This is the money shot : "Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense."
GEO Group also operates similar facilities in Australia, and is publicly traded in the US stock market under the symbol GEO. For the quarter ending 12/31/2024, they had top line revenue of 608M, but pre-tax income came in at 24M, and carrying debt of 2.3B. Somehow with such thin profit margins, their stock is trading at a 4B market capitalization and carrying a 128 P/E (by comparison, Google carries a 20 P/E, Meta 24), i.e. "richly overvalued". It would be a damned shame if Australia started re-evaluating those contracts.
Oh - and some of the risk factors that GEO notes in their last 10-K annual filing:
Efforts to reduce the U.S. federal deficit could adversely affect our liquidity, results of operations and financial condition.
We partner with a limited number of governmental customers who account for a significant portion of our revenues. The loss of, or a significant decrease in revenues from, these customers could seriously harm our financial condition and results of operations.
We are subject to the loss of our facility management contracts, due to terminations, non-renewals or competitive re-bids, which could adversely affect our results of operations and liquidity, including our ability to secure new facility management contracts from other government customers.
and also - this amazing level of self-awareness:
Adverse publicity may negatively impact our ability to retain existing contracts and obtain new contracts.
I don't get the " tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights" and a foil blanket thing though. Why be so nasty? If you are making a business improperly detaining people it would only be likely to cause outrage and get it shut down?
I'm curious as a non American why no one stops this. I mean presumably both political parties have not bothered. Do people in the US think it's ok? I think if that stuff happened in the UK there would be a lot of protests.
A lot of America (even parts of the left) still fall for the "hard on crime" narrative. They assume the sentences are just, and thus bad people deserve the worst. Even if our constitution has a clause agaisnt "cruel and unusual punishment".
never-mind that we've had decades of initiatives using such prisons as a form of soft racism, something so longstanding that is publicly declassified information. And people still don't care.
> I think if that stuff happened in the UK there would be a lot of protests.
A lot worse happened in UK prisons in Northern Ireland and people in Great Britain widely cheered it on. Target the right minorities and there'd be no shortage of supporters in Westminster.
Simple. It doesn't cause (genuine) outrage and it doesn't get them shut down. AOC for example, protested these private prisons during Trump's first term and went silent on them when Biden didn't close them.
Here is a tweet from soon after Biden took office in January 2021:
> People must understand the depth of what’s happening here: the President of the United States has ordered a halt to deportations. ICE, a federal agency, is refusing to comply.
> There’s no reforming this rogue dept. It’s time for a new, just vision.
> A lot of people who are just now suddenly horrified at the dehumanizing conditions at our border are the same folks who dehumanize immigrants + helped build these cages in the 1st place.
> When we tried to stop this infrastructure over a year ago,we were overruled by BOTH parties.
> Fact is a lot of the politicians crying right now don’t work to solve either.
> They vote to grow ICE + CBP cages and they do everything to avoid addressing the root: US foreign policy and interventionism that destabilizes regions, the climate crisis, and unjust economic policy.
Your statement that Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez stopped protesting these private prisons while Biden was in office is simply factually wrong. And it was not hard to check it.
1) Tweets are not substantive action. I was actually involved in abolish ICE actions in real life and watched it die.
2) Tweets are even less meaningful when in real life she supported at every step the people who were actively propping up ICE. Including Bernie, who just recently said Biden could have done more on illegal immigration. (Biden deported more people than Trump 1).
AOC actually has a long track record of saying one thing and doing another, like the controversy over her “present” vote on weapons to Israel. This is the major reason why the Squad broke up. The most charitable interpretation of it is that she wants to gain cache within her party. But she doesn’t realize her party hates her.
If you want to continue to champion someone like that, I have no problem with it, at the least she’s effective at bringing people to the left after they are inevitably disillusioned by something her or Bernie does.
This is horrible and scary, why border guards are even giving the authority to revoke visas is beyond me. When people think about giving cops/guards authority like this they need to be picturing the dumbest bully from their grade school. That's who is going to be using the power
It's Team Grade School Bullies all the way up, from the voters to the representatives. Plus decades of pro-cop propaganda, especially against following the rules.
I'm about to travel to canada on work and as i understand it the last step in the visa is an interview at the port of entry where the border guard can decide if I get to stay or not.
When I went through it years ago, it was mostly about making sure you had all your paperwork in order - had the company sponsoring you provided the relevant information regarding the role and why you were needed, did your resume and experience match at all with the work being performed, etc. Basically I showed up with a list of documents and a very nice border guard looked it over and said welcome to Canada. Each time I traveled up there for work, the border guards were polite and professional. Each time I traveled home, I got pulled aside for advanced screening like I was a drug mule. Just loved all the America trivia questions and deep dives into the history of where I live, just so they could feel good about their jobs.
> Each time I traveled up there for work, the border guards were polite and professional. Each time I traveled home, I got pulled aside […]
Interesting, it was the opposite for me, US citizen with CA work permit circa 2016. CBP seemed to not care while CBSA was often irrationally aggressive and suspicious. The closest thing I got to an explanation once after being freed was “We just like you” with a grin.
I was grilled in Vancouver about whether the purpose of my visit was work or pleasure, after I helpfully told the officer that my dad was attending a work conference and I was traveling with him but sightseeing.
"Well which one is it, work or pleasure?!"
I don't know, dude. I just explained the situation: you're supposed to be the expert!
What confuses me even more about that situation is that Canada seems to distinguish between business travel and work travel instead, where those two options seem to be mutually exclusive to each other (199b), and neither is for pleasure
I believe making you flustered is a deliberate part of the procedure. If you don't act 'normal flustered' or panic, it is a signal for more advanced screening.
Imagine taking a >$500 flight to Japan or South Korea only to be told by the border guard there that you can't enter, even when no rules were broken. And then the flight home is even more expensive. It happens sometimes.
canada just revised the rules to allow border agents to revoke your visa / work permit, fyi. so look out. it might be better to go during "normal" hours and at major ports of entry to try to get a more senior officer.
