known (unless you join in wartime of course.)
All these cases are meticulously documented. So not making a decision is not at all the same as a 'no'.
A 'no' you can challenge, a pause not so much. They probably cannot and don't want to actually deny all those applications as they'll be in hot water really quick. So this is just the childish, not wanting to really own it, way of trying to achieve the same result.
No? Visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons based on what executive branch of US. there have been multiple cases where it has been clear that visas are a privilige not a right. Visa needs a reason to be granted, by default it is denied.
America is becoming the India that they hate.
Refusing to enforce drug laws or immigration laws is perfectly fine. Ditto for refusing to honor the 2nd amendment.
Honoring it, no doubt, by restricting firearms to duly registered militia personnel as written in the plain text for all to see? What about the 14th Amendment section 3, also written plainly?
It’s been repeatedly established through multiple SCOTUS interpretations that it’s just one example of why such rights shall not be infringed.
Theft of personal property under US$10,000 is no longer a crime.
Survival of the fittest, as nature intended.
Expanded rights, therefore good.
Yes, they are the same category.
In US$10,000 property damage, nobody is physically harmed.
Here’s another example, expanded rights:
Anyone holding a 401k, IRA, or pension can purchase single family homes and apartments inside the account, and pay zero capital gains tax and zero rental income tax.
We expanded rights!
Take a guess what this does to the homeless population.
I am not sure on pensions, but this is not true for a 401k. Only an IRA can be used without paying capital gains taxes for a home purchase. Including first time home buyers. Speaking from experience, I learned the hard way the benefit you are describing applies only to an IRA.
To be clear, you are saying that theft of <10k is not a crime..? If you steal an iPad in an airport, you are charged with theft. I don't know where you got that idea. People are charged with theft for much less than 10k daily.
The alternatives I can think of are for laws to be executed at the whim of an algorithm, a king, a more local executive like the governors of each state, or a more distant foreign executive like the UN
But it's not a given that they can just decide what laws they will or will not enforce or follow
Article 2, Section 3 of the US Constitution: "[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"
The judiciary doesn't have discretion as in it has been "granted" discretion. It de facto has a high degree of discretion because the act of judging a case necessarily entails a judgment of the laws.
Judicial review is a functional necessity. It's a necessary downstream consequence of simply having a Constitution as the supreme law.
The analog to the executive is that the executive naturally has finite resources to enforce law, and so as a matter of functional necessity it has some degree of discretion. That is not discretion to say "I disagree with this law and so am choosing not to enforce it," but the discretion to say "there are other priorities that are more important."
> Beyond these constraints, the Clause raises several vexing questions. For instance, must the President enforce those laws she believes are unconstitutional? Some scholars argue that Presidents must enforce all congressional laws, without regard to his or her own constitutional opinions. Yet modern Presidents occasionally exercise a power to ignore such enactments on the grounds they are not true “laws” subject to the faithful execution duty. In so doing, they somewhat mimic the arguments and practice of President Thomas Jefferson, who refused to enforce the Sedition Act on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
America welcomes the most people in by percentage and by numbers in the world. If they don't want to issue visas, and they do it the most by political design, then no one does.
There's an argument that the US is the least immigrant friendly large Western nation. Maybe the medium sized ones too.
Why is there a "pipeline"?
Does the United States owe immigration to the world, somehow? Does it owe it so much that there must be an avenue to immigration so large that you casually refer to that as a "pipeline"?
Unless you were Chinese. Let's not romanticize that period, the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted precisely over fears of too many people of a different culture and race moving into the US at once. It was only repealed in 1943, as Imperial Japan became the common enemy of both China and the US.
And the Jews who were seeking shelter from Nazi Germany weren't particularly welcome either. There was an entire conference in Evian in 1938, ironically organized by none other than FDR, that sought a solution to increasing Jewish emigration from Germany. The end result was that no one was willing to increase or waive any quotas.
History tends to repeat with some variations. Few political things are totally new under the sun.
Sure, I have friends. But I'm not about to give my friends 50% of my house's equity just because we're friends. I'll invite them over temporarily, often even. But this doesn't entitle them to owning the property. I don't want to give them voting rights in my household budget.
And it's very bizarre that you can't make the distinction here. I doubt that the thought has crossed your mind that this is equivalent.
>You used to be able to just show up on a ship
True. That was then. But I don't want 2 billion people showing up off a ship and getting automatically put into the formal partnership with the rest of us. We have a right to decide who can come, who can't, and we don't even have to justify why. And there's enough of us deciding they can't now to make things better.
> We have a right to decide who can come, who can't, and we don't even have to justify why.
"We" is a funny concept here. As a US citizen, I am a part of that "we", and I want lots more immigration, and much easier paths to citizenship. Why don't I get what I want here?
At the very least, the current situation is inhumane, and treats non-citizens like an underclass. It's disgusting, and an embarrassment. Even if "we" decide we want fewer people living here or becoming citizens, there are better ways to do that.
What analogy? It's the same exact thing, scaled up from family to nation-state. These things aren't like each other, they are the same thing just smaller/larger. You were mal-educated in public schools.
>and I want lots more immigration
If we were talking about your equity in some startup and that the major holders were diluting that stock, you'd be apoplectic. Would call it cheating. I don't care what you want. One way or another, you must be defeated and never allowed to hold political influence again. Or educational influence, come to that.
>At the very least, the current situation is inhumane,
"Inhumane"? That word means something like "you're needlessly causing physical agony to livestock". So I'm sort of smirking that you would apply a word to people that is reserved for animals... maybe that's how the left really thinks of immigrants. They're just some sort of vote cattle that you can farm for election wins. But it's also bizarre. Seems like something you'd accuse me of, not the other way around.
>and treats non-citizens like an underclass
It does no such thing. It treats them like they should stay home and live there. Which is all anyone's asking for.
>Even if "we" decide we want fewer people living here or becoming citizens, there are better ways to do that.
There were! But those ways are disallowed. You blame people like me for the detention centers... we'd be deporting them the very first day, there wouldn't be time or need for them to be detained. That's the left doing that.
Start implementing those better ways. No one will stop you.
Because Congress said so. Grep for shall in the INA.
Less catchy, but damn, I hate that slogan.
In the end this is 100% a political issue and who knows why it is on the HN front page.
Through the entire history of the phrase "hacker", there have been hackers concerned about human rights, political causes, anti-corporate measures, etc.
Personally I consider myself a hacker and will not abide by the narrow definition you set forth. I'm a hacker because I'm pissed off that money controls our lives and I seek out to regain control wherever I can.
The cruelty is the point.
(The UK system requires initial applications from overseas but I believe doesn't require you to leave for renewals)
That "public resentment" mostly was fueled by a rabid, out of control yellow press and a healthy dose of Russian propaganda spread by Russia-financed entities (Brexit, UKIP and Reform UK all have been shown to have very suspicious links to Russian money).
It was very much ‘controlled’. We lost SO many European workers due to the obsession with EU Freedom of Movement that entire sectors like nursing were about to implode without a source of new workers.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons
Call me crazy, but this is something I want in a democracy. Less ideology and more pragmatism.
From my perspective as an immigrant in the UK, there have got to be so many parameters the UK government can adjust before indulging into performative cruelty. Setting higher requirements for visas, revising what jobs qualify for Skilled Worker visas and such. In fact, my understanding is that this is exactly what they have been doing (rather mildly), and it's been successful.
If you make it standard procedure that everyone has to leave the country temporarily to renew their visa, the person is already outside your country when you refuse the renewal.
Instead of having a deportation challenged in court and mired in paperwork, you simply don’t let them back in. That’s what the parent comment was getting at.
Not saying this is right or wrong or it will necessarily happen in the UK, but it’s the kind of change you can make if you want to quietly reduce immigration without fuss about deportations.
And that does seem to be the direction that UK policy is going, albeit currently only with baby steps
* Do we expect a high number of people applying for visa renewals and getting rejected? How come? Otherwise, when it comes to people illegally overstaying their visas, how does this policy idea address intentional non-compliance?
* Don't legal challenges to deportation of criminals have to do with the deportation rather than visas. It would be convenient if hardened criminals complied with the law and removed the need to deport them, but what would motivate them to do so?
The idea seems to be to inconvenience law-abiding visa holders without addressing major concerns, but then I probably misunderstand the concerns. For instance, maybe there is a way of creating legal busy-work when one's visa renewal application gets rejected in a way that is cheap to the individual, but costly for the state, and that this happens on a scale that makes the problem significant. Sounds surprising, and surprising that there'd be no other way to avoid that too!
1a. Illegal immigration has nothing to do with visa based, legal immigration. illegal immigration is the type of immigration people are upset about here in the UK. most people have no problem with legal migration.
1b. anyone claiming the UK’s legal migration is any sort of problem right now, or in the past, should probably not be listened to in any way shape or form for anything they have to say on the matter.
2. a lot of the folks who have illegally entered the country end up asking for asylum, and by law their claims must be processed
3. the dublin convention states something along the lines of “asylum requests must be processed in the first EU country the person entered into”, ie it’s possible to remove people claiming asylum if they initially arrived in a different EU member state country
4. most people get to the uk having traveled through EU member states, because geography.
5. we left the EU, we cannot do 3 anymore. so we have a bunch of people stuck in hotels waiting for asylum claims to be processed.
illegal immigration got worse because we left the eu.
If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue.
It would be very strange (basically unheard of in human history) if it didn't.
People I know who are non-white all report increased racism (mostly not aggressive but noticeable) since Covid, despite having English accents so clearly not being illegal immigrants.
That is caused by reckless immigration policy stoking resentment
Maybe not millions per year but millions over a very short time
Close to a quarter of our population are immigrants right now. It's become a pretty fragmented society imo as a result.
Maybe it's just rose colored glasses then, but it certainly feels like we're more divided than ever before
A lot of people ideally want immigration to be negative, so +170k is still going in the wrong direction.
There are potential arguments in favour of that level of immigration but you need to convince people that it’s fine for their country to change beyond all recognition in the space of a single generation.
And unsurprisingly, the people trying to do that are finding it a tough sell
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
This sort of position is, IMO, disgusting and immoral. I cannot express how appalled I am that someone would state something like this. Anyone who's a citizen of the UK most certainly has a right to express their opinion on legal immigration, either in favor or against.
Sure, but we don’t have to heed their opinion.
> a right to express their opinion
...
People claim that, but you can't read someone's immigration status from their face.
I have no problem with refugees. I do have problem with a million people a year arriving through Heathrow. Farage and co want that though as it’s good for business (more workers, higher asset prices) so they blame it on the tiny numbers of small boats.
Brexit meant we swapped immigration of mostly like minded Europeans and temporary workers for permanent immigration from poorer countries with more medieval views.
I’m fairly left on the spectrum, I was door stepping for remain, and for Lib Dems in 2017,2019 and a by-election, I’m very much on the tax wealth not work side, and I have no problem in paying tax despite earning more than 90% of the people in the county, including the old folk who just keep taking and never paying.
But it seems I’m not left enough because I have a problem with the massive amounts of legal immigration under a populist right wing government and I should be sent to a gulag.
In fact I would argue: if someone is truly left wing in the traditional sense (i.e. they believe Marx when he says politics is all about class conflict, they want to live in a society where workers have more power, they support trade unions etc.) then logically... they should oppose mass immigration.
Mass immigration exists because it's in the interests of the capital owning classes. It massively reduces the bargaining power of labour, and the potential power of trade unions.
Yet most supposedly "left wing" people support mass immigration and for some reason they can't understand they're voluntarily acting as willing foot soldiers for people they profess to hate
Not sure if that matches a definition of huge, but it's important to note that with a shrinking population without immigration the UK would be in serious economic trouble (like every country). This is even more exaberated due to the aging population that the shrinking population implies.
Immigrants like always are the convenient scapegoat that is being used to distract from the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else.
> You must currently be present in Ireland to be eligible to renew your permission to remain online. Applications submitted from outside Ireland will not be accepted.
Nigeria I'm less sure about. From what I can quickly google, they have a few classes of temporary work visas that aren't extendable (which isn't particularly unusual), although they do list at least some as "renewable upon regularization", and I'm unfortunately not well-versed enough in Nigerian immigration law to know what that means. For actual long-term immigration they have a document called a CERPAC, and the respective website [2] doesn't seem to mention whether you have to leave Nigeria to renew it, only that it's done online. Common sense suggests, however, that if you did have to leave, it would be mentioned somewhere on there, likely in big bold letters.
[1] https://www.irishimmigration.ie/registering-your-immigration...
Of course, if you have a spouse and kids, this all gets easier once you have permanent resident status. Which used to be comparatively easy to get once you were married and you had offspring running around. I don't know what that process looks like now.
In practice, this kind of arbitrary screwing with people makes the US far too risky for educated, professional immigrants. So the scientists and the engineers and the company founders will just go elsewhere and build that country's economy. Which is fine, in the long run: If the US doesn't want to build the future or create new industries, then the voters have every right to vote for that. We've already decided we have no hope of competing with China in cars. And we'll need to cede more industries over time. As far as I can tell, the US has benefited heavily from poaching other people's scientists and engineers and professionals for decades now. But maybe the voters don't buy my argument, and they believe that chasing away skilled professionals and imposing 100% tariffs will lead to the future they want. It's a difference in beliefs about about what makes a country prosperous, and people have a right to vote based on their beliefs.
Even with this pretext though, it's a good example of a rule which punishes the law-obedient. People who intend to stay in the country illegally won't go abroad to reapply in the first place.
Even considering the disfuncional way, one thing it's to say "you only stay if we allow". The other is to say "you only leave if you allow": that's a much more authoritarian position.
These policies will work and immigration will lower for sure. Let's see the outcome in a few years.
This is how you become the Kingdom Of Dumbasses.
This so much. Ultimately, you are a guest and the host country can kick you out with no notice.
UPDATE: Looks like I ruffled some feathers here
People haven't always complained about this feature/bug/whatever because the US has generally not had people in charge who allow in people charged with sex trafficking (like the Tate brothers) but stop and harass even American citizens who are accused of saying mean things about Israel on the Internet.
If anything, there are services that can deliver your stuff back to you, so this is not the big deal it seems to be.
I'll just cancel my rental agreement, move my furniture across continents, cancel my other subscriptions, oh wait that's got a few month notice period so I'll have to pay up for months I don't need anymore, let alone all the friendships and social connections I made that I never got to say a proper goodbye to.
This is extremely unappealing to skilled workers, and the loss of trust will extend past this current administration, if all it takes is one idiot in office to upend your life, you can't trust that country and its people anymore.
The tall blond nordics they really want have no real motivation to deal with this bizarre BS as they usually already have a great standard of living in say Norway.
So you end up with a ton of folks from places where running water is still a luxury. A lot of these people are even excellent church attending Christians.
Not white though.
I really do think this country is ran by idiots. No one will be there to pick the crops, prisoners make poor farm hands.
