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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

I mean, anyone who is still defending this administration isn't even trying to have a conversation in good faith.

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 :(

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> defending this administration

"Leave to renew" has been policy for decades.

> isn't even trying to have a conversation in good faith.

What about the sweeping halt of all legal immigrant visa processing?

Right, the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy. Such bad-fucking-faith on display everywhere.

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.

> the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy

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.

Right, stateside renewal was common until 9/11. Disappointingly, Biden tried to bring it back but was presumably thwarted by labor/union or incompetence. Immigration tends to be a bipartisan morass.

First, that's not what this is talking about. "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, and you will not be renewed" on a whim is insane, self-destructive cruelty.

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.

yes, I remember making fun of my british friends for brexit, and then ...

You probably don't realize, but there's a connection between Brexit and "Mr. Brexit".

I'll defend this administration in good faith on the policies I agree with (I disagree with most of the current foreign policy).

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.

I’m not arguing policy here. My point is Trump is an absolutely terrible person who should be removed from office. It’s not the “I don’t like this policy” it’s “maybe do the policy without being an absurdly cruel person who treats others like garbage”

I have good friends on an H1B. I've got plenty of amazing coworkers and teammates on it as well. At the same time, the program has been wildly abused. We don't need to go into the details I'll assume if you are trying to have a conversation in good faith here then you are well aware that companies abuse the H1B program to import literal indentured servants (to the point of there being covert rings that traffic H1B workers with fake credentials into the country) that ultimately aren't serving even the most remote interests of working class America and really just allowing companies to lower costs while increasing profits so boomers can get rich. We can have nice things until people abuse the system en masse. This isn't a new failure mode.

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.

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