Every country is like this. Israel is the scariest but I remember decades ago crossing into Switzerland by train and in the middle of the night being woken up by border guards with barking German shepherds asking for my passport. I have so many stories it’s funny. On top of the other stories I’ve already posted, my friend who is Canadian drove into Buffalo for dinner and on his way back, they asked him where are you going. He answered “Canada” and they detained him and pulled apart his car looking for drugs. He was detained for hours until they let him go.
As a Canadian living near the border (as many Canadians are!), I would often drive into the US for shopping. There are a number of towns that seem dedicated to serving Canadians, like Watertown, NY. I've found that often the US border guards would be much nicer than the Canadian border guards, probably because the Canadians are the ones that need to deal with the customs rules (Canadians aren't trying to smuggle their new purchases back to the US without paying tax!).
I haven't been on a shopping trip like that in a while though, and I find it hard to believe I'll ever do it again now. I feel bad for Watertown, but with the tariffs and the risk of detention, its not worth it.
That's an interesting anecdote. I grew up on a border town, but as a US Citizen often going up into Cananda. Without fail it was always the US border guards who were the jerks (I went to school with their kids!) and the Canadian guards who were gracious and courteous.
Given that I've NEVER had what I would call a great interaction with a US border guard, it warms my heart to hear that at least they could be kind to some one ;-)
This has been my experience as well (as a US citizen). I've crossed the US/Canadian border many times and the US guards are usually the jerks. I always dread re-entry into the US because of that.
The Walmarts and gas stations near the Northern NY border used to have a lot of Ontario and Quebec plates. I've seen reports that February traffic across the bridges was down ~15% in February YoY.
don't forget a sub-70 cent dollar. Pretty rough to pay that sort of premium and THEN maybe GST and duty on your purchases. It's not the same as a generation ago when you had to go to the US to get their chocolate bars...
There's a wide spectrum between being aggressive about asking for your passport and detention for weeks. While it's a slippery slope the extent to which it happens, and the extent to which prejudice is involved, varies a lot.
I have the best story on this - they didn't believe I wasn't Swiss, because my name is clearly Swiss and I was speaking German. My (American) passport had been amended so it took an hour and them making some calls before they were convinced I wasn't some kind of spy. Love the idea of my ancestral home not believing I wasn't one of them, even if they were quite rude about it.
She was. You didn't even do a modicum of research. She co-founded a hemp drink company in California and then self-assigned her own TN visa through the company she founded, which isn't allowed. Her visa was actually illegal and then she was found upon subsequent crossing. She tried to reapply and this time she was detained.
Sorry, I’m commenting on an article and don’t feel as though I should need more research than what’s written in it. Based on her account, that’s not really accurate, and I do actually trust her (and Guardian fact-checkers) more than your anonymous claims. Feel free to give sources.
Anyway: it’s still moot. What she did, even based on your account, is not illegal.
It’s not illegal to apply for TN, period. If the application is rejected, that doesn’t make the application retroactively illegal.
It’s not even illegal for a Canadian to apply for a TN at the border crossing, have their application rejected, and keep driving right into the US. I know this because it happened to me. As Canadians don’t need work permits to enter the US, entering the country wasn’t the question - only working in it.
Unless she’d previously been given paperwork that had banned her from entry to the US - and she hadn’t been - there was nothing illegal with reapplying. She was told to reapply.
Whether she did anything “wrong” is debatable, but whether she did anything illegal isn’t.
I was getting suspicious the more I read. When she said the guard though she was shady, I knew something definitely was up.
Guards/cops/whatever maybe be dumb sometime but they don't say this when everything is done correctly. If she had just made an honest mistake, she would have been told so and corrected. But clearly, she tried to do something that wasn't allowed or played with the lines on how things have to be done. Then she complains that she got detained for it. If you don't respect the rules, there are consequences, women tend to forget it because they get away with all kind of shit in today's society.
Also, The Guardian has a habit of obfuscating the truth (by omitting facts or orienting the narrative) to create outrage, so it doesn't surprise me at all.
I need to determine if this is true. I had not heard of it before, and the idea she would qualify for a TN visa seemed a little thin, but the rules are so arbitrary and uneven (especially these days) who knows. Regardless this sounds like a nightmare, and to top it off is neither "DOGE-efficient" or increases US security. It's a least 4-combinations of lose-lose.
Hmm, I'm not an American so this is all new and pretty interesting. If you wholly or partly own a company and the company sponsors your TN, would that be OK? Or is that still 'self-sponsorship' under the regulations?
Canadian here. I recall in 1991 being woken by Swiss border guards in a train carriage full of Germans and Italians. After inspecting their passports they shined the light in my face. They saw my maple leaf on my bag and asked “Est-tu Canadian” bleary eyed I replied “oui” and they said,”it’s fine, we don’t need to see your passport”. Of course 9 years later I was thrown off a train to Czechoslovakia” because they changed the visa requirements at the last minute and my “Let’s Go” guidebook was out of date.
Oh being young, stupid and crossing boarders without a clue.
Why do you need guard dogs to check a passport? Is it the most effective system to do sweep-checks in the middle of the night? Why not check as you're boarding or de-training? What happens if something is wrong or not aligned? Is a stressful situation the best way to conduct routine processes for anybody?
HOW shit goes down is really important. When systems reduce people to cogs in a machine they lose empathy and personal responsibility. This is why we end up with guards who know nothing, treat people like cattle, and are "just doing their job". It does not lead to good results.
The part OP is scared of and points to is some border guard revoking your visa, which probably implies you losing your job and having to leave the country you live in. This is scary because it is a very big, bad outcome to be totally in the authority of a random border guard to decide. Waking out by guards and dogs barking on a train is scary in its own right the moment it happens, but we are talking about totally different things whose only intersection is "border guards" and the emotional category of "scared".
I did not say it cannot be revoked or it does not happen anywhere else, I said it is scary for completely different reasons than waking up in a train to a border guard checking your passport. Moreover, both can in principle happen anywhere, but the extent and context of them actually happening also matters.