The price of food will skyrocket, and if the rest of the world wants to punish us they could just suspend food imports to the US.
This was all predictable, and while the Democrats are far from perfect, at least you don’t have chaos.
Every country has the government it deserves.
Need to keep those wages down, it would be terrible for profitability if he had to hire Americans you know!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/06/12/trump-or...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/politics/h2b-visas.htm...
These are not fully trained scientists, but rather trainees. As such, they don't get paid the same as a fully trained scientist. Like how a journeyman is paid more than an apprentice electrician.
Of course, they are also underpaid, too. Ask any grad student union.
> It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.
Yes, it's very hard to pay your workers a liveable wage if everyone else is exploiting their workers by underpaying them.
All you're saying is that we've built exploiting labor (foreigners, interns, trainees) into our economy.
But doing any kind of labor that a machine can do, is beneath your capacity as a human, so you shouldn’t do that job, you should do other jobs that require human effort or where the quality of human output is valued.
I also disagree with the automation point regarding what humans should do. As we see with current AI, many creative tasks can be automated but it doesn’t make them unfulfilling human endeavors.
Do you think all jobs of equal moral value? I think most people feel that some work is more "humanizing" than others
One of my former partners was making around 200k. Her grandparents cleaned homes.
The idea is that you come here and your life is crappy low paid work, but your kids and their kids have amazing careers.
I’d just prefer to grant every worker the dignity of permanent residency.
The bizarre dystopian system we have now lets your employer get you deported. Not just farm workers, a lot of food processing plants are manned by undocumented workers.
If everyone without status up and left tomorrow we’d all starve in 2 months.
We also need to end the practice of holding workers to few enough hours that they require supplemental government welfare to thrive, for example the fraction of Walmart workers on food stamps, or who want full-time for benefits but can't get it.
Do they refuse tourist visas for someone who recently had an immigrant visa?
Someone applying for a tourist visa, who recently had an immigration renewal denied, who has no life to get back to in their country of origin (because they built a life in the US) but clearly has a life in the US (owns property in the US, has family in the US, has work ties -maybe even still has a job in the US); that applicant is an enhanced overstayer risk and this increases the chances of being denied a tourist visa.
also it has been quite convenient explanation for adopting systems such as Flock and allowing all kinds of para-police actions which seems very similar to what happened in germany circla 1930-1934
"The way that a society treats its prisoners is one of the sharpest reflections of its character." - Nelson Mandela
http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1998/980625_dcshr...
Different societies are at different places on the prison is for punishment to prison is for rehabilitation spectrum, and their reoffending rates reflect that.
That's exactly what the citation is about: how a society opts to treat its most vulnerable also shows what that society is truly about. Often times we see USians criticize Nordic countries because they lack cruelty in their prison system. How is that not a demonstration of the cruelty imbued in US culture?
Thus the rebranding of humans as “illegals”.
you surely must realize that any rational person just shrugs off listening to what else you might say when you start with such ridiculous interpretations
Fundamentally, it’s a disagreement over what makes countries the way they are. Does a Bangladeshi start thinking and acting like an American the minute they set foot within borders where the 1st, 2nd, etc., amendments apply? Or is culture deeper than the words on paper.
"Of course I'm not racist, I have black friends"
...
I have a family member that is a naturalized citizen. They were in the country illegally for 2 decades before that, and they are the first one to yell "kick those lazy illegals out". So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture.
What's really fucking stupid about this guy is the people he loves to vote for are the ones that would strip his rights and kick him out of the country in a heartbeat for.
Remember when America was a melting pot and not a bunch of redhats goose stepping in line?
It’s weird that you think my point is about the superficial optics of having immigrants in Trump’s coalition, rather than about the motivations of the immigrant voters themselves.
> So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture
You can’t be “racist” against a culture. Racism is wrong because race is superficial—how much sunscreen someone does or does not need is as irrelevant as hair color or eye color. But culture isn’t superficial. Culture has major impacts on the types of societies people create.
Your family member’s viewpoint is totally rational, and frankly, more rational than the opposite. If you come from a country that’s dysfunctional and unsuccessful, why wouldn’t you dislike that place’s culture? It’s like someone who left some failing dinosaur company to go to a high performance startup saying that the culture at the new company is better.
Counterpoint: yes you can[1] and it's basically what you're advocating.
That's a weird way to cap off an endorsement of cultural racism? A series of fictional stories about the future, by and for Americans, tells a story that Americans would want to hear: QED, monolithic American culture is obviously the future. Let's get this paper submitted for peer review.
Gravity and the spherical shape of the earth also aren't 'accepted things,' this 'I don't like it so it's not real' argument isn't really a coherent counterpoint.
Just be bigoted on race, man. The richest man in the world does it, nothing stopping you from doing it too. You don't have to hide it in this era.
Alternatively you can think harder and understand that the world is a complicated place, cultures can't be assigned numerical values and sorted, there's more variety within cultures than between them and have all sorts of circumstances and history that explain their situations that go beyond 'this culture is 3.75 eugenic units better than that one.'
European culture is itself a product of that process. When the Germanic tribes conquered Rome, they didn’t impose their own culture on the Romans. Instead they adopted Romans’ self-evidently more successful culture, law, and institutions.
Please elaborate on what defines 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' cultures, and while you're at it let me know what the heck 'European culture' is? Or 'Roman culture' for that matter. I'm honestly lost.
Building steam engines, rockets, the Internet, etc.
> and while you're at it let me know what the heck 'European culture' is?
European culture is one of the most well studied subjects in the world. It’s the culture that resulted from Roman colonization, followed by German conquest of Rome and the spread of Roman customs, language, law throughout Europe alongside Christianity. It’s why Slovenia and Spain both have a legal tradition built on Roman civil law. It’s why British law is full of Latin terms.
Also: European culture is a discrete thing you can either be in or out of, and it's a combination of legal system and language. In addition, the Romans were a homogenous group of people with the same language and customs, and they were Christian.
I've made note of this, thank you for clarifying.
Culture doesn’t need to be “discrete” or “homogenous” in order to exist. “Arab culture” also exists, despite regional variations. Law and language are critical aspects of society that indicate a shared culture despite local variations. Yes, during the relevant period, Romans were Christian. It became the majority religion in the roman empire by 400 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_Christia...
European culture is one of the most well studied things in the world. You should read about it.
But you’re saying that it’s the inventions that make certain cultures superior, the other stuff is just there to enable the inventions. So for example China is building far more advanced infrastructure and high tech equipment right now, thus their culture is superior to European culture.
What’s your proposal to help European culture the level of advancement that Chinese culture has achieved ?
No idea how you came to that conclusion. There are many counterexamples to this claim.
It’s not racism when, for example, some Koreans discriminate against each other on the basis of skin tone. It was racism when some Hutu did pogroms against the Tutsi.
I agree with mulling. Give up these language-games and just admit that you can’t be a culture realist without also indulging in a little race science.
Culture, by contrast, is about how parents raise their kids. And that’s a choice. Treating culture as coextensive with race is just racism for leftists: https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/926/d5f/a334baf0d43cd480b3ea.... It’s horseshoe theory. And the implications of that theory are depressing. Your theory would mean that places like Bangladesh can’t fix themselves, because, according to you, their culture is a manifestation of their race and everyone has to accept it. That’s literally the same thing the Groypers say.
I need you to both explain what this is all about and workshop up a treatment we can take to ONAN or something to start their sci fi division.
How would someone show up late to dinner on a spaceship?
Why is it people who tell me about a post-racial society always make it sound like they mean “post me erasing the Others”?
Nobody said you couldn't say them, it was that open bigotry is something everyone associates with being a person of low class. When it's used by the upper classes it's as a divide and conquer tactic to keep the lower classes from focusing on the group that's actually exploiting them.
The normalizing of open bigotry is a kind of 'death of despair' for US culture: it indicates that, en masse, people have given up on elevating their class in society and being better people, and have decided to just wallow in it. Blaming the 'other' isn't anything new, it's the basic lazy tribal default and it's the 'easy' button for a culture that simply gives up.
The middle class is disappearing. They're being impoverished.
I also know plenty of illegal immigrants and family. I own a construction company in Texas and have lived here my whole life. They find this sort of American strife comical, it’s not based on their reality. If I were to call them an “illegal” or even other common old school phrase, like “wet back” they laugh and call me the words they have for me. Nobody with real problems cares about this stuff. They generally like Trump even since ICE stuff.
Genuinely though, such a lazy response to act like you caught me in something. People like you trying to weaponize political correctness is precisely what puts guys like Trump in the oval.
Honey. You just told on yourself.
I grew up in one of the most diverse cities in the US and was pretty poor (not in some white enclave). On my street I think we had families from 16 different countries, all continents represented often multiple nationalities from each, and we frequently had block parties and gatherings out in the street.
Yeah, can you imagine?
I refuse to believe there’s enough racism in America to run a winning campaign on. I’m in Texas, know a lot of Trump supporters, and the number one thing is how they support his ideas but not his process and how they still view that as a better option on the ballet.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nr, nr, nr.' By 1968 you can't say 'nr'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is—blacks get hurt worse than whites…”
The system has evolved to the point where if people do not verify their political assumptions in relation to a history of racism, they are voting out of ignorance and bigotry that is essentially synonymous to racism. And this isn’t for a lack of trying on everyone else’s part - you can’t say it’s anyone else’s fault but your own when you were warned multiple times, alarms bells ringing like fucking crazy - that this is the history, these are the dog whistles, this is what you’re signing up for.
I get there was, and still is, a status quo that needs upending. But when you look at people’s actual policy beliefs, they align broadly with the aims of the current DSA movement, and yet they vote in droves for the diametric opposite in the form of the GOP. And even in the modern age, it turns out “ban transgender” and “protect free speech” is not valid economic policy. There’s no explanation for it, other than suicidal stupidity and stubbornness manufactured by years of systemic racism.
I mentioned somewhere else, I met a person who have lost money, house, family, everything... The only thing left was his daughter.
I cannot imagine one wanting that for someone else because a rich lobbyist wants more power and creates a narrative of enemies that suddenly arise to destroy us.
Temporary worker programs are a deal offered on open terms: people can come to work, but they have to leave afterward. The laws are plastered with the word “temporary.” People take advantage of the deal knowing the terms and there is nothing wrong holding people to the deal.
The ultimate uncertainty is that regardless of who you are and what you do, a country always has the right to kick you out when you are there on a visa regardless of what the rights and rules of that visa. Nothing is guaranteed ultimately.
>The ultimate uncertainty is that regardless of who you are and what you do, a country always has the right to kick you out...Nothing is guaranteed ultimately.
Which is what makes the actions of the government so disturbing. What made the USA so attractive (the rules, the decorum, the civility) is gone.
While there were a great many injustices, in general, it trended toward getting better over the years, until recently.
The craziest part is with globally declining total fertility rates, a country would be fortunate to have productive, younger people be banging on their door to be let in.
> > The ultimate uncertainty is that regardless of who you are and what you do, a country always has the right to kick you out...Nothing is guaranteed ultimately.
Depends on whether you think international law still exists and is followed - statelessness isn't allowed under that.
More to the point, nothing about this decision implies statelessness. Every visa applicant is a citizen of another foreign, non-American, nation. Being booted out doesn't make them stateless. They couldn't have applied for a visa if were stateless.
Note, I do agree that this suspension is unfair and a bad idea. But tossing out random accusations that imply that international law is being violated or causing people to become stateless doesn't help our case.
Well that’s an easy one. It doesn’t. There are specific agreements, and I guess you could consider war crimes the primary example of an international court. But there is no and should be no international courts for immigration.
A country gets to set its own laws, end of story. The current happenings in the US are a direct pendulum swing from the previous administration. If people can’t accept that, it just shows how biased they are. Or how one-sided their information sources have been.
These are non immigrant work visas.
So maybe just don't engage in immigration fraud?
Always written and followed up with “but…”
If only the millions and millions of people that NGOs were shuffling in over the Biden years could have had some obvious and expected pushback… I don’t remember anyone here saying “geez, this could effect more than a response to illegal border crossings down the road!”
While I critique the US for a lot and it does get a lot wrong I think many countries do this.
We’re so screwed. Good luck to us ever building up goodwill again.
This would be paranoid ramblings more than 10 years ago but today is a legitimate concern.
The only way I can see this happening is if you try to convert from OTP to an H1. I used to do some runs up to Vancouver to help a friend do that.
This just generally sucks for anyone making plans in their life. I remember my wife's greencard interview in Guangzhou, and it would have sucked if they instituted this the day before she did that.
That being said, yes, the way the current administration handles immigrant visas, worker visas, and more is absolutely inhumane and completely asinine. I've been through it with family and friends, and it is painful and can be heartbreaking even.
I think it is helpful to remind folk that these policies are not universally hated. Indeed a majority of voters voted specifically for them, and they were explicitly laid out.
This is democracy in action. The majority (of those who care enough at all) get to rule over the minority (and the apathetic). Obviously not all actions will be universally loved, but no govt action can ever be universally loved.
The largest reason US got to where it was at least in the world economy stage was because of the visa program. It was the country everyone wanted to move to, because you can apply your skills, make money, start a business, with very little restriction comparatively, buy a house, and live your dream life.
The more people wanna work, the more opportunities there are for work. Any time money changes hands, like in salary for work, this grows the economy, which further creates new jobs.
If someone is for this type of restricted immigration, then you should have a clear cut position on why you think things being more expensive, less available, and overall lower economic activity (which affects things like one being able to get a mortgate or other loan, and so on) is generally better for the country.
Because if they don't have those reasons, or have ones that are not rooted in reality than the position comes from xenophobia and racism in 99% of the cases.
Presuming to have any real agency over the evolution of human culture also seems misguided. Culture is like a river, in that "no man ever steps into the same one twice". It's constantly changing in unpredictable ways, from generation to generation or even within generations, with or without immigration. That goes for the cultures of immigrants also.
Pretending that importing millions of foreigners will not affect the culture whatsoever is just a dumb or disingenuous argument, sorry. We already see a microcosm of it with Indian tech workers, having constant scandals about only hiring other Indians of their caste, and with the southern border states having dual spanish language signs everywhere. UK has issues with Islamic tension today already.
It is so fundamentally obvious that mass immigration from non-western cultures will produce non-westernized cultural changes, that otherwise wouldn't happen, that I have to just assume you are intentionally pretending not to understand that.
No - the less real exposure a person has to immigrants and their communities, the more dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric has a chance to substitute for real experience.
> Southern border states are a lot more concerned with illegal crossings than anywhere else
Southern border states are also generally filled with a lot of people who actually know, from experience, that illegal border crossings and immigration are not the same thing.
> the southern border states having dual spanish language signs everywhere
The humanity! There will always be cultural diffusion along borders, no immigration policy is ever going to change that reality. The lives of people on either side are integrated in real tangible ways despite the lines on maps.
And the reverse is also true, of course. Mexico is filled with English speakers and it's quite easy to get around there without speaking a lick of Spanish. It's a great place to visit.
