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!”
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.
---
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.
While I critique the US for a lot and it does get a lot wrong I think many countries do this.
Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and most EU nations generally require non-EU citizens to return to their home country to change visa types.