It's not nonsense, people are following all the rules and then having some thug with no ability or willingness to understand the situation revoke their visa. This can and will ruin lives I don't see how you're not seeing the problem here
Canada is at the top of my mind. You need to get a visa and go through the "full immigration processing" even if you are only transiting through and not leaving the airport.
It is you that actually has to answer on which rules were broken and which countries do the same. Tbf asking questions to be answered by non-examples is disingenuous. If your argument (2) is that others do it, then you should provide concrete examples similar to the original article. If your argument (1) is that they did not follow some rules, you should either provide specific rules that the author did not follow, or at very least plausible reasons for why they are lying in the article about following all the rules.
2) She applied for a TN visa that was sponsored by her own company, which is illegal.
"I was granted my trade Nafta work visa, which allows Canadian and Mexican citizens to work in the US in specific professional occupations, on my second attempt."
4) She was trying to enter the US illegally with an illegal work visa and even though the first TN was granted, she was likely detained because of the illegal nature of her TN visa application and the multiple attempts she made.
Did you look up Section 214.6(b) [0] before you posted?
Curious how you determined
>> A professional will be deemed
to be self-employed if he or she will be rendering services to a corporation or entity of which the professional is the sole or controlling shareholder or
owner.
Do you have a link to the ownership structure of Holy! Water?
She has publicly stated she is a cofounder of the company. In order to qualify for the TN visa there has to be a legitimate employer-employee relationship, and as cofounder, that makes that impossible. At the very least this makes her subject to detainment for possible immigration fraud.
Was she accused of these things by ICE? Was she told which laws she allegedly broke? Was she being detained ahead of a trial? I don't understand how even allegedly illegal activity results in her indefinite detention without anyone telling her anything.
TN self sponsorship is not allowed. However, it's not immediately clear to me that she would meet the standard of self-sponsorship as laid out in the law:
>> A professional will be deemed to be self-employed if he or she will be rendering services to a corporation or entity of which the professional is the sole or controlling shareholder or owner. [0]
I did quite a bit of digging to see if I could find corporate entity filings that might indicate if she is a sole or controlling shareholder. My initial findings suggest that she's not, but with low confidence.
Her product's site lists a mailing address in Illinois. I noticed the first line was "My Crew Doses"[1] (side note: lol - I guess this is a pun and a double entendre for "microdoses" but also "my friends dose"). I checked the Illinois register of corporations for that entity but came up short. I noticed the email listed on the contact page was "jeremy@enjoyholywater" and searched for 'Jeremy Holy Water' and came up with this guy [2] who lists himself as "Chief Scientific Officer" and a Co-founder of Holy! Water. I noticed he's in Colorado and checked the Colorado corporate register and bingo, came up with this: The corporate entity for My Crew Doses[3]. Not much info there but it lists the home registration of the entity as Wyoming. Going to the Wyoming register, we find the listing: [4]. That lists "Brian Mccaslin" as the sole corporate officer (President) with an @enjoyholywater.com email address. Cross-referencing his LinkedIn, it seems to be this guy: [5]. He also seems to go by BJ.
Now, assuming that this is the corporate entity for Holy! Water, I find it highly doubtful that the subject of the article is a controlling shareholder. We don't know what the ownership breakdown is but the fact that she isn't even listed as a corporate officer or a director is to me a strong indication that she isn't a majority shareholder. My hunch is that she in fact would be eligible (or at least not disqualified under this rule) for a TN visa.
TN visa requires a legitimate employer-employee relationship. If she is a co-founder of the company, which she has advertised herself as being, then the TN visa is illegal. Add on the fact she tried 3 times in various borders is more than enough evidence to detain her for immigration fraud.
Do I think it's right? No.
But is it lawful? 100% yes. I've seen draconian behavior at the border so I'm completely familiar with how things are so I'm not surprised.
Of course, it's kind of the point of having borders and control, if they let anyone in without verifying, it's not even worth having a border.
Going from France to UK is like that, and before Shenzen, it was like that from EU country to EU country. When I was young, we had to wait for 2 hours with my parents while they checked everything was in order for a Spain border crossing (we were in a big RV so it makes sense).
People on HN have very soft views of the world, being too idealistic libertarian or some sort of socialist derived ideology.
Most people may not be criminal but you have to process everyone crossing the border as if because otherwise it's pointless and you will never catch the criminals...
The specifics of this case are largely irrelevant to me, the fact is I am scared to cross the border into the US at this point.
For the foreseeable future I will not be travelling to the US for any reason. Canada is safe and there is nothing in the US worth risking my freedom for. I will remain here and I will continue to avoid travel to America as well as spending money on American goods/services.
The specifics are seemingly irrelevant to everyone. She had her work visa revoked at the Canadian border because her company in California was allegedly making THC beverages in violation of federal law. She was told to visit a consulate to straighten it out.
Instead she flew to Mexico and tried to enter there with new and obviously fake job offer. She was treated like anyone else would, but it’s international news because she’s a pretty white woman.
Again I do not care. The US has done more than enough to instill fear in Canadians like me.
Would you travel to a country where its leader is constantly making threats against your country, some as serious as repeatedly calling for your annexation? The current US administration has made it very clear how it feels about me and my countrymen.
I don't consider the US safe and I do not need someone to americansplain to me. You aren't exceptional, you're a threat.
I am Canadian. I’ve been to the U.S. a hundred times and nothing has really changed to make me blink at continuing to go. I have friends and family who work and vacation there, and it’s the same for them as it’s always been.
The Canadian media and Canadian businesses have been drumming up fear and patriotic rhetoric to drive domestic industries. That’s great - the last 10 years of “Canada is a post-national state with no culture or identity” narrative that Trudeau championed wasn’t doing us any favours anyway.
Trump may be a buffoon and what he’s doing is clearly not acceptable with respect to Canada, but to fear visiting or considering the U.S. unsafe when it’s objectively far safer than visiting any all-inclusive hotspot in the Caribbean that Canadians are still flocking to like they do every winter is, well, removed from reality.
Then you perhaps aren't looking closely. The US is undergoing one of the fastest democratic backslides (democratic sinkhole?) the world has yet to see [0], deportations and detentions are happening with zero regard to the rule of law [1], and our _sovereignty_ is under attack daily.