> Pretending that importing millions of foreigners will not affect the culture whatsoever is just a dumb or disingenuous argument
The argument is more that any predictions about the future of culture or efforts to steer it one way or another are mostly futile, and likely more inspired by ones prejudices and irrational fears.
Whatever it is that you are afraid of losing - you probably won't - or if you do, the immigrants probably weren't the ones who took it from you.
(It's actually way more likely that some piece of technology, maybe built by some people on this very site, will be the thing that kills your culture)
It be valid point if you cound point to a set of traditions and beliefs that defines what American culture is, but modern American culture is literally an average over contributions from different cultures due to all the historic immigration.
The point is valid, but perhaps not relevant. Broadly, yes, Americans are easy to spot abroad. Attitude, behavior etc are all part of culture.
Yes, an American from NY and one from Alabama will have massive differences, but culture (anywhere) doesn't mean that people are all the same.
Deep down, if you substitute "culture" for "race" in most (not all) conversations you get a much closer understanding of the real problem. For example the first lady is an immigrant, but clearly the right kind.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
I've always been confused about how "democracy" is good, but "tyranny of the majority" is bad.
Have you worked at a tech company in 2026?
Plenty of engineers, born in India/China and working in Silicon Valley, are openly anti-immigration. And I also support them since I agree with them.
Pull up the ladder once you’ve made it.
Nothing new.
> This is not X or blind. You created a new account just to post drivel?
Tell me you don’t work at a tech company, without telling me you don’t work at a tech company
You’ve let your bitterness infect your happiness and think no one can see you regurgitating your lack of self worth all over your shirt.
Can we agree these are actions of a coward, you’re attempting to label as democracy and that it accomplishes nothing because no one reading this has authority?
If these weren't issued he would need to hire Americans?
Sources: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-01-30/the-trump...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/06/12/trump-or...
I mean this is how gay marriage flipped, enough people got to know their homosexual friends, neighbors, or even family members and realized that the policy was hateful against someone they cared about and the stated harms were clearly rediculous when put in the context of that real person you know.
you mean leaving the country is required for visa renewal? the other way around?
This is specifically a pause on immigrant visas. That is, green cards. So this is for family-based green cards and investor green cards through consular processing (ie when out of the country).
As yet, work visas and other nonimmigrant visas are unaffected.
The end goal is to do end migration as a whole (especially from “certain places”) and expel all “undesirables”. To get there, they will test the waters, get the right precedents and judicial orders in place, and move the Overton window enough so the public sees these actions as “business as usual”.
Does it suck? Yes. Is this unexpected? Not really, no.
¹: residence permit card in case of schengen, visa in case of "non-immigrants" in US.
It’s no fun, but these are adults (and often very privileged adults) that decided to move to a new country for more upside at the cost of no residency.
Conflating this with “inhumane” is just a basic misunderstanding of immigration and the contract these people signed up for.
Very uncomfortable, yet a risk these people took, and hopefully a conscious one.
I think this distinction would help as well.
Inhumane != human rights violation.
1. It can be inhumane to halt someone's visa application
2. Visa applicants have no human right to have their application processed
Everyone is right, except for the implication that their point disproves the other side's point.
Come on, there's nothing to be gained by misrepresenting people's views.
The argument is a simple one: if you are currently within the immigration process you should be able to move through that process in a timely manner, with clear communication of expectations. Freezing appointments is a political hack: they're not changing the law, they're not altering what anyone is entitled to. They're just leaving people in limbo.
You're saying "these people took a risk", and you're right. But that doesn't mean we can't criticize the people ensuring their bet is a losing one in the least moral way possible.
> “Just ‘putting a pause’ on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane”
And now you're saying:
> “if you are currently within the immigration process you should be able to move through that process in a timely manner, with clear communication of expectations.”
Sure it sucks. But do you understand there is no right to have this visa application interview nor a yes/no decision in a timely manner? Applying for a visa is a privilege. You aren't being denied some human right if the process is interrupted.
“It isn’t a right” and “it’s immoral” are not mutually exclusive statements. No, there is no human right to a visa application response. That doesn’t mean that leaving people in indefinite limbo is morally right.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72218277/catholic-legal...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72369535/dorcas-interna...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72494270/ivanov-v-trump...
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue with this strawman.
No one in the thread is claiming it's a "human right".
We the people will be reminding them who is actually in charge.
Is this really how smart immigrants want to live their lives since this is not some temporary glitch? This is society you want to raise your kids in? There is no sum of money high enough for me to accept such treatment, money are not that relevant once person is not poor.
And if its not money, other places have much better working societies in all important metrics, not just this (healthcare, education, social services, criminality, infrastructure and so on... basic pillars not some nitpicks)
You are confusing some terms. You are never asked to leave to renew the visa. Visa is an entry document. It only serves the purpose of granting you entry. When you are in the US, your stay is covered by your status. If you extend or change your status, you will continue to be in legal status in the US. That is, you are never asked to leave as long as you are in status. If you do leave on your own though, you will need a new visa if your old one has expired. So the TLDR is that if you leave on your own, you will get stranded.
The fresh grads who can't find a job in the US aren't the saddest about this news.
For the admin that closed USAID overnight, sent innocents to El Salvador, incited ICE to gun down American citizens, this seems to me like business as usual.
Any other rationale ignores history.
Tarriffs, immigration, they're poking the bears to make them bootlick for regulatory allowance. Thats how Republicans now treat the regulatory apparatus: it's either jetisoned as wasteful spending or used to get kickbacks and favors and to "tame" the bear.
Also, the first paragraph of the article says it too:
"Immigrant visa applicants with interviews scheduled at U.S. embassies and consulates have been notified by email that their appointments are being postponed."
I am to some degree on board with keeping a closer eye on immigration, but the way the current administration does it feels intentionally cruel. The guy at my company has a house, wife, and kids in the US; his visa is perfectly legal, so it seems it would make sense to process these people quickly. But instead, he is now in some limbo. Same for ICE. Clamping down on illegal immigration makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for ICE to behave like some unaccountable secret police that hires the biggest assholes they can find who can then do whatever they want.
Yet you throw around insults and labels at me. Who is the callous one here?
Quite the rebuttal.
I could never imagine myself buying a home in a country where I don't have permanent access to that real estate. I am not opposed to voting to prevent non-PRs from owning real estate in order to keep housing prices lower for residents and prevent non-immigrants from shooting themselves in the foot.
As I live abroad in temporary status, I keep one foot back home (USA) and am extremely mindful of the risks of needing to close up shop and move.
If you want an economic perspective, consider reading Warren Buffet's "America’s growing trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us" article [0].
[0] - https://fortune.com/article/warren-buffett-foreign-trade/
American Police officers are famous for not actually living in the cities they work in.
In each country I have lived in, I was a guest. With that knowledge, I carefully designed my life so uprooting would not be a painful inhumane process.
If you throw a party and a guest refuses to leave, you wouldn't declare forcing them to leave your home in-humane.
Show me where the govt has actually revoked their visa? Instead, because they cannot cancel the visa legally they are trying to create as much pain as possible for these visa holders hoping that some will give up and leave.
However, time is important and after a certain amount of time or perhaps even connection made to the community, a person does move from guest to neighbor.
Yes there is. They are a huge reason our economy is as good as it is.
When a player comes to a team from another as a result of a trade, is he a guest or is he someone people look up to? It depends on what he brings to the table right? Most of the immigrants we talk about here, high skilled tech workers, are bringing more to the table than the average American
(b) Even if we are talking about H1-Bs, it takes someone in India 10-15 years of waiting in line to get a green card. If someone were to buy a house in the interim, it doesn't seem so irrational to me.
Its easy to blame the victim and say they should have known.
(b) If I enter China on a temporary work permit visa, with a 15 year plan to obtain Chinese citizenship, no one will have sympathy for me if that plan is interrupted by legal, political, economic changes. Since I full well knew my current status and the risks of failing to obtain Chinese citizenship.
Just because there is a possibility in the distant future for permanence, doesn't mean you can safely backdate it to today.
I would have sympathy for you if it was interrupted by suddenly changing the requirements through no action of your own.
Like, if you commit a crime, are a belligerent drunk, or whatever and they don't renew your visa over that, I have no sympathy.
If you're unable to secure employment for an extended period of time, and they don't renew your visa, I also have less sympathy since that's part of the bargain you knew going in.
If you play by the rules, but they reject a visa renewal for a reason like "we have too many immigrants from $x country, so we're rejecting y% of renewals" , well that's legally within the government's rights to do, but I'll have sympathy for you and think that you're morally in the right and China's failing its duty to its foreign residents.
Likewise, this US one is a case of capricious rejection, the US government is not holding up its end of the deal you both thought you were agreeing to. Like, the deal with a work visa, even if it's not permanent, is "if you follow the rules and keep good steady employment, you can live here, but yes it's conditional on the work thing".
I have sympathy for this hypothetical you, and also I have sympathy for those holding american visas who are impacted.
In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.
I agree with your overall point but the answer here is money. The earning potential in the US vs. e.g. India is drastic.
If you're lucky enough to have had rich enough parents to not have to worry about money too much, yes, you'll probably optimize for doing things you enjoy, but people who spend a lot of their younger years with money issues will sometimes obsess about it and really focus their lives around 'getting rich'.
I've noticed have similar phenomena with people who are deprived of certain important needs in their youth - people who are starved of a certain type of parental affection overcompensating by orienting their lives around getting more of it (eg women with daddy issues who are very promiscuous), people who feel disrespected and downtrodden who become obsessed with social status, people who get bullied and get into martial arts...
If you've ever read Gone With The Wind, there's a line where Scarlett O'Hara says "with God as my witness, I'll never go hungry again". I suspect that many people who have similar experiences will react by orienting their lives in a similar manner. "I was deprived of something important, so I will react by over-indexing on that important thing I was deprived of, to avoid the future pain of being again deprived of it".
I think you’re in the right ballpark, and I have seen it play out exactly that. However, I think it is even more common for rich kids to obsess about getting richer.
In my experience, as long as their needs are being met, most people get used to whatever lifestyle they are raised in, and stick with it. if they grew up in a family that chases wealth, and equates income with self worth, then they tend to keep doing that.
Also, you have plenty of people who will have career plans like "work in finance in NYC for 5-10 years, amass a fat pile of cash, and retire to a small farm in the middle of nowhere". If I were living in China or India, I might see "spending 5-10 years in the US earning large piles of money and returning to my homeland to retire and live a life of leisure" as a valid career path.
Another point is that speaking the local language in a richer country of the EU is less likely than speaking English (with English being official only in Ireland and Malta), so it's harder to settle - esp. with kids and school.
I'm curious as a non-American - labelled by who? People who want to talk tough on immigration but benefit from H1Bs in their companies? Or the system itself in some way?
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...
My personal rule of thumb is that any non-citizen who becomes a tax resident due to hitting the six-month rule is an immigrant.
For the same reason I temporarily resided elsewhere: An opportunity to expand my horizons, experience another culture, and oh yeah... the money. In fact, through much of history it was common for skilled workers to go abroad and bring skills home, this was how industry got kickstarted in many places and there were even various formal programs for this. This is even the case for skilled labor that doesn't qualify for an H1-B visa. It's commonplace for aspiring chefs to work in kitchens around the world under the tutelage of well-regarded chefs to learn from them and then apply the same techniques and operating models to their own restaurant at home.
You are mentally applying reasoning that assumes permanency to a situation that explicitly says it doesn't include permanency.
The fundamental problem is people spreading this lie. It has a path to permanent immigration, but it is a non immigrant visa, it is very clearly define and describe as such.
It is idiotic to build a life in a country where you only have a temporary visa. I've lived in 4 countries and I never assumed I would forever be allowed to stay in any of them.
The US do not owe a path to permanent residency to anyone.
I never even thought of buying a house or "build a permanent life" in a country before I was given permanent residency with no condition. And even then, I worked as fast as possible to get citizenship. When you are a guest in a country you don't assume they'll keep you around forever.
Whole point of this thread is that it isn't unreasonable to have kids and family and a house and social life when you've lived somewhere for 10+ years. So any action on part of the government should at least give the space to get things in order or find alternatives. This is a fair and humane expectation.
If someone gets permanent residency in a country I see no problem if they want to buy a house after 6 months, more power to them.
The abnormality is this idiotic 10+ years time that people are allowed to stay on a temporary visa. This is what needs to end. This is what makes people entitled - understandably I would even say. People are foolish, but I still blame the game, not the players.
An example might be someone who is renting your house. If you allowed them to live in your house for 10 years, would you ask them to leave without notice or with just the minimum 1 month notice? Yes they are not entitled to anything more than what was in the contract but would you do that? I wouldn't. Most people I know would work with the tenant and give them more time to figure things out. And if all of this was done with that decency, I am fine with it.
It’s a dual purpose visa. You are allowed to pursue immigration (i.e. a green card) while you have an H1B.
It's amazing even on HN people are openly giving their opinions while being completely uninformed of the facts.
Imagine the discussions elsewhere.
Can you correct the mistake?
If I show up in China (or the USA) on a tourist visa with the plans to pursue a marriage and permanent residency, does that mean I get to backdate my permanent residency to the tourist visa because I’m able to pursue a marriage (PR)?
"dual intent" doesn't backdate permanent residency once you're started to seek.
>seeking permanent residence on a tourist visa is not allowed, under most conditions.
In the US, it's allowed under your stated conditions. Immediate relatives of US citizens can generally adjust status to PR from any status (including tourist visa/visa waiver) or no status. Although if your underlying status expires you could be temporarily detained on a discretionary basis.
That said, it's better to pursue a K1 if you plan to get married shortly after arriving. It's very unlikely you will be granted a tourist visa if you tell the truth in the interview that you're engaged to someone in the US with immediate plans to marry.
Can a nonimmigrant in H-1B or L-1 status intend to immigrate permanently to the U.S.?
Nonimmigrants in H-1B or L-1 status can be the beneficiary of an immigrant visa petition, apply for adjustment of status, or take other steps toward Lawful Permanent Resident status without affecting their status. This is known as "dual intent" and has been recognized in immigration law since passage of the Immigration Act of 1990. During the time that the application for LPR status is pending, a nonimmigrant in valid H-1B or L-1 status may travel on his or her visa rather than obtaining advance parole or requesting other advance permission from USCIS to return to the U.S.
Why would you think a random person on HN is less prone to talking out of their ass than a random person in the CS/engineering/VC world? Than a random person selected from the population of the world?
Or let me put it in plain English: an HN reader is more likely to have a Chinese/Indian friend/colleague on H1B, and if they ever discussed anything outside work, chances are that these topics come up, and they get exposed to more information in the area. If you are actually interested in immigration topics, you'd probably learn a few facts there. At least between people on visa, these topics get discussed all the time.
I understand that not everyone is based in US, they may not be in such a situation, or their conversations never reach these topics. But I would think they'd shut up instead of giving their opinions. That's called basic courtesy.
