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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

If the government refuses a visa renewal while the person is in the country and they don’t comply you have to deport them, which is often problematic.

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

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This would be true if visa and status were the same thing. In the US, they are not. Whether you are legally present in the US is governed by status. So what happens is that your status is valid and even renewed or extended in the US. But your visa expires. And you need to renew the visa just to bring the date on the visa to the same date as your status. You literally go to the consulate and show them your other status document, and they stamp your passport with the date from the other status document. It's all quite silly. A bit like the movie Brazil.

I find this quite confusing, but then I am far from being an expert on the matter:

* 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!

Yeah, that's what always happens. By "tightening" the law, you only hurt the law-abiding citizens.

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