If that doesn't make you blink, like most Canadians have [2], then perhaps nothing would.
> I’ve been to the U.S. a hundred times and nothing has really changed to make me blink at continuing to go.
Let's hope you never get unlucky, it only takes one border agent having a bad day after all. I've been to the US many, many times and as I said I no longer consider it safe, but we all have different risk tolerance levels.
> when it’s objectively far safer than visiting any all-inclusive hotspot in the Caribbean
I don't visit those places either.
Cry to someone else about how it's all media based fear while ignoring the very real changes in attitudes, policy, and atmosphere, but I personally see no reason to take the risk when I could...just stay in Canada and be safe.
Dude, if you have a tattoo that looks questionable, you literally could be deported to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Granted, maybe you are white, and that might be the one thing which saves you.
You're saying that you're not actually interested in discussing the post you're commenting on, you just want to use the comment section to rant. Got it.
No, they are saying that the minutiae doesn't impact their desire to not visit, as simply the threat of arbitrary incarceration is sufficient. It's in fact a sentiment shared by most Canadians if the sharp decrease of Canadian visits to the US approaching pandemic levels is anything to go by.
It's international news because she was detained for 2 weeks with no explanation. If they had simply booted her back across the border - which I thought was the default in cases like this, where someone's applying in an orderly manner at a port of entry - few people would have cared.
>If they had simply booted her back across the border
They can't. And this is entirely her fault for trying to enter through Mexico. Telling them she will return to Canada isn't helpful because what are they supposed to do? Tell her ok, go get an Uber to the Airport and just let her go? Mexico would not issue her a VISA either so her only option is US or Mexican Detention. When the agent said "You aren't a criminal" is when she saw that Mexico had denied her re-entry and she was flagged for detention.
Now, I mean, personally I think it would be fine to just let her go because who really cares, but the point of rules/laws/procedures is for them to be followed.
Why did she go to Mexico first? Because she was denied entry in Canada and thought there would be less scrutiny at the Southern Border for Canadians. She was correct, because it worked the first time when she would have likely been denied at the Canadian border for her second crossing, but her initial denial flagged her.
I feel for her, and the situation sucks, but she 100% knows she's trying to game the system, and that's not even bringing up the issues of her self-sponsored TN visa which is dubious.
Is it true that Mexico denied her re-entry? The source article doesn't say anything about that, and I'm not sure why it would happen - Canadian nationals generally have visa-free entry for short trips to Mexico.
Yes, the agent saying "We have to send you back to Canada" is because she wasn't allowed in Mexico. By default her tourist card would have only covered entry from from Canada. The first CBP agent almost certainly attempted to get her back into Mexico which is why it took "hours." If she already had a valid VISA for Mexico then the default would be to return her. The article doesn't even really make it clear that she flew to Mexico first and then tried to enter the US. To the uninformed it would seem she may have flown into San Diego or something. She wouldn't be able to return to Mexico on an asylum claim either of course.
Canadians don't need a visa to travel to Mexico though [1], assuming they won't be doing any work or studying. Going to the airport to go back to Canada is not work.
Yes, but if she HAD a VISA she would have been allowed to return to Mexico. She entered Mexico with a Temporary Tourist Card for entry from Canada to exit through the US with specified dates or less than 72 hours. That card became invalid when she left Mexico. The border agents most certainly tried to get her back into Mexico, but "denied entry into the US" is going to cause a manual administrative review in Mexico and that appears to have been denied. The only thing different under Biden / Obama would have been that she may have been processed faster because their was less backlog.
She gambled on trying to to game the immigration system and lost. It sucks but 12 days in custody isn't world ending. The most amazing part to me is people with no experience with "the system" find themselves incarcerated and think not eating sounds like a good idea.
Yep this person clearly tried to manipulate the system and had the gall to admit that in public because she knew some many ppl wouldn't care and would support her regardless. this comment thread is proof of that.
1) She was not detained in connection with any crime whatsoever. At no point was her company's use of THC stated as a reason for detainment.
2) You have invented the idea that her second job was fake. If it were, then fraud could have been a crime and reason for detainment- but again, the article makes it clear no crime was charged or cited.
3) You are right that plenty of non-white people are also going through this. I wish that was also enough to motivate people to care.
The point is that removing due process for anyone is a threat to everyone. It could be you next. You might think, "Not if I'm a citizen and not a criminal" - but the whole point of due process is getting the opportunity to prove that you are in fact a citizen and not a criminal. That right is eroding.
After a long interrogation, the officer told me it seemed “shady” and that my visa hadn’t been properly processed. He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients.
i don't know what hemp is or how is related to THC.
Hemp is a type of cannabis. Historically in the US, it contained extremely small amounts of THC. With the legalization/decriminalization of THC across many states, I don't know if that's still true.
You run a company in LA.
Your visa is revoked.
You show up at a different border shortly after with a novel job offer.
Is it a genuine job offer or are you going back to run your company?
The starting assumption when crossing any[0] international border is that you don't have a right to enter the country, until you prove otherwise.
People from wealthy Western countries are generally used to just waving their passports and passing through, but that is not nor has it ever been some kind of automatic right. People are questioned and denied entry all the time, should they fail to satisfy the border official of their eligibility for entry under the exact terms of their visa (or the relevant visa waiver program).
I'm very sympathetic to the idea that border officials should have less discretion to deny people entry without very solid reasons, but if you start talking about 'innocent until proven guilty' at a border today, you're not going to have a good time.
[0] International agreements can of course modify this default assumption, e.g. Schengen.
ppl here are so freaking annoying and ignorant about how immigration works in any country.
you are right, for immigration its your responsibility to prove that you are not coming in to violate terms of entry. Onus is not them to prove that you are coming to work on tourist visa.
Exactly. From her own story you can also infer that pretty much everyone who was detained with her was in fact illegal.
Nobody cares about them because they don't have the reach of this white woman; not that anyone would care, because they can't make up a bullshit story to pretend that they got unfairly detained.
It may not seem right, but enforcing laws is kind of the point of having borders and cops and things like that. I'm amazed how many people are complaining.