Where does this notion come from that a host society has any obligation to the foreigner / non pr? As if he was forced to move to America.
Again change the law if you want. Give a heads up. Or dont. Nothing the current government does to home owning H1Bs should be rank ordered anywhere but to the bottom quartile of the greatest injustices being doled out.
Sorry but does that word ring any bells? Is there any nation where natives have to "renew" their native-ness acceptance from the state on a n-yearly basis? This is intellectually dishonest imo.
The problem is the moving of goal posts. For decades, h1b (which is an immigrant visa) was a stable path to immigrate to America. People see that, and there was an implicit promise made there. If the US wants to decide not to continue with this practice that is fully fair. Just make up the rules clearly and give people a heads up. Is that too much to ask?
> in order to keep housing prices lower for residents
And where do they live? They rent. So this jacks up rents for everyone, not just for immigrants, but for any who cannot afford to buy.
Basically everything you say and also imply makes life worse for immigrants and better for wealthy residents. It even makes life worse for poor residents.
I immigrated to Germany from the US in 2013. My employer handled basically everything--even hired a personal assistant to accompany me to the immigration office and help with finding housing, which is pretty competitive in a major German city.
Honestly, immigration for highly skilled tech people is a walk in the park compared to basically everyone else. I used the term privileged because it's accurate--and I daresay it was a tad bit easier being white, having an advanced degree in tech, and even having some German roots. My experience was absolutely not what other people immigrating to Germany face, as they come from all over the place, there are far fewer slots, and there's a host of soft discrimination that even Eastern Europeans face trying to come to Germany. Like everywhere, there's xenophobia and isolationism, mistrust, and blame. Literally the exact same arguments, finger-pointing, suspicion. And that didn't fall on me.
I moved back to the US and handled the backend of that process, which honestly isn't too bad, but it was so much harder to deal with than one would expect--and that was just leaving. I have a bit of German language skills but legal German is a whole other matter.
When I read OP's comment it raised my hackles because it just sounds incredibly tone deaf. Lots of people want to come to America, and it isn't easy, even doing it right. Telling them they need to be prepared to get kicked out at the drop of a hat is a shitty welcome.
If we want to have reasonable controls on immigration and a better policy, I'm all for it, but let's focus on things that would work without screwing people over and treating them like subhuman garbage like this administration has. Limit the number of visas, handle visa overstays better. A ham-fisted, incompetent over-correction that has untrained meatheads shooting US citizens in the streets with no consequence isn't it.
I don't have a lot of patience for anyone carrying water for this administration. Not a thimble-full. If you think you have nuanced, smart-sounding take on immigration but is just victim-blaming, then it deserves to be challenged. I haven't got time for the leading edge of the Overton-window people who just can't confront their deep anti-immigrant biases and provide cover for the tragic and cruel things that are going down as we speak.
I am extremely mindful that the visa that I am using is temporary. Perhaps as a white person in Asia, I'm reminded daily that I am a guest and that I don't accidentally fall into a mindset that misaligns with my visa status.
Its insane the hoops that I have to jump through that American Immigrants don't. For example, this week my landlord cut off my water and ended my lease due to me failing register an overnight guest with the local government. [0]
In the USA, its very expensive to find people that overstay, but in Vietnam b/c the government tracks everyone, they know exactly where you sleep every night.
I know that: "just because you have it bad, doesn't mean we have to have it bad." but the US system is much much more kind than any country I have lived in.
In the USA, we pay you to leave. In Thailand or Vietnam, they can toss you in jail if you can't pay the overstay fine.
The US economy provides a lot more resources for immigrants. In Vietnam, a 'good' salary is $850usd/mo. The lawyer I spoke to about assisting me said her hourly rate is $300/mo...
[0] - there is more to the story, for brevity ill just leave it short.
also h1b is “non immigrant” but it is dual intent. this means it is perfectly legal to seek an immigrant (ie green card) visa. again, you have no idea what youre talking about
I went through the whole immigration process from H1-B to citizenship. In general I agree with your mentality, and I did not consider buying a house until I got my Green Card. But I am not Indian and it took me 6 years.
no one talented will come pay taxes and make your nice tech companies carry the S&P500 and in turn, everyone's retirement funds, if you treat them like hogs
Responding to "it's cruel" with "they're allowed to do it" is kind of sidestepping the core of the complaint.
I highly recommend that you refrain from commenting on any immigration related topics until you can get your facts correct.
> This nonimmigrant classification
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
> The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens
https://global.temple.edu/isss/faculty-staff-and-researchers...
> The doctrine of H-1B dual intent has the following legal bases:
> Unlike many nonimmigrant categories, I.N.A. § 101(a)(15)(H)(i) contains no requirement of proving there is a "residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning;"
> The H category is specifically excluded from the I.N.A. § 214(b)'s presumption of immigrant intent;
You say:
> You're not supposed to rely on it to build a life in the US with no backup plan
when in fact the visa very specifically allows it (as per the "no intention of abandoning"). People arriving in the US on an H1B visa with immigrant intent are absolutely following the law. Is it a good idea? Much more debatable. But they're not acting without precedent nor without specific legal text allowing it.
*argh, why do LLMs have to ruin perfectly good words
No, there's nothing proper about it and it has nothing to do with the merits of the visas in question. There is no law saying that the state department should make travel impractical for people USCIS has already decided can live/work in the US. The reverse is much more likely. They want to push people off of legally obtained visas by causing unreasonable delays.
H1B is temporary but you can have immigrant intent. It can be extended indefinitely with an approved green card application. Your employer is going to pursue that if you're on h1b and they want to keep you around. Many if not most h1b holders are in that category and will get a green card eventually. They are simply waiting for that to be available due to quotas based on their qualifications and birthplace.
Where have you been? There is so much evidence of the deliberate cruelty that it beggars belief you’d say that.
That may be so, but since the person they're responding to is not one of them, I don't see the relevance of their comment.
> According to The Atlantic, while helping Trump prepare for a debate in 2024, Miller got into an argument with an ally on immigration. Trump reportedly said, "Stephen... if you had it your way, everyone would look exactly like you", to which Miller replied "That’s correct". In another incident reported by The New York Times, Trump told a campaign meeting that Miller only wanted 100 million people who looked like him to live in the United States.
To you.
But the existence of a secret police has a lot of upsides if you plan to not leave office.
H1Bs have been used as a path to citizenship for a long time. You can't just change the rules like that without destroying so many lives in a senseless act of cruelty. But the cruelty is the point.
* America was built by immigrants.
* None of the Americans currently alive "built this prosperous nation". They were born into it.
* Welcoming immigrants won't "kick Americans to the curb".
* There are Americans currently alive who are direct descendants of the pioneers and colonists who created this great nation who deserve to prosper from their ancestors' sacrifice(s)
* Resources (housing) and opportunities (jobs) are finite -- if Heritage Americans have to compete with the entire developing world for their birthright, there is a non-zero chance they will be "kicked to the curb" so to speak.
* I utterly reject the concept of "birthright". Birth alone does not entitle one to anything. You want prosperity? Work for it.
* Housing can be built, opportunities are created as the population grows. Immigration is economically beneficial to the country that harbors them.
They are intentionally cruel. Its the point. They aren't even trying to hide it. The posts on official Whitehouse X account are borderline gleeful on topics of deportation and immigration. I'm in dis-belief at times.
They're not trying to change the rate of immigration, they're just looking to score political points.
Yet, I feel my apathy growing. I know logically it is not the person seeking a better life’s fault. But the system is broken and the only winners seem to be Fortune 500 companies.
every foreign-born, myself included, should get ready.
I agree that this is cruel, but I also think that many people coming to the US on an H1-B visa aren't taking to heart the very clear terms of that visa. An H1-B is a /nonimmigrant/ /temporary/ work visa. It does allow you to pursue a green card via the PERM process, however until your receive your PERM status you reside in the US at the mercy of the government only. Buying a house on an H1-B visa, for instance, seems like an exceptionally foolhardy idea.
As someone who once had temporary residency in another country, I did not buy real estate even though I was considering seeking permanent residency, because it was obvious that until I had permanent residency granted that I could be removed at any time and it was perfectly legal, within their rights, and aligned to the terms of my visa.
ICE is run by the same people today as it was under Obama. No one had a problem with Deporter-in-Chief Obama. Any notion that ICE is "some unaccountable secret police" is unsubstantiated nonsense.
not only are they making it hard & unbearable for families of US citizens & PR holders to be together.
while at the same time - discouraging talent to come to the US at a crucial time when talent is at a premium due to A.I development.
last the backwards energy policy of banning renewable energy.
The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965. That worked fine. How can you say with a straight face that someone must be a “foreign agent” to think doing the same thing again will have the same result? Surely the burden is on you to prove the opposite, right?
Either way, your whataboutism isn’t even relevant since those were congressional changes.
This is the executive trying to undermine the law.
Better for whom? People are struggling to afford groceries largely because the dollar is worth 1/165th of its 1913 value and the minimum wage hasn't been raised in 17 years.
I found a job that pays in BTC and I'm super hopeful about that one because my effective salary won't go down by 3-8% every year but instead will appreciate relative to what things are priced in.
(I'm not sure they're right about the overall effect though.)
Even if they don't give me a raise, I'll still have more purchasing power at the end of a year rather than less as the case with USD.
Minorities and women, for a start.
In the area of women’s rights, for example, the driving force was mainline protestants who wanted prohibition, in opposition to recent immigrants: https://www.wpbstv.org/prohibition-and-the-suffrage-movement.... If America had remained an Anglo-Protestant society, it likely would have developed on a similar trajectory as Canada, the UK, and Australia on issues like abortion. Remember, Roe v. Wade had five Nixon and Eisenhower Republicans in the majority. The party shifted positions on the issue with Reagan because it was a way to flip a large number of catholics, who had overwhelmingly voted democrat until then. Evangelical protestants plus religious Catholics was a big enough coalition to offset mainline protestants on the issue.
I looked at that data and decided deliberately, out of rational self interest to be just like them and put my own race first exactly like they do. Equality!
Hard to parse .. ESL ?
That aside, what made up assertive nonsense is this? There are many stories and studies about various non Caucasian groups WhiteMaxxing to make themselves look more Caucasian because <reasons>.
eg: (2013) - Asian women are turning to plastic surgery to look more Caucasian https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/asian-women-are-tur...
Native English speaker. Read more books. Or maybe some Thomas Jefferson. The sentence wasn't that complex.
>That aside, what made up assertive nonsense is this?
It's ANES data. Since words are clearly difficult for you, I included a picture. https://arete.network/attachments/zcbz1owza8jnvaot6u2gmd5o20...
1) not all minorities have their own countries. Examples today would include the Tamagzight people in North Africa and the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey. Other examples could include Christians in the Middle East (Lebannon comes to mind, but I think there are other countries as well), Uighurs in China, or even people living in a place like Iran that is a religious theocracy who want more freedom.
2) in particular, for the case of the US, there has been, since the founding of the country, a large population of African-Americans who don't really have a home country anymore, and don't really have much of a choice but to be American, because, having lived there for hundreds of years at this point, that is the only country they know.
3) I do believe that religious tolerance, and tolerance in general, pays off in the long run. Many early American colonies were founded by people seeking greater religious freedom - Pennsylvannia, founded by a Quaker, Plymouth was founded by Pilgrims who rejected the conventional dogma of the Church of England at the time. More recently, the large number of scientists and engineers fleeing the Nazis in Europe during the early-mid 20th century did have a large impact on American industry, in fact I linked Andrew Grove's wikipedia page in another post on this thread as an example.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
It's not exactly an unbiased selection but it is interesting.
I hope this because it’d be hilarious if they got what they wanted and realized that meant actual open borders with most or all of the Americas.
> The U.S. had a draconian restrictive immigration policy from 1921-1965.
to “well ok not really but it didn’t matter”?
If you give any debit for the decade-long Great Depression, or wartime malaise due to loss of life, emotional toll, and rationing, it’s fair to conclude that half of the period of good times was during exactly that post-war rebuilding (largely powered by US industrial capacity) and concomitant baby boom.
Even odder: what makes you find it plausible that an understanding of the policies of this period and their effect on the economy were part of the decision-making process of this administration - especially when they have actively voiced opinions that fully explain this action? At some point bending backwards to provide some benefit of the doubt is saying more about the speaker than the topic - I am certainly of the opinion that we are well beyond that rubicon. I cannot fathom the reasoning at this point.
It’s strong evidence that immigration restriction isn’t economically destructive. If you think economic circumstances have changed and the result would be different this time, then I think you have the burden to prove it.
They explicitly said that for h1b and l1 aos wouldn’t be affected as they are dual intent visas.
There are employment-based nonimmigrant visas like H1B and L1. Being a nonimmigrant visa means it doesn’t grant you a right to immigrate but some (including H1B and L1) are ‘dual intent’ visas meaning you can apply for an immigrant visa while in the US as a nonimmigrant.
There are employment-based immigrant visas, which have categories like EB1, EB2. Like all immigrant visas these are also known as ‘legal permanent residency’, LPR, or ‘green cards’.
There are also non-employment-based visas that are both nonimmigrant (eg visitor visas, student visas) and immigrant (eg family based green cards)
[1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...
It’s a common pattern to say ‘company X laid off thousands of employees but then applied for thousands of H1B visas’ which very much gives the impression that the company has just fired a few thousand Americans and hired a few thousand foreigners.
What actually happens is: a company has a global workforce of 100000 or so. 50000 of them are in the US. 5000 of them are in the US on H1Bs, 45000 of them are Americans.
Company does a 10% layoff: 4500 Americans, 500 people who are in the us on visas, and 5000 people around the world.
Headline: “Company X lays off 10000”
Then the H1B renewal numbers come out and what do you know company X is applying for 4500 H1Bs, to retain their existing H1B staff who weren’t affected by the layoff.
Headline: “After laying off 10,000 staff company x applies for 4500 H1B visas”
Unstated in such a headline: 5500 of those layoffs were foreigners; the company still employs 40500 Americans.
To bring it back to your point: you cited this article as evidence for the claim that Microsoft laid off ‘thousands of domestic employees’; the article does not say where the thousands of layoffs were and explicitly contains a quote from an MS spokesperson that says “H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S.”
What a brilliant plan. Lets make sure that we restrict the supply of doctors and medical personell, that's sure to improve care!
That would be a market based solution that allows everyone to get the talent they need without driving down American wages.
But the point isn't about helping Americans, it's about being peedormatively against letting in brown people.
And if the employer isn't willing to pay the cost of labor to fill the position, it directly raises the question of whether its "necessary".
It's common for the prevailing wage to be double what that person could earn in their country of origin.
* The expected marginal increase in supply, from immigrants looking for jobs in F
* The expected marginal increase in demand, from immigrants (or non-immigrants identifying an opportunity) starting companies that need experts in F
And how strongly does that delta correlate with average salary in F?