This woman is clearly shady and got what she deserved and that's that.
I traveled to the US (from my country -France- and many others) for 12 years. About a trip every month. The last time was 10 years ago.
I never had any problems (outside the horrible behaviour of border officers who show you that you are not welcome). I was stopped once by a policeman when I did an illegal car maneuver (which is tolerated in France), and when he realized I was a tourist with family, he just said, "Be careful, have a nice trip."
Today I am seriously considering never going to the US anymore because it looks like it is not a good destination anymore. I may be wrong though, I hope.
> outside the horrible behaviour of border officers who show you that you are not welcome
They've always (in my life, which is largely post 9/11) done that to US citizens too. Going into Canada it was "where are you going to? the beach, eh? have a nice day!", coming back seemed to be performed under the suspicion that our passports were fake and our car was made out of drugs. Despite doing nothing wrong, we were always afraid of getting in trouble because a border agent felt like it.
As a Canadian travelling throughout much of the world, border controls aside from the US always seem much more concerned with imported goods (tax collection and protecting agriculture, etc) than imported people.
I got a light interrogation as a US citizen. For the record, I have Global Entry, NEXUS, and TSA Pre-Check.
I handed the border agent my US passport and the conversation went like this
"why are you entering the country?"
"I live here"
"do you have legal status in the US?"
"I'm a citizen, you're holding my passport"
"have you ever overstayed a visa in the US in the past?"
"I was born here, so no"
"do you intend to do any work while you're in the US?"
"yes, I'm a US citizen and I have a job"
I didn't get pulled off to the side or anything, it was just standard questioning at entry processing when flying in, but it was just bizarre
the border agent kept looking me up and down suspiciously like I was hiding something, but he had my passport the whole time
even when I got questioned on my way to Canada (I would've stopped me too), they were much nicer about the whole process, it's an air of "we're just double checking cuz making a mistake here would be real bad, but as long as everything's legit, no worries, I hope you have a nice stay in Canada"
entering the US the vibe is "you're a violent criminal and it's my job to ask you questions until you slip up and admit that fact, the US is magnanimous for allowing you to touch our great country's land with your disgusting feet, and you should remember that every day you're here or we'll detain you so you won't forget again"
I'm a little surprised you've only had positive experiences.
That is indeed quite bizarre. Most of those questions literally don't matter for a citizen, and if you were somehow falsely claiming to be a citizen, the other questions also don't matter because a false claim to US citizenship is punished more harshly by US immigration law than the other things they were worried about. (Such false claims make one permanently ineligible for permanent immigration to the US, with no waiver available, and require a waiver for any kind of nonimmigrant admission.)
> I'm a little surprised you've only had positive experiences.
I was talking about the experiences within the country. The border is horrendous, exactly like Russia. Same vibe of "we hate you, kneel before stepping into my country"
For a foreigner, even one that knows the US pretty well, there is a background feeling of "if it goes bad, it will go vey bad". This is mostly because of movies and news like this article but the everyday life was more or less friction free. I did not get into anything serious, though.
Are you flying or driving? These were at land borders in Michigan, maybe they're more strict when you try to bring in a whole vehicle instead of a few suitcases that have gone through inspections.
Same. The president is repeatedly threatening to annex my country. I was already avoiding the US because TSA is creepy, but now I'm actively divesting from it.
Same for me as well. I've also gone as far as moving any paying business away from the US. I have completely moved off paid US services as of about a month ago to Canadian or EU equivalents.
I'd be careful comparing statistics like this between jurisdictions. What might be counted as a "illegal immigrant" is likely different between the EU and US.
Same has being happening in UK for quite sometimes post 911. The facilities looks very similar. Some one line Cornell Correction must be making a killing in US.
Yes. This is the reality of how it is. It’s unfair that this woman was caught in this but CBP have ultimate power crossing the border can be scary.
My friend got her visa stripped and given a 10 year ban under Obama because of jokes in her text messages about a GC marriage. She didn’t get thrown in jail but she was refused entry back into the US and had to get someone to sell all her stuff while she flew back to her home country.
Most of you have no idea about how life is because you’re probably citizens but this is the reality at the border. It’s even worse in other countries.
Someone I know is from Australia and she said if you overstay your visa they track you down, arrest you and send you to jails outside of Australia mainland until you are eventually deported. Every country treats their border extremely strictly.
CORRECTION: I pinged my friend and I was wrong. They arrest them but don’t send to offshore jails. Those are for illegal immgrants that arrive on boats.
It's not. I take you are comparing to western countries. If you have a valid visa and behave even remotely normal to the border agents you will have no issues. Only in the USA some border agents have the attitude of "I'm gonna get you" or making you feel unwelcome for no reason. Hell, even in "authoritarian" countries like UAE or Quatar I never experience anything but pleasant interactions on the border.
>> If you have a valid visa and behave even remotely normal to the border agents you will have no issues.
This is the crux IMO: it should be an OR not an AND. Having to behave "remotely normal" where this is determined solely at the discretion of the TSA is impossible.
You are ignorant about how life is crossing into other countries. In the 1990s, my friend who is a white Canadian drove into Buffalo for dinner with his family, and on his way back the Canadian border patrol asked him where he was going. He answered “Canada” instead of Toronto and based on that they detained him for hours and ripped apart his car.
Just recently a woman from the UK was denied entry into Canada and because of that was denied entry back into the US and found herself in the same mess as the person in the article.
This happens all the time, you just don’t hear about it until the news decides to make a thing about it.
there's a difference between sending someone back where they came from (what Canada did) and torturing them (what the US is doing, sleep deprivation is torture).
> Someone I know is from Australia and she said if you overstay your visa they track you down, arrest you and send you to jails outside of Australia mainland until you are eventually deported. Every country treats their border extremely strictly.
Honestly, this kind of abusive approach is predominant among certain of the major anglophone countries only, at least within the world of fully developed democratic countries, likely for reasons of shared media ownership/viewership and overlapping cultural/political attitudes but I don’t know for sure.
Yes, several other fully developed democratic countries do of course treat their borders strictly in the sense of who’s allowed in and under what circumstances, but not with these kinds of abusive treatment as a common pattern. And I do frequently read news in three languages plus a fourth occasionally, so I don’t think this is just me being biased toward news from countries that share of my native language of English.
Yes, though the degree varies by language. I'm a native US English speaker, usefully bilingual in French at least when things are being spoken relatively standardly, and have partial degrees of proficiency with German (hello from Berlin) and Spanish which nobody would confuse for fluency but which are still useful levels of each language.
The offshore detention we do here in Australia is abominable, but it’s not accurate to say it’s “if you overstay your visa”, it’s generally only used for people who can’t be deported for whatever reason (usually around asylum claims, being stateless, etc.).
If you just overstay a visa you will just be deported fairly quickly, you aren’t going to go into offshore detention…
That’s not a defence of the practice, offshore detention should absolutely be abolished, it’s just worth being accurate.
My friend went to University of NSW early 2000s and she said when her friends disappeared for a while, they knew they were caught by the border patrol and deported because of some sort of overstayed visas. They all knew how aggressive Australia was at enforcing visa violations. Maybe they changed the process since then but she said everyone knew they sent visa overstayers to the offshore jails to scare them and send a message to everyone else.
CORRECTION: you are right. I got my story mixed up so I was wrong. It’s illegal immigrants who arrived by boat that were sent to offshore jails. My friends friend was sent to a regular jail. He had a student visa and stopped going to uni so he got arrested and deported because his visa got cancelled.
AFAIK, the Australian system doesn’t operate like this for visa overstays. Your friend may be confused with asylum applications for those who arrive by boat (which isn’t often used in practice).
> Most of you have no idea about how life is because you’re probably citizens but this is the reality at the border.
The reality is that you can be denied entry for pretty dubious reasons, but most people with a valid visa/visa exemption who don't do sketchy shit like the woman in TFA don't get randomly denied or even interrogated beyond the basic purpose of visit questions. All my entries into the US (as well as other countries I have been to) have been pleasant except for the long queues.
> Every country treats their border extremely strictly.
Unfortunately not every country. Much of the EU has gotten used to lax borders.
Strict enforcement of borders is mostly in countries that get lots of people trying to enter illegally or overstay their visa. E.g. those with neighbors that are significantly less well off.
It's either that, or get denied. Interestingly enough, however, it's quite easy to "prepare" for a phone search in advance since border agents can only search the actual content of your phone. You just need to delete apps and reinstall them after you passed the border. Their "advanced" forensics tools would likely find traces of those deleted apps, though.
"CBP officers can only search and access data stored on the device’s hard drive or operating system. The search does not include data that is stored remotely in a Cloud format. The officer must ensure that data and network connections are disabled before starting the search, for example, by asking the traveler to turn the device into airplane mode and disabling Wi-Fi."
You would be detained and eventually denied entry. You have no rights when you cross the border no matter which country you're in. China and other countries have just as draconian enforcement.
ESTA applications ask for your social media accounts even before you get to border patrol. You can of course omit them but that may or may not backfire. I have only ever listed GitHub since I don't really use anything else they have in the drop down.
I imagine it would be, if you visited South Sudan.
It is not "even worse" in any of the western countries. The border control people in most western countries are actually friendly. They are polite, sometimes even, gasp, smile at you.
> It is not "even worse" in any of the western countries. The border control people in most western countries are actually friendly. They are polite, sometimes even, gasp, smile at you.
That has also been my experience with the US. YMMV of course.
I've been issued a five year bar for visiting someone in the US while unemployed. My immigration lawyer told me it's the weakest case he had ever seen. It took two years for the appeal to be approved. I had worked in the US on TN visas twice before, and never overstayed. It felt like they were just trying to meet a quota.
Edit: I had applied for a GC years before this happened, so I think the officer thought I didn't want to leave. This was not the case however. The case had been approved but not processed.
The officers were "dirty". They brought me in a room to do an interrogation where one officer asked questions and the other took notes on an old computer. I literally told them: "I am not going to stay past my return date" and the officer asking questions told the officer taking notes to not write that down. They asked who my parents were, how much money I had, my employment history, what I did in the US while working on my previous TN, if I was in danger, etc.. They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
For those of you who go through that, don't agree to the statement if they modified it, like mine. There's no cameras or recording devices so they can be dirty, and they abuse that fact. You have no rights at all at the border, and your assumptions on decency and honesty are not correct.
My assumption to this day is that they thought I was trying to work illegally, but this is not the case.
>They asked if I was applying for jobs and I said yes because I was unemployed. They then asked if the jobs were in the US and I said I would accept another TN job if I could. They call the process a "sworn statement".
So you told them that you were there for visiting/tourism, and they alleged you were coming to the US to work, on the basis that you're applying to jobs in the US?
I would like to remind everyone assuming that some kind of hassles at the border are normal and necessary (even if the specifics of this one make you mad) that this is NOT the case.
Our current international regime of widespread passports, residency permits, visas, and border checks is barely 100 years old. Even in my lifetime (pre-9/11) the US-Canada border was a passport-free affair: just show the border guard your drivers' license (if you were the driver) and tell them you had nothing to declare -- they knew you were lying but didn't care.
It is not an iron law that international borders have to be dystopian "papers please" civil-liberties-optional free-fire zones. There is little point in the US policing either land border at all, but hassling NAFTA citizens (aka Canadians and Mexicans) traveling on business is especially absurd. A Schengen-style regime in North America (it's only THREE countries, should be pretty easy!) is way beyond overdue, but it seems like we're instead headed in the opposite direction as fast as we possibly can.
Open borders are the default state of the world. Anything interfering with our ability to travel should be in response to a specific, real problem. Instead, we've handed the door keys to our whole country to a handful of cops and private contractors who get paid more when they hassle us more.
I sort of disagree. There _is_ a process, which optimises for holding people as long as possible for the prison industrial complex to make money. When you privatise these kind of social services, this is what happens. This is not due to a few officials on the ground that just happened by chance to be "incompetent, ignorant, and have contempt for you". As the article concludes,
> The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
> Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
> The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
One is the private prison industry being incentivized to hold as many people as possible.