You don't need the carrot of a green card or the stick of deportation to make a software engineer on an H1B accept a depressed wage, because it's not depressed relative to their alternatives.
I think the situation is quite simple. Companies want the best candidates they can get, and the larger the recruitment pool, the better.
If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar, or would they expand their Shanghai or Zurich offices? Are US citizens entitled to work at Google more than others for the sole reason they have a particular citizenship?
For some visa classes, the law says you should hire an American citizen if they can do the job - not if they rank first at whiteboards or fizz-buzz.
> If tomorrow you were to tell (let say) Google they now need to hire only US citizens, would they lower their hiring bar
Does it really matter? To a point, obviously, but a lot of people are good enough for the role without being the world's best. The bar for getting into Google has dropped since its early days, and Google keeps breaking profit records quarter after quarter.
This entire "hire the best or nothing" mindset has led to a dysfunctional hiring process that's a pain to both employers and employees, and is prima facie unachievable.
As an interviewer, I don't rank candidates. I have my set of questions, some candidates solve them, others don't. You can argue that it's the bar to do your job properly. Should politicians tell big tech companies what's the bar for being a successful SWE?
> When it comes to national interest, the argument for "meritocracy" falls apart quickly.
A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers. I'm not sure what would be the tech industry without them.
Someone in your org does - an individual or committee: that's the entire purpose of the hiring pipeline. I've interviewed candidates at multiple companies small and (extremely) big, and interviews always have to give recommendations for ranking purposes (out of 10/100, or (strong-/)yes / maybe / (strong-/)no)
I am not attacking you personally, but the fact remains: in some circumstances hiring "the best" - when they happen to be a non-citizen - can be in contravention with the law depending on the visa class and whether you failed to find an American capable of doing the job.
Don't just take my word for it, big tech companies have lost or settled multiple AG suits because they tried to hide job postings from Americans, e.g. by posting SWE/PM jobs in some podunk, print-only Farmers-Weekly-type magazines.
> A lot of US tech exists because of skilled foreign workers.
I fully agree. Unfortunately being skilled doesn't grant them the right to vote, and as young people keep finding out, those who write (and sign) laws care a lot about what actual voters think and feel. You have to get into office first before you can do the hard labor-policy stuff.
Relevant historical footnotes: The Manhattan Project [0], where an international team of scientists and engineers built the world's first atomic bomb.
Operation Paperclip [1] where Nazi scientists and engineers were hired by the US government to work on the space program, amongst other things.
and of course, there's this Andrew Grove guy, [2] who convinced the tech industry to obsessively focus on KPIs, for better or worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
I went for a job in the US back in the late 80's (Specialist on hardware).
California it was exceptionally strict. While I was more than qualified it took months of the company advertising in the US, and at the end of it all an American was hired.
The second job for another company in California, same deal except they only advertised in the local newspaper (which felt off), and when I finally got an interview they said they couldn't hire me but recommended places in Mexico to jump the border if I ever wanted a job. Noped out of that fast.
Did eventually get to a spend a couple of years in the US in the 90's. It was the same hoops to jump through as the first company. Wasn't easy or fast.
No idea what it is like now. But I had seen the racism of "They are an immigrant, so they were only hired because we can pay them cheap", not as bad as my Indian co-workers though.
Respectfully, this sounds terribly naive.
1/ Employment provides training and experience. If the h1bs are given access to the jobs (training and experience), then is it the American's fault that they are no longer considered "best"?
2/ h1b increases labor supply, not the demand. More supply, means lower wages for everyone.
2/ Demand for software is not static. Good software drives demand for more engineers in many cases, intra or extra-company. There is probably a non zero rate of wage suppression per marginal h1b currently. But an American economy with no h1b employees could feasibly have a much lower average sde salary. It is not an Econ 101 problem.
Again... the skill issue falls apart when you consider teams at tech companies having 1 non-American national origin or caste. I'm very skeptical that, between two foreign candidates with the same U.S. education and experience but different national origins, the fact that the candidate whose nationality matches the current team composition is selected can be explained purely as a matter of skill.
2/ Great, lets train up more American engineers to push the demand higher.
Consider growth of CS graduates in the past 5 years or the number of people that transitioned into tech (like myself).
In 2026, this signal is not as clear: with the uncertainty of tech, increased output with less labor due to AI, and growing competition amongst workers (citizen or otherwise). We may see a shift in studies to other fields.
The moral of the story is that two things can be true at the same time: A lot of H1Bs are rightfully thrilled at the opportunity to work for decent US companies and make decent money to provide for their family. While a lot of American engineers are rightfully wary of the knock-on effects of hiring workers who can be cheaper and more 'malleable' (in a manner of speaking).
Yes, at the lowest wages they can get. Increase supply -> lower prices (wages) -> more corporate profits!
However, there are those who believe that corporate profits are not the highest good. Some of us also care about the earnings of American workers.
Also, "best candidates" alone does not "best company" make. You need people who can work well together—which requires some degree of culture fit. Immigration restrictions help preserve the cultural homogeneity that makes collaboration and social trust possible.
I don't understand this.
At least in tech megacorps, immigrants get paid the same as americans. They're also very good, and if they were to hire only americans, their talent pool would be worse. They're not 'cashing in' on cheaper labor.
… which is less than the Americans would otherwise get paid if there were fewer immigrants. A larger labor pool depresses wages for everybody.
Why do you think so?
Where are all the people good enough to work in Big Tech but they have better options than a job that pays $300k to a new grad? What work are they doing right now which pays them more than Big Tech would?
> > At least in tech megacorps, immigrants get paid the same as americans
So at least in this thread we're talking about those employees.
A megacorp isn't property of the US government. It's a property of this shareholders who very often aren't even US citizens.
It's pretty ironic that Americans who forced globalization to the rest of the world, and largely benefited from it, are now bitten by it.
If Americans want the lucrative jobs, they should better improve their education system and work hard to compete.
No one is saying corporations cannot offshore and move the jobs overseas and hire workers from that country. What we are saying is that it is disingenuous to bring those workers into the country and claim there is a skills shortage; that is a bald faced lie.
It's not disingenuous to say that America's talent pricing has created a genuine shortage in the country. It's simple supply and demand.
A market price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Do you understand this concept? If not, I can use examples or link to better explanation.
Adding highly skilled immigrant workers to the labor pool will marginally effect labor prices (most likely hold them from rising, not decreasing them). So the talent pool would be smaller, maybe worse / maybe better, but definitely higher priced.
Your comment is veering uncomfortably close to bigotry.
No it doesn't. It's not black and white. Of course, some amount of cross-cultural collaboration is not only possible, but desirable. But there are also challenges that need to be managed, and some degree of shared assumptions that need to be instilled. If you don't carefully control and limit immigration to a sustainable level, you get stuff like this: https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...
(BTW: I'm an immigrant, I'm talking about myself here) Yes people from a certain place do tend to be a certain way. They are not all 100% exactly the same, of course, but culture is a real thing that exists*. Assimilating into a different culture is slow and difficult, and not everyone is equally good at it. If you non-selectively import people from cultures A-Y into culture Z faster than culture Z can assimilate them, the result will be conflict between all the different cultures.
* I've always found it strange how many people will insist that they love "diversity" and "different cultures", and then in the same breath deny those things exist at all. Actual cultural diversity requires boundaries, otherwise you just get an ugly broken mish-mash.
Google (and friends) famously have teams composed of a single national origin (or caste...). What does that say about their hiring bar?
Google (and friends) are already expanding the Shanghai and Zurich offices.
That racism isn't only something white people are capable of.
Every global company I've worked at has had extensive ethnic networks and sometimes teams of only one ethnicity.
It's painfully obvious that they're not just taking the most qualified candidates.
I don't either, but my guess is almost none are
Did you write this with a straight face? Companies want candidates that are good enough for the lowest possible price.
Yes, US citizens are more entitled to be employed for US based jobs than importing someone from a different country to do the job. If Google wants an office in Zurich then Swiss candidates there should be more entitled instead of asking Switzerland to import foreign workers to fill the positions.
A company can decide to open an office in India where there is cheap talent as long as they pay the taxes put in place by US/EU governments to prevent offshoring. That's the game.
Maybe try to express yourself a bit more clearly, because once again, I have no clue what your point is now.
Now local talent over immigrants, each country has different policy, and it certainly affects where companies decide to open foreign offices. For instance, would OpenAI open an office in London if all they can hire are British citizens?
When a reasonable human being and a xenophobe or racist argue, the truth is not somewhere in the middle.
You can't hire scab helicopter blade design engineers. Not even from abroad. You have a small pool of those who qualify looking for work (or actively keeping their ears alert for new work), muddied by many people tangentially quasi-qualified who want a job.
After you filter (imprecisely, but as well as you can), the pool is small, and you don't have enough qualified applicants to routinely work one group against another.
Also encompasses the self-destruction of military power, alliances, and beneficial trade.
So if you were essentially having a spasm about how no one understands how perfect the world was when you had all the advantages, I mean, we don't need a fancy theory at that point. It's literally old people spewing up acid about why their kids don't come to Thanksgiving, only we managed to create such a presence in the world media, it's a damned disaster.
Trump first term was make Mexico and Vietnam Great Again as companies moved their manufacturing there. This term its make India Great Again as companies retain and train their tech talent there.
If not, are you willing to equate the current Chinese regime’s quality to that of your perceived quality of the US?
But really, immigrating to any country is quite complex. It's far from "just fill out a form" for pretty much every western country.
Though I may disagree on some for that, as now it seems the you should either mery someone from the admin or buy a gold 1million$ card and your good.
There is no right for non-citizens to come to the US.
I’m an immigrant to the US. I knew the risk that at any time the rules could change and I’ll be headed to my home country.
You literally have the cops in Canada working hand in hand with federal immigration enforcement. No politicians crying about it. No protests by Canadians.
Just the enforcement of common sense law
They are insurgents. These people are Confederates.
imo even H1B didn't change, I wouldn't go all the way to study in a country that kills so many people abroad senselessly.
Americans tend to overestimate how attractive it is to live in the US. It's true you can make a lot of money, more than you would in Europe working for the same companies, but you'd also be willing to live in a very different society, with high inequality and almost no worker rights protections. There was a time I wanted to, but not anymore.
I miss visiting the US though - it has wonderful places and people, but I wouldn't want to live and raise kids there.
Why do you wonder if it's economic instead of the Trump administration's announced policies of stopping immigration, including unconstitutionally removing birthright citizenship?
Every economic analysis I have ever seen shows that there's economic surplus from immigrants entering a local economy; more jobs and more wealth is created, per person, than if those people had not come. In particular I'm thinking of some studies of local economy in Miami when there have been bursts of immigration.
That was study about Cuban immigrants into Miami, a city with large Cuban population and thus existing infrastructure to absorb. I wouldn't draw that study into anything broader.
As someone in Local Politics, the issue generally is, immigration, esp of unskilled kind decimates local budgets since they are generally directly tied to number of people. Here is CBO report on it. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
Now, type of immigration that mostly impacts this study is not type of immigration that is impacted by visa application processing halting but acting like "Yea, this current system is working GREAT!" is false. This is what so annoying about this issue, it's in clear need of change but Congress refuses to do it and Trump doesn't have leadership to get it done.
Costs $2500 AND payment of all student debts.
This place (USA) is literally a fucking company town.
you have a kid like billions of other people in the world, nothing special tbh besides it is "your" kid
you just want a subscription pass to a country, and i think people like that are useless freeloader people who want none of the stakes and all of the benefits
cool you can code and get hired by some company, or maybe you start a company. so what?
Regarding your concerns, I don’t see why it is unreasonable to simply renounce citizenship later or just simply double check your travel itinerary during the late stages of a pregnancy. This seems like at best an unfounded concern.
However being a dual citizen isn't necessarily all upside. Citizenship comes with requirements, particularly in some countries military service is mandatory and so if you're a citizen - even though you are a permanent resident of somewhere else, you must either go do your service or maybe pay a fine depending on the country.
You also get treated differently if things go wrong. Foreigners are entitled in most cases to diplomatic assistance from the representatives of their country. Your country can't necessarily do much for you, but typically you will get that phone call home to let loved ones know what happened, they can find a lawyer who speaks your language (but you'll need to find a way to pay them), if there's some paperwork snafu they might be able to help (often for a fee). It's at least nice, if you're jailed or in hospital after surprise food poisoning or whatever, to hear somebody who speaks your language.
None of this applies to dual citizens. You're "home" from their point of view, so no need to contact your diplomatic representative, maybe you have never been there since the day you were born and can't speak a word of the language but too bad.
Not treated differently. Treated the same.
You are required by law to enter your country of citizenship using that country's passport (this is true for every country). Not doing so can result in fines or jail time. This is precisely to stop idiots from playing the "foreigner" card to try to, for example get out of paying a speeding ticket or parking fines.
The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.
Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
If it were really part of a coherent anti-inflation, pro-housing strategy, then, well, a lot of other policies would be different... (Including signing the ROAD act, not starting trade wars, or driving up the price of oil)
The change would require 2/3 of all states to approve a constitutional amendment. It won't ever pass. Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
My family came here in the early 1700s and fought in the revolution. It would be a disgrace for me to do anything other than support immigrants.
"my ancestors came here as immigrants in search of a better life 300 years ago. I honor that by helping those doing the same today."
Being American, especially back in 1776 (250 years ago!), was not about ethnicity, but about an ideal - a group of men on the North American continent decided that " that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." [0], and then literally put their lives on the line to protect that ideal.
America is, and has always been, a nation of immigrants. What unites it are the common values - in theory, the idea that everyone there has the right to live free and pursue their happiness, as opposed to the idea that everyone should serve the king because that is the will of God, which was the dominant idea in Europe in the 1700s.
With that view, I can see that supporting people who come to the US so they can be free as continuing what the original poster's ancestors started 300 years ago.
[0] https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
Have you gone through and read the quotes from the well known figures that contradict the story? There are a lot.
The standard explanation is that they had some weepy romantic morality deep at heart which they tragically were unable to live in their flawed time.
Sure, that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that they did not anticipate people in the future so drastically taking what they said out of context, and so they weren’t sufficiently precise as to represent themselves in a way that made it through to today’s context with its meaning intact.
To me, the latter just seems like it probably happens all the time in history and so why not here?
And, to be clear, in this case what they would have meant in modern context is - all men are created equal does not refer to literally all humans on earth, it means that the born aristocrats are no better than anyone else and they shouldn’t get special privileges for it. That’s it. The duke’s son is no more deserving of government enforced privilege than the commoner’s son, because the commoner’s son may be more capable. That’s it. Not that all the races of the earth are the same. They just didn’t think that, men in the 1700s did not think that way. People in 1910 didn’t even think that way! The founders didn’t think they had to qualify “men”, they were just referring to the “men” of their group, one “man” of their group is not born higher than another “man” of their group, and this aligns with what we now know about population genetics, which is why it actually works better in some ways (I.e. if take a high performer, his sons are more likely to be high performers than the population, but you can only extend that so far, it doesn’t reliably persist past a couple generations and in some cases you get unlucky right away in the first generation).
And I haven’t seen this framing refuted, despite it being so, so much less of a just so story than the mainstream framing, and being successfully non-contradictory with the other extremely racist by today’s standards views and actions of the founders and their contemporaries, unlike the mainstream framing.
One big example of contradictory views that is not from the founding fathers era but is a good starting point. Did you know that Lincoln wanted to send them back? He didn’t want to free them and have them later integrate into our society. He wanted them gone, relocated, good luck see you later. He didn’t think that Africans and Europeans could live together, he didn’t think it could possibly work because they are too different by nature. But oddly that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the school curriculum. Lincoln is a hero, the man who freed the slaves. Well of course he was flawed, etc, but he had a good heart and he worked towards the good. Except what is good is defined by the current moral regime, which was entirely different from the one at that time. Lincoln would probably be shocked and appalled at how he is portrayed today. If he could only see what has become of New York City or Philadelphia, we could power the nation with his grave-spinning, which would surely be hypersonic in its rotational velocity.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't feed poor black people, you just can't pat yourself on the back for honoring your ancestor at the same time.
I don't really understand the disagreement. If you are performing an act which, if your ancestor were somehow magically in the room with you, they would respond to with horror and disgust, then you aren't honoring them. Performing your own present morality does not necessarily honor your ancestors, if they had a different morality.
And we can amend constitutional rights. It most definitely will happen in our lifetimes.
> Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
And?
You think the world in 2026 is exactly the same as in 1776?
What about slavery? Good idea in 1776 therefore good idea in 2026?
This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.
If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.
More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.
I have seen a lot of freakouts about birth tourism since the recent SCOTUS ruling and I haven’t seen anyone give even the most cursory overview of the actual scale of the supposed problem. It’s purely an emotional reaction.
Or if they do, surely there are ways wealthy "real Americans" could hide their money just as easily and defraud welfare, so this isn't really a problem specific to birth tourism.
It appears your argument is that foreigners are greedy, lazy, fraudulent, exploitative, and shameless, but Real Americans never stoop that low. Again, do you have statistics on this, or is just kind of a feeling?
If your answer is dual citizenship giving them access to banks abroad, a wealthy American can buy another citizenship.
There is nothing to stop them from just not owning a mortgage or house, since that is the thing you say will catch them.
very consistent correlations between migrants being net positive economic providers, more law abiding then native citizens, and just straight up regurgitating racist myths
mass deportations won’t solve anything economic when it’s the same admin hamstringing prices and rates with tariffs, war, and defacto support of the oligopoly
i really wish basement dwellers like you though of something original now and then
Not to mention how unsustainable it is anyways, what happens a few years down the line when the immigrants stop having kids? There isn't an infinite ocean of people you can import on a whim, and definitely not forever.
So the immigrants end up with the same birth rate and then we have to bring in more immigrants. So there would have to be a constant source of excess people somewhere else for this to be sustainable. So it gets to a point where I wonder if this is really the plan.
You're assuming the birthrate can be "fixed". Japan has an even worse demographic problem. They've tried "fixing" it and nothing much works. Similar for South Korea. Japan would certainly benefit from opening up to more immigration. Countries that can attract more immigration are going to benefit economically as the birthrates continue to decline globally. Why not be attractive to immigrants instead of wanting to repel them?
It worked with Romania in the 1960s and 1970s. Mind you, it caused a bunch of other problems to crop up, but Romania did solve their low birth rate problem.
Both @account42 and myself agree this isn’t a particularly good solution, and I’m not worried about the fertility collapse myself: It is an issue which will last for only one generation.
I think he’s implying he has some pretty, shall we say, interesting views on the matter. As someone who has been in an interracial marriage and multiple interracial relationships, I probably don’t agree with those particular views.
It would be nice to know what he’s advocating for, but he’s gotten pretty mum after I pointed out it could be done, but only with Orwellian levels of suppression.
Primarily, because : https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/
It worked: The birth rate exceeded the rate of deaths until Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989. There was some level of circumvention in the 1970s and 1980s, but birth rates continued to outpace death rates up until the day Ceausescu was overthrown and Decree 770 was made null and void. (If you have a different definition of “work” than “it increased fertility”, please let me know what that definition is)
Mind you, as I said before, there were a lot of undesirable, shall we say, side effects because of this decree, but it did solve the fertility problem.
{Snark tag: Obviously, I do not endorse doing something as Orwellian as having a government like the Romania of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unwanted kids caused a huge amount of intergenerational trauma. To get back to the issue of fertility collapse, fertility collapse is an issue which will last only one generation: The people who have kids will have worldviews which encourage having more children}
It’s probably a bad prediction of the future, but having an exaggerated dystopian view of the future is a classic trick used in golden age science fiction (e.g. Decision at Doona from 1969 had a grossly overpopulated Earth) so one I was able to accept while reading the story.
It definitely has a bias; it doesn’t mention the stories of women regretting abortions at all, except (minor spoiler) mentioning that Asenath Smith didn’t want an abortion. As someone who has had multiple women confide their abortion stories to me, it’s quite common for women to deeply regret having them. I understand why a story as political as this one doesn’t want to get in to the nuance of the trauma abortion can cause, because it’s written in the same year Roe vs. Wade was overturn, so it’s a story of how much women need access to pregnancy tests and to abortion. [1]
[1] I personally believe in the right to an abortion, for the simple reason that, when a woman has a miscarriage or a baby which just isn’t viable, the medical treatment she gets should be a decision doctors make, not a decision people with guns and cages make.
It did not change the overall trend because radical anti-abortion measures like that do not change people's desire to have kids.
For people in the peanut gallery, here is the chart we’re looking at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Birth-death_RO.svg Unfortunately, the data for this chart is not sourced.
As one can see, births were at or above pre-decree levels after Decree 770 was passed, and only went below pre-decree levels when the decree was dismantled in 1989. The 1970s downward slope is much less steep than the 1960s pre-decree downward slope. In the 1980s, there was no downward slope whatsoever. Fertility stayed at roughly pre-decree levels before plummeting once the decree was ended. At no point while Decree 770 was in effect did we have a birthrate that “very clearly returned to it's [sic] previous trajectory”.
Now, let’s go back to what I was replying to when I brought up Decree 770. “Our birthrate has been below replacement” said one poster, and in a reply “You're assuming the birthrate can be "fixed"”. Decree 770 fixed the issue I was replying to: Birthrate being below replacement. Pre-decree, Romania’s birthrate was on a downward path, and would had been below death rates by the early 1970s. Because of the decree, the birth rate stayed above replacement rates until it was repealed in 1989.
Decree 770 increased fertility. It kept fertility above death rates. I have already posted elsewhere why Decree 770 was a very bad idea.
This will be my final reply to @mrguyorama. They do not come off as someone willing to admit when they are wrong about something.
https://decreechronicles.com/guardians-of-the-decree-the-hid...
I mention fertility rates remained constant in the 1980s. Now I know why fertility rates didn’t go down back in that era.
In the year 1984, Romania took a page from Orwell’s 1984: All medical units were put under surveillance to minimize the number of illegal abortions. There was now a secret “Thought Police” in 1984 monitoring all doctors and nurses to make sure no abortions slipped through the cracks. The number of abortion related convictions in 1986 doubled compared to 1985. Just like 1984, not only did a hidden thought police find these people doing illegal abortions, but people would report on their neighbors.
Romania was able to stop the 1970s fertility decline (which, again, was a good deal less steep than the fertility decline when abortions were legal) in the 1980s by going full Orwell and clamping down the screws.
https://archive.ph/AEfUQ - https://x.com/Schtal2/status/2069217060803035485
As an aside, the notion that 80% of the women sleep with 20% of the men is a complete fabrication:
Many immigrants come to America to work and start businesses. That creates jobs. Even the day-laborers buy food, clothing, tools. If we cracked down on businesses that used illegally immigrated workers, that would be a much more targeted way to fight wage suppression.
How could inflation come from illegal immigration? Are the immigrants bringing in crazy amounts of money? Does the existence of more workers competing for an open position drive up the going wage?
If we want to reduce the price of housing, we need to build more houses. That's the key. The trouble is how to tackle the financial and regulatory hurdles that discourage building houses. Clamping down on immigration from poorer countries hurts the construction industry, which employs a lot of immigrants.
>Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
If we cared about people with foreign allegiances participating in our politics, we'd ban dual citizenship. If we cared enough about welfare costs to do unpopular things, we'd ban smoking and high-sugar foods. That would save a lot more in welfare costs, and our citizens would be healthier. On my list of priorities for reducing welfare costs, taking money from poor people who don't actually qualify ranks low. It's a mistake or crime that feeds people and gets money circulating in local economies. Not efficient, but not world-ending and probably not common. If you really want to find people receiving benefits despite not actually qualifying, look for senior citizens hiding their wealth as cash in their house.
>I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
Trump stated immigrants poison the blood of our nation. I'm going to accept that as his actual belief and reasoning.
But since you asked, here you go: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/microsoft-...
> Recently[1] Microsoft laid off several thousand domestic employees while simultaneously hiring a couple thousand employer-sponsored-Visa workers. > > [1]https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-2026-xbox-h1b-vis...
Occam's razor. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Nativism is possibly the only stable and coherent political ideology this admin holds. Everything else is negotiable, but not this one.
I'll concede that this statistic is cold comfort if you fall into that 5% category, but the point is that work visa almost always means non-immigrant.
Employment based green cards are mostly granted inside the U.S. via adjustment of status without state dept involvement.
Obviously if you do not renew the green card itself, you are going to face practical issues, because you have no easy way to prove your permanent resident status. So things like employment verification because of new employment and entering the country from abroad will become quite a bit more difficult.
They're working on that. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doj-deploys-tactic-to-stri...
Simply applying for renewal or naturalization extends the card as well.
There is no eventually about it. This administration has a quota for revoking naturalized citizens' status set hugely higher than the historical level of cases. Given the quota they will just ignore justice and revoke the status of those least able to defend themselves, like they have with other immigrants.
Supreme Court doesn’t get to throw out an amendment because it’s old.
As a non-american, I would have enjoyed the precedent that the logical conclusion had to be that I would not be subject to the laws of the US, when visiting.
The Thomas interpretation must logically have given diplomatic immunity to anyone on an ESTA too.
(I'm not sure where I stand on it but I can at least see an argument for revisiting the question)
If what you say is false, why not end birthright citizenship?
Also frankly it's a bit silly when you are born to two residents of a country but don't become a citizen. Why does it matter what passports they hold if they live and work in america like american citizens? People being born on the same soil being given second class citizen treatment is pretty despicable imo.
Far from agreeing with the Trump administration; his view would effectively end birth tourism but preserve birthright citizenship (and maybe even stronger) for the children of non-citizens, legal or otherwise, who are domiciled in the US.
As for it being cut and dry, do you earnestly believe that "and subject to its jurisdiction" is cut and dry? You might have your view, you might have some historical receipts for it, others have other views, and historical receipts, and others rely on common law readings. There's no single unambiguous interpretation of this phrase. Thomas's dissent is well reasoned and has ample historical antecedents and if adopted would have been the best possible interpretation.
Vivek Wadhwa, one of the staunchest supporters of H1B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489558) is now recommending to end it: https://x.com/wadhwa/status/2090958079726927873
> These visas played a very important role in making America the world leader in technology and innovation.
Citation needed -- it's as if we didn't have major technological advancements and a burgeoning tech industry in the valley before 1990 when the H1-B was signed into law and companies rushed to force Americans to train their (unbeknownst to them) replacements.
> But the system became badly corrupted. Unethical body shops learned to game it.
Who corrupted it? Certainly Vivek and his compatriots have some culpability here. I'm sure there are other examples but Cognizant was the most egregious where they were found liable in discriminating against non-Indians when deciding who to put on the bench and who to ultimately terminate.
As usual, it started with Americans screwing over other Americans while getting you to blame the brown dude. Gosh, darn!
Labor is no different than goods/services. Why should the world allow coca-cola, netflix, mcdonalds and hollywood access to their markets while their local equivalents suffer? Competition? Fuck that. Nobody wants their 401k to appreciate as US companies grow their customer base in overseas markets. Stupid, silly capitalism. FUck that, lets go all in, super mega great depression style.
It's a real shame that just when we have the tech and infrastructure to allow people to travel anywhere in the world within a day, for a single person to be able to explore the entirety of this awesome planet for the first time in human history,
that the worst among us have to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.
Travel should be codified as a human right.
If someone can support themselves and doesn't harm anybody, what ethical justification does anybody have for denying a person from living where they want?
a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.
that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
So because not everyone can afford to travel freely we shouldn't let anyone do that?
"Borders" as they are treated today began barely 200 years ago, and only started being enforced so strictly since WW1 and then even worse after WW2.
For the vast >95% of human history, if you could walk to somewhere and survive there, you could live there.
The real ironic shit is that most of the travel and immigration restrictions of today are instituted by the descendants of people that invaded and occupied the lands of other people :')
For 95% of human history we were hunter gatherers living in extremely sparsely populated areas.
How do you think they got there?
The natives of the Americas, Australia, and the many nations previously colonized by European countries, know that better than any descendants of the colonizers.
Did they get to have any say?
Taking the lands of native peoples → outright massacring them in most cases → treating the original natives as second-class citizens with restricted rights → starting the worst wars in human history → preventing other people from traveling and immigrating under the excuse of "pReSeRvInG cUlTuRe" or jobs
Fish Fails to Detect Water
The easiest way to see it is look at Japanese portrayals (outsider perspective). Cowboys, horses, guns, pride in our military and our free speech, fireworks and BBQs.
Just because you look down on the culture doesn't mean there isn't one.
NYC and Los Angeles are the biggest cultural exporting centers in the US and have none of that.
If you want to experience American culture I recommend https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello
America doesn't have one culture. It has 500 cultures. But the ones that other cultures notice are the ones I listed. Cities literally stink.
I'm guessing I didn't explain my self clearly when I mentioned that people use the red neck stereo type to make fun of us? I wrote that in an unclear way?
It's common for people to not recognize that their commenting seems more escalatory when read by others than it does when it's being formulated in their mind, which is why we need to keep reminding people and asking people to make a conscious effort.
If you want more religious conservatism and traditional values, Americans are naturally moving away from that. Americans aren’t creating a whole lot of cowboy movies. China is innovating in fireworks.
David brooks has specifically called out this nihilism of the modern right. I think people attributing intention to policies like this are sadly externalizing their own values into an administration that doesn’t have them.
Because I think nobody is unified in this stuff. The people representing the culture you purport to imply a desire to preserve I don’t think agree with you, and certainly not with each other.
This is like Cracker Barrel all over again where most of the liberals I know loved Cracker Barrel and all the conservatives complaining about it almost to a one never went!
The sad truth is there is some sense things might be better if you were right.