But there's also a bureaucracy (ICE and State) with little to no pressure to perform better for this particular population (because who cares about criminals?).
Consequently, you get an industry that's perfectly happy to warehouse people... coupled with a slow and ineffective government controlling the keys to their release.
Private detention facilities should be banned.
But the government also needs KPIs with consequences tied to them. E.g. average holding time, average response time to filing, etc. And leaders get fired / budgets cut if targets are missed.
At this point, I am not sure if we can exclude that lobbying from private prisons does not affect the way bureaucracy runs, from the stage of legislation to the point of how said legislation is executed. Thus I am not sure that these two are in truly independent.
But otherwise I agree; even in places where detention facilities are not privatised, bureaucracy can still pose a lot of issues because, as you say, "who cares about criminals", or because certain traits are overrepresented in the group of people who take up these jobs.
The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.
To wit, that no one actually cares about doing anything.
And granted, that's long been a consequence of low morale in the prison and ICE employee pool, but now it's coupled with a removal of even the least pressure from above to do the job well.
In short, I don't think "Be cruel to people" needs to be messaged from above: "We don't care about anyone you're holding" is sufficient for low-level employees to be their worst selves.
> The "I don't know"s in the article smack of bureaucratic ineffectiveness more than deliberate obsfuscation.
I’m pretty sure it’s not either.
In situations like this, it’s simply conflict avoidance and sticking to the responsibilities of your pay grade. Any given ICE employee may have a good idea where someone is likely to go or not go, but they almost certainly don’t know enough about any specific case to make a comment about it in a way that may have legal ramifications.
This may sound like punting responsibility, but if an ICE employee says something incorrect to someone being held, that could come back to haunt them via legal consequences. As such, if it’s not their job to answer questions about a detainee’s status, it’s probably prudent for them not to answer.
Let me be clear, I think that this is a racket. I also think that any person with decent morals and ethics should consider not working at these places.
That said, I don’t think it’s necessarily reasonable to criticize the ICE folks for staying in their lane when on the job.
Well, now those incentives work in the opposite direction. There have been many reports of Trump being livid that his deportation quotas aren't being met.
When the incentive is a quota rather than just adjudication, you end up with what's going on now.
However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens. US law is perfectly happy with arbitrary brutality towards non-citizens.
(ECHR is different on this, which has caused a lot of controversy in the UK from people who want to be arbitrarily brutal towards non-citizens)
This isn't true and what I wish more than anything in life is if people would stop repeating unadulterated propaganda because that literally normalizes it.
> The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as persons guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
> However, the US has long been very clear: constitutional rights only apply to citizens.
Nope, most of the constitutional rights apply to all people under the jurisdiction of the US. It's why the Bush administration set up Guantanamo--to try to evade any hint of constitutional protection, and he still failed that. (Of course, as Guantanamo also shows, the remedies available to people whose constitutional rights have been grossly violated by the government are quite lacking.)
> Not within 100 miles of the border unfortunately.
Taken from your link:
> In practice, Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. No matter what CBP officers and Border Patrol agents think, our Constitution applies throughout the United States, including within this “100-mile border zone.”
It seems that non-US citizen still have rights, but abuse is rampant within the US border patrol.
I'm waiting for 'jcranmer to respond to this, because it was a response to this claim years ago that started me following him, but, no: the "100 miles from the border constitution-free zone" thing is a myth.
I wasn't planning on responding to this, because the sibling comment already points out that the ACLU's own explainer page is walking back its original description of it as the "Constitution-free zone".
Although while I'm here, I will note that they still don't discuss the fact that--as far as I can tell--all the regulations and laws means the 100 miles start not from the water's edge, but from the international boundary, which is 12 miles out to sea. And which also means Chicago is not in the 100 mile border zone, since the actual Canadian border is on the side of Michigan, well over 100 miles away.
...except at border crossings (which may be at a US border crossing or at an international port of entry like an airport gate where US customs has a checkpoint).
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may search any electronic devices without probable cause at these points.
I was disagreeing that it is just a matter of some officials doing a bad job. And in any case it is not about who is right or wrong, OP is right in identifying that there is no due process, and I did not disagree with that.
To some extent this has always been the case in the US fairly broadly. From living in cities in the Midwest I've heard stories from people I know and their interactions with police and luckily the stories aren't this bad but they are in the same vein of incompetence and cruelty with little recourse.
There's that proverb "You might have the right of way, but the semi truck will still kill you". We might have the Constitution, but it apparently is enforced on an honor system. (Plus non-citizens don't have any rights, so I guess they aren't inalienable human rights after all, eyeroll)
If you look at international press, horror stories happen everywhere, semi-certified (the press from Country C diffident against Country Y will publish if they have a warning piece). The issue is telling the exception from the norm and similar.
> But they were all perfectly competent and infallible under Biden.
It's clear that you're trying very hard to fabricate assertions and muddy the debate. If it helps clarify, until January 20th they were just as abusive and shitty, but with Trump imposing a political mandate to ramp up their abusive and shitty behavior then of course the abusive and shitty behavior will ramp up. Is there something specific that you don't understand?
The San Diego port of entry is the busiest land border crossing in the western hemisphere. The takeaway here should be that the resources to handle immigration along the southern border are insufficient.
If you’re deporting someone, they have to be in custody. They have to deport her to Canada, not Mexico. They likely deal with many other countries and have to arrange for transportation back to all those countries.
I don’t think anyone would have a problem if she was processed promptly and quickly deported or if the confinement accommodations were nicer. That’s purely a resources problem.
This country is sick in the head. We actively eschew healthcare for temporary satisfaction that we are locking some minority group up. Then the defense spend lobby comes back around riling people up so that they can make money and people can have temporary satisfaction that they are safe.
> A woman asked me for the name of someone they could contact on my behalf. In moments like this, you realize you don’t actually know anyone’s phone number anymore. By some miracle, I had recently memorized my best friend Britt’s number because I had been putting my grocery points on her account.