Then starting ~2016 Trump and his DoJ made it borderline impossible for Chinese nationals to get visas, specifically targeting research universities. Since then new Chinese skilled immigration has slowed down to a trickle, and there has been a massive "brain gain" of existing talent in China's favor.
The result - China now has a booming tech industry, Chinese universities have overlapped Amercian ones in research output, China is a very close 2nd in the AI race. And as skilled immigrants continue to be driven out of the US China in particular will enjoy the benefits.
(Musk started X.com while on a student visa and didn't get around to securing a work visa until many years later. This rule violation technically renders his U.S. citizenship void under Trump-era immigration rules.)
Wanting to tie economic performance to public support for immigration is risky gamble.
So now, we're just throwing that all away and becoming a merely average country with an average amount of smart and ambitious people. Throwing away our key advantage for literally no benefit.
Also, let's not be as childish as assuming that policies that were good 100+ years ago for a country should be good ad vitam eternam. Countries change, their interests change, therefore their policies should change accordingly.
From CBP's own website[1], emphasis is mine:
An immigrant visa (IV) is issued to a foreign national wishing to live permanently in the United States.
A nonimmigrant visa (NIV) is issued to a foreign national with permanent residence outside the United States but wishes to be in the United States on a temporary basis for tourism, medical treatment, *business, temporary work, or study*, as examples. Note: There are more than 20 different categories of nonimmigrant visa classifications.
Tourist visas are nonimmigrant visas. So are H1B visas.
Was the comment edited?
"The State Department and Department of Homeland Security are reviewing all B-1 business and B-2 tourist visas, he said."
You are making a bold claim that US is being racist here. US is THE melting pot, and no other country in the world has accepted all races living together like this.
One thing that changed my viewpoint was this book. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, and Angus Deaton.
In it, they make a point that, almost all US economists agree that immigration, both legal and Illegal Immigration, is not the cause for American working middle class failure. It is lack of education, and capitalistic system wherein rich steal the money from the poor, which is like a reverse robinhood.
Hacker news crowd can easily verify this by spot-checking. But still we fail for the false narrative and divisive exploits of immigration topic, which is certainly not aimed to solve the problem of American well-being at hand. Truth to be hold, politicians know this too.
Decades of loose policy around financial regulation and ZIRP made living unaffordable for most western citizens but politicians rediscovered the eternal scapegoat in the shape of immigrants. This way they don't have to answer for their failures. They just made one up.
It's tragic how gullible the public is. This scam worked in Britain, USA and is likely going to work in Germany, Poland etc if the polls are to be believed.
a significant proportion of the HN crowd DGAF because they see themselves as current/future founders whose goal is ultimately to scale/enshittify/retire early, which typically requires the reverse robinhooding.
Do you think that they supporting it because they think Americans should have a say in their policies via a democratic process or that anyone in support of this has fallen for a "false narrative"?
There needs to be a viable, reasonable, and legible path to residency and citizenship for highly skilled immigrants, while at the same time reforms on the current overly complex system which has failed to properly address challenges with folks who seek economic asylum or who violate immigration laws. Pausing these applications doesn't seem to serve either end, it seems like a stupid decision that is self-harming and unnecessarily cruel and capricious.
Actually not. Harmful for US. US gains for more from the skilled immigrants (at their cost).
There’s a lot of discussion about whether this is cruel or justified or legal—whatever. This sucks for people who get caught up in our immigration fight and ultimately it’s bad for all of us because it makes the US a less attractive place for immigrants.
However, we are here (1) because US citizens voted for more scrutiny of the immigration process to make sure people immigrating are successfully landing in the US and not taking advantage of the systems we have in place. And (2) because a vocal minority is unwilling to enforce any of our existing immigration laws and is actively sabotaging the administration’s attempts to do so. Nobody has clean hands.
In the US we do not approve visas for immigrants who we suspect will become dependent on our welfare system. This isn’t some new rule Trump made up to get rid of immigrants because he’s cruel, it’s existed for over a century. Fun fact: the current statutory language Rubio used in January to limit immigration from 75 countries comes from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a Democrat sponsored bill.
The legal challenge honestly feels like a technicality which is probably why the state department responded as they did. A judge said we can’t limit the ban by country based on public-charge language, arguing that the public-charge consideration must be evaluated independent of nationality or in other words, it can’t be used to institute a country specific ban. So the state department removed the country specific ban and said fine all immigration is paused until we can properly train people to evaluate public-charge since the current training is ineffective.
The state department tried the surgical path, judicial activism, whether technically correct or not, vacated the surgical path. So the state department escalated with a tactic that more literally adheres to the judges interpretation but also has more collateral damage.
This bickering is dumb and shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
This bill was originally vetoed by Truman, but overridden by both house and senate by a 2/3 vote. However, in the house vote, democrats were split about 50/50, and republicans overwhelmingly approved. (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/82-1952/h165)
Note that this is pre southern strategy and post new deal era. There was a conservative coalition of both democrats and republicans against the new deal. The majority of the Democratic Yea votes came from southern states where the conservative coalition dominated.
Saying that it was a Democrat sponsored bill is missing some important nuances.
In my country, we do have a policy of integrating people quite early on if they come from a fragile situation and for other people if they have jobs and can sustain themselves it is a bonus as they contribute with taxes and will have basically no benefits like retirement.
I am not making any points here, I am trying to understand why people think this is a priority and/or problem.
Following World War II, we took in European immigrants who had lost everything. More recently, we have welcomed individuals from countries in the Middle East and South America.
Within a few days, you would receive your citizenship and be integrated into the system. I believe there are some initial advantages, but based on what I've heard, the expectation is that you'll need to become self-sufficient very quickly because the financial support diminishes rapidly.
Despite not having a community center or NGOs for that, the overall community would find out and help.
You can find out where I am by searching for the single country in the world that continues to uphold all post-World War II human rights.
My position to this policy changed when I encountered a refugee who had successfully integrated into the community.
He has lost his wife and two daughters and his only remaining daughter was all he had when he got here.
He rebuilt his life working his a* out to be able to provide to his daughter. We never know what people are going through.
The US has this same expectation. It’s the long and short of what this reaction of pausing visas is about: bickering over how to make sure the expectation is being met during visa screening.
I don’t see anybody anywhere even remotely implying that hard working immigrants shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt and be allowed to make their own way in the US. I do see people rightly upset that when given the benefit of the doubt a Somali fraud ring setup to extract money from the welfare programs we’ve set up to provide children with education and generally people with healthcare runs rampant. Stopping that indeed involves more “public-charge” scrutiny during the visa process.
Can you tell me more about this Somali thing? I confess I googled and I saw a couple of cases, but maybe because I don't understand the benefits system i am not quite getting it.
Do you mean that they send people to live on benefit claims? Do they do that remotely? Are the benefits that good that they can live from it and still sustain a criminal organization? Are not the benefits not conditioned getting a job or something?
Comparatively, the US is extremely good at 'integrating' immigrants for whatever reason they come (asylum, work, family reunification, etc). There are a lot of factors, but I'd say the biggest one is that the "American" identity is one of immigration and is generally more flexible than say, the Dutch or Norwegian identity. I'd also say the general lack of a safety net compared to more socialist countries mean you pretty much have to hit the ground running and work, which usually means learning English quickly and all of the social components that come with work.
The idea that there is an urgent need to protect the US from a significant number of people abusing the system who come via legal immigration (as is the case in this context) is, to me, pretty laughable. I would assume that any abuse in the system or strategic priority shifts (which I may or may not agree with) could easily be picked up through a more normal policy/procedure/training structure within the state department.
There doesn't appear to be a specific, recent event where a significant number of people were discovered to have gotten through some state department filter or loophole that needs to be IMMEDIATELY closed in the context of some large risk to the US.
I am not being pedantic. I think I lack lots of context here.
I don't see any loopholes. There are immigration policies that guide state department employees through a process of deciding who gets a visa. Let's say, theoretically, that a particular visa was meant for one scenario... let's say allowing athletes to live and train in the US with no additional checks or limits based on country of origin. And then let's say that all the sudden this summer we saw the number of people receiving that visa go from 10k / year to 100k in a month.
That would be a scenario where you could say holy cow we need to put a pause on the visa application process because when we created this visa program or wrote the screening criteria we did not envision this at all. In this scenario you could, of course, just put a pause on this particular type of visa while you revisit the intent and criteria.
I was saying that I don't see any evidence for that at all. So any desire by the administration to change what kind of visas are given out, or what the criteria or thresholds should be for those visas, should be adjusted in the normal way of working and not via some huge pause on all visas.
Even before that, the US only attracts people who are at least willing to work.
I think depending where in Europe is the same but you still have some other things that you pay as taxes.
On some other countries you pay for everything and sometimes you have it sometimes not.
It makes me feel that the levels of accessibility to the thing are about the same but they way the uncertainties of life can hit you are different.
There are the negative effects as well. There is all the incentives in the US for health to cost more or for people to do deals with pharmaceuticals or similar businesses.
In other countries a more general public policy is required to make things standardized.
About people only willing to work. I am 100% sure there people who are not willing to, but in the UK and France and Italy, the illegal immigrants cannot work, literally. They are not allowed. So what can they do?
Most of them needs to use fake accounts to get a gig job which certainly is more exploratory than a anything.
I was told that Brazil has a policy to integrate immigrants more similar to what Spain is doing now. The idea is that as soon as you get the safety of not being kicked out, which seems to be quite fast, you need to start working. Brazil does not have as many public funds available other countries in Europe, but to be honest, some of them have all the incentives for locals to not work as well.
Not saying it is right or wrong. In the UK if you go to a uni and start earning after a certain threshold, you need to start paying back what you spend, but now as the economy is bad it is likely to not have a related job that allows you to pay it back and live a normal life, so you might be better living on benefits because the other option is much worse. I think it is time for UK to reshape how to pay these bills and the thresholds so people can start working.(And maybe not offering support for random stuff too)
The figureheads (Trump and others) are the least qualified populists imaginable, who have no business governing anything. They have zero ambition solving big problems, and have rather managed to get the US bogged down in a war with Iran, trade wars, and what have you. Trump is more concerned with the ballroom and the Kennedy center, than fixing anything of substance.
But working in the background, you have extremely goal oriented people trying to implement changes outlined in Project 2025.
So there are essentially two admins working in parallel.
On top of that, conservative media is working like a propaganda machine to filter what the MAGA base sees. Unpopular or head scratching news never make it to prime time, while the culture war nonsense is aired 24/7.
And frankly, Trump is not concerned what non-MAGA, or left leaning voters see. The current admin is concerned with convincing their base to keep voting for them, while doing everything in their power to make it harder or more chaotic for centrist and left leaning voters to vote.
Stopping immigration is a priority yes. A job would contribute equal taxes if a current permanent resident was doing it. Unemployment is an issue, there is no need for more immigration.
I won't dox myself. If I ever need to visit US there is always a chance for your paramilitary police to take my phone and find anything and make an excuse. I am not here to defend something is better, I am saying it is different. Note that I never said I agree with the policy, I am saying it exists and why.
From your comment you see people as tools for work supplementation. Immigrants are also a peace tool. They help establishing short and long term associations with other countries and spread cultures both ways. There are reasons to think this is the main reason why immigrants are being attacked. I don't know if it is true but it could make sense.
Yes immigrants are a tool. Immigration is a tool for countries to fulfill their interests. If a country needs carpenter, targeted immigration is a way to get carpenters while internal policies kick in to compensate for the gap (e.g. promote the specific trade).
Spreading culture is stupid. Successful countries nowadays are the most culturally/racially homogenous. The whole "diversity is a strength" is just a religious mantra that has been disproven by empirical data for decades now.
So far he has driven away allies, put huge tariff on our most loyal allies. Driven away manufacturing by tariff policies. Driven away immigrants and academics. Pushed a last century oil based economy. Shown us how our exquisite weapon tech will fail (this might actually be good in the long run). Along with crippling our cybersecurity and state departments.
But yeah, as we saw with covid, cutting rates and qe now means markets surge now and $15 burritos in three years.
No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking
No Javascript or cookies
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curl -A "" -Haccept: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA2aXEw9 \
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firefox ./1.htmI am one such "gambler" in this process, and it's happening to me too. I don't like the turn of events, but I also do not feel robbed.
Playing victim bestows no benefit.
Or is this in retaliation for a federal judge ruling 6 days ago that Trump's ban on immigration from 75 countries was unlawful?
* indefinitely pauses legal immigration *
They like to complain that "big government inefficient and bad" while actively making it inefficient and bad. They are fulfilling their own prophecies.
Similar to immigration I'm sure. If all immigration is illegal then it's all bad!
Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants. That's the case in the UK, by the way, where the vast majority of immigrants are legal and it's the reason for the growing anti-immigrant attitude of the natives.
People who are anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration also have requirements like:
- there should be a fixed number of legal immigrants
- they should be well vetted (this may be lacking in the US and UK)
- legal immigration should be points based
- quotas for legal immigrants should be increased contingent on the number of illegal immigrants which are expelled
- there should be checks to verify that visas are not abused (the way H1Bs are abused in the US with under qualified immigrants)
- asylum should be abolished because it's abused. It can be replaced by paying poorer countries to permanently host asylees.
> Being anti-illegal immigration and pro-legal immigration doesn't mean you want to flood the country with legal immigrants.
If only there were something between 0 and unrestricted immigration, some sort of program where people apply for permission and the government issues approvals for individuals to enter its borders after meeting legal criteria.
Nobody is banning legal immigration. It's being restricted. The headline itself says "pauses". Do you think no legal immigrant will be let into the US until 2028?
> some sort of program where people apply for permission
Yes, and if that program is being abused (just ask people here on HN about H1Bs to see how they feel), then you pause it until you figure out how to solve it.
In 2024, I didn't think we'd be murdering protesters in the streets or kidnapping heads of state or inciting global tariff wars paid for by US citizens or watching the president take billions of dollars of bribes using cryptocurrency.
Why do you think thos government is responding to something in a good faith attempt at improving a system?
No it has been banned. There is no legal way to do it. Even if it is a temporary ban, it is a ban. If you support indefinitely pausing legal immigration, you are anti-legal immigration.
> Yes, and if that program is being abused (just ask people here on HN about H1Bs to see how they feel), then you pause it until you figure out how to solve it.
That is an absurd strategy. Would you "indefinitely pause" schooling children until you can figure out a way to solve the problem of students cheating on tests? Would you "indefinitely pause" funding police forces until you can figure out how to prevent police abuses? Would you "indefinitely pause" money transfers until you can figure out how to solve tax fraud? Pausing any of these would create massive problems while doing nothing to speed up improvements, and it doesn't help that "solving" those problems may not even be possible. We can immediately switch to a better system after someone figures out that better system; until then we make do with what we have.
So of course that is the tiniest small print of every promise any politician makes, such that once it is a promise broken it is someone else's fault and not theirs.
Therefore their entire job is to lie.
You as a citizen have a choice to tolerate that or leave the country.
So like the DMV then?
So you have a lot of really pissed off young people, on both the left and the right, looking to politicians for a solution. On the left it's essentially socialism and in the worst cases communism and on the right it's American job protectionism and the removal of racist anti-white policies from American institutions... and a whole lot of deportations.
Young Americans do not want to compete with the entire world for jobs and houses and SBA loans, so you're going to see the right push very hard to look like they are appeasing them, when in reality they will not do anything because the corporate oligarchy that finance our politicians and the stock market that feed their primary boomer constituents. On both the left and right, all the boomers want is for the stock market to rise and their home value to rise and they don't care if it disenfranchises a generation of Americans... but it will definitely create a millennial political machine that will be pushed to the extremes of Communism and Nationalism when that generation rises to power... so we will see how it all plays out.
We were promised socialized medicine, we got socialized insurance oligarchy instead. I'll never forgive Obama and especially Rahm Emmanuel, his chief of staff, for that.
Right wing oligarchs want infinite immigration because they get a larger labor pool and lower wages. Right wing normies want less immigration because they don't want to compete with the entire world for a job and don't want to become a minority in their own country.
Spend some time on X and you can see the two parts of the right wing attack each other over this issue.
Yet in the next thread over, people are crucifying DHH for saying the same thing, except they are spinning it as "denying their right to exist"... somehow.
Seems like this policy is a long time coming? Why do we need workers?
The most important thing to note is this for immigrant visas ie green cards. As yet, nonimmigrant visas such as visitor, student and employment visas are unaffected. That may change. It's also unclear if K1 (fiance) visas are affected because they're technically nonimmigrant but they'll probably be treated as immigrant visas.
This has the most effect on family-based green cards. The most common type is a marriage-based green card but there are also green cards for parents, children and even siblings of primarily US citizens but also lawful permanent residents ("LPRs").
When a US citizen or LPR marries a non-resident and they wish to live in the US, you broadly have three routes to make this happen:
1. If they're within the US, you can do an adjustment of status ("AoS"). This is where you file an I130 and an I485. Generally you do this concurrently. If you're an LPR and not a citzen then you might not because you may need to wait for a visa to become available. There can be other reasons depending on the foreign spouse's immigration history, whether they're in removal proceedings and what other immigration benefits they've applied for;
The I130 is filed by the sponsor (ie the citizen or LPR) and it basically shows that you both are free to marry and the marriage is legal. If neither of you have been married before, this is relatively straightforward. It can be difficult otherwise but an I130 is generally considered routine;
The I485 is filed by the immigrant to adjust status. It can be based on an approved I130 or filed concurrently (within the US only). This is where USCIS will determine if they believe the marriage is bona fide, meaning there's no fraud taking place. This includes the submission of marriage evidence (eg joint bank accounts, bills in both of your names, a lease or deed in both of your names, photos, proof of the relationship and so on). USCIS makes a holistic determination based on the totality of your case and prior immigration history. For various reasons, you may have a bar on adjusting and may need a waiver;
2. If the foreign spouse is outside the US, you will generally need to do what's called consular processing. You file the I130 as per normal and once it's approved you apply with the consulate. Depending on the country it may take over a year to get an appointment and the embassy and/or USCIS may end up sitting on the case. This whole process can take years. If granted, you are granted a visa to enter the US. Upon entry, you get a green card; or
3. The so-called fiance visa (K1). In this case you are unamrried and the foreign fiance is outside the US. It's similar to consular processing. If granted, you get a visa stamp and can enter the US. You need to marry within 90 days of entry and then you apply for adjustment of status within the US.
So, what has this administration done to block legal immigration? A ton, actually:
1. They've placed various bans on the issuance of visas to citizens of certain countries. There are 3 such bans in place now and they're called the 19, 39 and 75 country bans. I honestly forget which is which. What happens in consular processing and fiance visa cases is that you go through all the above steps including a consular interview and then... nothing. The consulate is forbidden from issuing you a visa by executive order.
Although it's never been estated, the administration tends to take a broad view of citizenship. For example, if you were born in Afghanistan and your family moved to Canada when you were 1 month old and you've never been there in your life, this administration treats you as an Afghan for the purposes of the bar.
2. The administration implemented a rule whereby you have to consular process in the country of your birth regardless of where you live. There's really no reason for this rule other than to make it harder for people from "shithole" countries to get visas because certain countries have incredibly long wait times for consulate interviews. And if your country of birth has no consulate, they'll assign you to another one and that may not be convenient or even possible (ie you may not be able to enter that country);
3. The administration released a policy memo that stated that adjustment within the US was an "extraordinary" rememdy and that most cases should consular process. They like consular processing because AoS can be challenged in federal court whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that the president has broad powers to limit immigration so consular decisions generally can be reviewed by any court. So the various bans will likely stop issuance of visas to citizens of those countries outside of the US until, at a minimum, Trump leaves office;
4. They're introducing a new rule that's typically called "public charge". This is a new standard whereby USCIS should reject visa applications from people who have been or they consider will be a "public charge", meaning rely on public benefits. You can guess the skew in what countries this does and doesn't apply to;
5. When you adjust within the US, you can optionally apply for an employment authorization document ("EAD") ie a work card. In earlier times, this would arrive within 2-3 months and allow a person to work legally while their I485 case is being processed. It seems like since January 21, 2025, USCIS has basically stopped issuing EADs to make life difficult for immigrants in most cases;
6. To adjust within the US, you need to be inspected at the border. People without this (eg they sneak across the border) are called entering without inspection ("EWI"). This administration has decided some previous programs under Biden specifically (eg CBP One and TPS) in most cases won't be treated as valid entries. This generally means you need a difficult to get waiver to adjust and if you leave to consular process, you're facing a 3-10 year bar and possibly a permanent bar depending on circumstances;
7. In certain circumstances to adjust within the US you have to maintain valid status the entire time or be in status at the time you apply. This administration is trying to take the view that TPS is not valid status for this purpose. This can be mean you're retroactively out of status and can be placed in rmeoval and/or face a bar if you leave and try and return;
8. Various humanitarian programs to parole in place ("PIP") have been ended, forcing people to leave the country to adjust and then face bans from certain countries, bars for unlawful status and/or inadmissibility;
9. There have been pilot programs, particularly in San Diego, to coordinate removals by ICE when people go an appointment at USCIS for an interview or check-in;
10. Judges in immigration court are not Article III judges like federal judges are. They can be fired by the executive for any rason. This president basically fires judges that approve too many cases;
11. Previously, people in removal proceedings depending on their circumstances could get out on bond. For a lot of people, this has been eliminated;
12. ICE will generally try and get someone out of the jurisdiction after picking them up to avoid getting blocked by a habeas petition in federal court. Often they're moved to jurisdictions with far friendlier judges (eg Louisiana). They can also be moved randomly to make it hard to family or even their attodrneys to find and talk to them;
13. There is a ton of evidennce that USCIS is sitting on cases to delay for really no good reason. For example, they'll approve the I130 and just not make a ruling on an I485. This can force people to pay even more money to go into federal court and get a writ of mandamus;
14. Naturatlization has a requirement for "good moral character". Up until thi sadministration, that's been treated as the lack of bad moral character, such as a conviction for certain aggravated offences. This administration takes the view that an applicant has to instead prove good moral character, which can be letters of support from citizens;
15. Denaturalization has historically been a very rare occurrence. It requires the government to go into federal court and make a case that you committed fraud to become a citizen. Historically this has been a few dozen casea a year at most. Now it's in the hundreds. That's still not a lot but people expect this to ramp up. They're also taking a broader view of grounds for denaturalization. For example, if you committed a disqualifying offence before you naturalized but weren't charged and convicted until after, they isometimes now go after that where they didn't previously;
16. They've implemented so-called third-country deportation. That is, you can be deported to some other country entirely if your home country won't take you or if it's deemed unsafe for you to return to that country. So, you can flee civil war in South Sudan and be deported to El Salvador now. Historically, we didn't do this;
17. This week they announced they were going to revoke the B1/B2 visas for asylum seekers issued in the last 10 years. For anyone who doesn't know, visitor visas typically allow you to enter the US for up to 6 months. It's up the officer at the port of entry and they just make it up, basically.
People who seek asylum are generally forgiven for however they get into the country as long as they entered with inspection. There is a huge backlog in immigration cases from the mid 2010s that are still pending.
Now those visas have long expired so what's the point? I have a theory. When you apply for a temporary visa, you're asked what it's for. So for a visit visa, it might be to go to the World Cup. At any point later on if they find you didn't do what you said you were going to do, they can view that as misrepresentation (ie immigration fraud). This is particularly the case for people who get a visit visa, come to the US and get married within a short window of time.
A finding a misrepresetation can make you permanently inadmissible and that makes you ineligible to adjust.
So what's the point of expiring old visas? I believe they're going to say certain asylum seekers committed immigration fraud to get into the country and they'll find them inadmissible and use that as an excuse to deport them, something we never previously did;
Or, that evocation will potentially break your chain of maintaining status retroactively, making you ineligible to adjust in other circumstances; and
18. The latest: immigrant visas are being paused in consular processing cases, ostensibly for "retraining" in public charge scenarios.
Whatever the party affiliation, he was an actual thief and scam-artist at the public’s expense, so wouldn’t be a great example of some high water mark for public service.
> Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work!
-- 1984
Users keep downvoting my comment even though it is the only literal interpretation supported by the evidence, without any evidence to the contrary. I would rethink only if it lasts over three months.
Note also that courts would easily overrule Trump if the pause became unreasonable.
By the way, you also haven't provided any evidence for your opinion, why would you burden type replies with it?
And yet we have an entirely open-ended "We have nooooo idea how long this will take!"
Garbage. This is the same administration that paused all immigration from Africa except for "Caucasian South Africans" who were classified as refugees by default, regardless of their motivation on immigration.
This is just Stephen Miller doing exactly what he said he intended to do, and exactly what Project 2025 said the government should do (meanwhile, Trump, "What's that? Never heard of it").
It will take about two weeks. Is that right, two weeks? We'll have it done in about two weeks I'm told by some, very intelligent people.
From AP NEWS. Sooo Trump can get deported? Is anyone draining public coffers faster than him?
With regard to temporary visas, the article cited a few types of issues. For example the scenario where someone obtain a temporary visa (promissing to return is a part of the application) and then files for asylum once here. This is broadly understood to be an abuse.
More broadly, because HN is a tech crowd we tend to understand that H1-B visas are often used to supplant American labor cheaper (vs - "filling jobs that Americans aren't willing to fill.") The same dynamic is seen outside of tech as well. Representative example: last year we stayed at two hotels in upstate New York. One was a family run operation that hired local teenagers and older people. It was awesome. The next place right next door, is owned by a larger operation and every single employee was central European - recruited over there and brought here to work the hotel for the summer. I don't think that's a reflection of lack of local labor (said teenagers and older folks) but a business strategy (ab)using temporary worker visas for cheap labor. I think Americans intuitively understand that this doesn't benefit Americans - except the business owners hiring the h1-bs and similar.
So because the system is perceived to be abused and not serving the people's benefit most people are fine with a pause and re-evaluation. Obviously there are sympathetic stories of people caught with uncertainty at the moment and we hope it resolved well for them. At the same time this is a sign of a problematic system in place - the fact that someone here on a temporary visa has an expectation of indefinite renewal means we have created and reinforced such expectation and that probably isn't right.
Without knowing much about it - that sounds likewise like a something to be sympathetic about but also makes sense that it's part of the overall visa process.
Moreover, this administration has a track record which makes it clear its not being reasonable on purpose.
I don't think centrism is about leaving logic behind and splitting the difference.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the legal process shorter and less unnecessarily bureaucratic so that people are less likely to come in the country undocumented?
Furthermore, the whole "immigrants are stealing our jobs" talking point seems to be built on a lot of false pretenses (and anectodtal evidence is not good evidence), not to mention this is about immigrant visas, which the H1-B is not.
Lowering the bar until the kinds of people who are happy to break the law to come here are now legal is not the goal.
Immigration policy changes all the time. H1B was not a thing until the 90s. The country has the right to evaluate what it needs at a given time.
They are economic migrants without the means or desire to immigrate legally.
> how do their coming affect you negatively?
They depress blue-collar wages for my fellow Americans. They increase competition for housing. They increase the burden on services like medical and education. I could go on and on...
Or is that okay because now there will be less brown people here.
Your sentence could go one of two ways, but I suspect I already know what it is
We all know this whole H1-B situation was to cripple wages and to get an indentured workforce. Glad its being "paused". Would love to it being modified to not being tied to a company, or gottennrid of for good.
Sorry about the people who were using it, but also not sorry.
Maybe we Americans can get some of those jobs the companies were scamming the govt with.
We can also take a more critical look at the definition of what being American is. The 20th century, especially pre-1920, was rife with illegal immigration. Why should the descendants of those who skipped the line, who didn't come in "the right way", be able to now call themselves American and reap the unearned benefits of citizenship? They've taken and continue to take jobs from Americans who need them.
What an offensive comment. You earn the benefits of citizenship by paying taxes, and ideally participating in your community (though _many_ americans also just disappear into their houses and watch tv / tiktok instead of being part of the community, both first generation citizens and people from a longer line of citizens).
First generation american citizens are every bit as much citizens as nth generation citizens. They all pay taxes equally and are subject to the same laws.
1. The definition of American is not as black and white as people would like to think, so who is included and not included in "we Americans" is pretty nebulous. As a recent example, the debate over birthright citizenship and the 14th amendment.
2. Who should suffer the consequences of taking advantage of the H1B program? The workers hired under it? The business owners who hired them? The policy makers? If companies were truly 'scamming' the government as the parent comment said, it sounds like the owners of those companies should be punished, perhaps to a degree commensurate with the other anecdotes in this thread of lives being upended and people separated. As the parent comment said: "Sorry...but not sorry"
3. "Immigrants are taking jobs from Americans" is a refrain almost as old as this country is but is also not as clear cut as some users here seem to think. Not to mention that it's a very convenient political tool often used to redirect the anger of the poor or marginalized towards immigrants instead of the business owners and those with power who flaunted the law but will not be held to account. I guess "companies who hire illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans" just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way.
FYI: It doesn't come up in the news often, but birth tourism is a real phenomenon. A lot of rich people in poorer countries travel to the US to have their child, and their child goes home with a US passport, or is raised by relatives.
Leaving the child with relatives, (or otherwise allowing an American family to adopt the child,) doesn't bother me, but going home with a US passport does.
> Melissa Chavin, a London-based U.S. immigration lawyer, said she expects the pause to be temporary. “I don’t think that they’ll leave this indefinitely, especially for wealthier developed countries,” she said. Applicants from developing countries might find it harder to progress their applications under the new guidance, she added.
This comes after one judge ruled the 75 country travel ban was illegal[1]
My sense is they’re trying to get some of that travel ban back through other means
1 - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/distric...