I definitely would be screwed in this situation. Time to remember by sibling’s number
> Right, people have attorneys. Very common thing ... nowhere?
By the number of people asserting that this sort of abusive from border patrol agents runs rampant and people just need to be ok with being deported when trying to lawfully enter the US, what leads you to believe that lawyering up in preparation to enter the US is unheard of?
I was simply sharing an anecdote about how we don't remember phone numbers anymore, in reply to someone sharing they didn't know their sibling's number. You're reading more into my comment than was stated or intended.
To read me as somehow condemning the woman in the original story seems pretty willfully bad faith.
I feel like remembering the phone number of a consulate is less useful than remembering the number of your spouse/partner/close friend, for various scenarios.
In a blink of an eye Americans went from "the government is out there to oppress you" to "if the government says the undisclosed people it snatches from the streets and deports are criminals, it must be true".
It's not necessarily an american thing. People will always have biased towards whatever fits their pre-conceived notions, and we seem to be in a post-truth society.
Ironically, it's not focused a lot more on feelz, no realz. People don't seem to want to remember that reality is in fact, often disappointing.
That's really irrelevant to the point being discussed. I was just trying to give some context to the apparent hypocrisy the OP had identified, without adding my own opinion about it.
The point that started my original response. Explaining a new, apparently hypocritical, propensity to trust such government actions. Whether any of us agree with it or not, is irrelevant to the explanation of why it has happened.
> The new administration has no regards for law. They are breaking multiple laws. This isn't how you get things done.
Your personal perception of hypocrisy is immaterial. OP's point is that this sort of policy is being supported bY rampant abuse and violations of the law and constitution.
If your original argument is how you think something violates the law, how come your high regard for lawlessness disappears as soon as you discuss abusing minorities?
You joined the conversation too late. Go up one parent level and see that the ONLY thing I was talking about, was explaining the apparent hypocrisy the OP had identified. The rest of this thread has been unnecessary and irrelevant objections to that point.
> There is a sense that the new American administration is more appropriately focused on oppressing criminals and people occupying the country illegally, which may account for more acceptance and a slight uptick in trust
That’s not an interesting insight IMO.
All governments claim some degree of criminality or immorality of the people they are oppressing.
After all, didn’t this administration pardon people who 50% of the country believe were actively trying to overthrow the government?
I think it accurately explains the mood shift of the portion of the public the OP was originally criticizing for apparent hypocrisy. The same portion of the public who think the prosecutions of the Jan 6 protestors as wildly overzealous, at best.
Except almost none of these cases are given due process, so we're just meant to believe them. It's trivial to say people are terrorists or gang members or whatever, doing it in court is hard. That's why they don't.
True, but they are so individualist that they don't give a f*ck to what happens to their neighbors, they are the first type to report anyone to the government
> to help launch an American brand of health tonics called Holy! Water
> contained hemp
The actual company name is hempandhoneynj? That sells “ HIGH THC IS FOR EXPERIENCED CANNABIS USERS”.
I don’t think weed is legal yet on the federal level. There is some grey ares are on the THC vs weed classification, but note that also harsher laws - like dealing drugs - could have applied here.
The THC is derived from legal hemp it seems, which is why they call it "Hemp" and not "Cannabis" in the article, I'm guessing.
> Our Delta 9 THC is legal according to federal law and many state laws. All Delta 9 THC extract being offered is 100% derived from legal hemp and does not contain more than 0.3% ∆9THC.
How is it different from a local dealer: trust me cops won’t care?
Federal law allowance on that 3% rule is very very narrow. And it’s highly likely that the THC is being re-enrich post haverst which then it is still not legal.
“Harsher laws” are pretty harsh. Even if no violence just “easing distribution”, it’s a max sentence of 10-year.
I dunno, if we start making up things like "She said she isn't a criminal, but what if she actually launders money" and not take the article for what it says, what's the point of discussing all of this at all?
This immigration employee did decide to classify this enriched hemp as a controlled substance, yes.
This doesn’t a crazy out of line interpretation of that 3% THC rule that seems like a legal hoop-hole, but it is just of the lack of enforcement of the law by other branches of the government that makes feel this way. It means to be accidental THC not laboratory enriched THC. Which is obviously the case here.
> This immigration employee did decide to classify this enriched hemp as a controlled substance, yes.
As far as I can tell, the submission article doesn't mention THC at all, and the only time hemp is mentioned is in this context:
> He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.
Seems he was OK with the hemp, he was just not OK with the part where there was a Canadian working with a US company that used hemp.
Where are you getting the part that this individual chose to classify some hemp as cannabis from? Wouldn't he try to alert some of his boss in that case, rather than take back this woman's visa?
Hemp And Honey seems to be a store that happens to sell Holy! Water. They seem to carry a lot of brands.
This appears to be their site: https://enjoyholywater.com/ - You can see they seem to focus on nootropics, mushrooms, herbs, etc with a little bit of hemp in it. Not so nefarious. This stuff is carried in mainstream stores all over the place.
When I got money and thought of travelling, I quickly realized it's too hard and humiliating to get visa, and preferred EU instead. And visa-free countries afterwards.
Then I planned to have kids and started contemplating what are costs, social security payments, public kindergartens, sick leaves, costs of ambulance (like if you break a spine), or giving a birth... and the US suddenly turned very, very unattractive. Even without these horror stories.
Amerikanische Großstädte sind landesweit mit einem Anstieg der Gewaltkriminalität konfrontiert. Es besteht auch weiterhin eine erhöhte Gefahr politisch motivierter Gewalt."""
Translation:
"""Domestic political situation
Major American cities are facing an increase in violent crime nationwide. There is still an increased risk of politically motivated violence."""
Quid pro quo.
Hurt the current administration's popularity by inconveniencing US citizens.
And in general, Visa free travel is a mutually beneficial deal. If the US stops giving the EU benefits, why shouldn't the EU reciprocate.
Personally, I get it but don't support it. I still appreciate my American brethren, just not their administration. We should hit back at the establishment, not the population. Big point there is reducing weapons import, and adding export tarrifs on F35 parts, perhaps ASML machines aswell.
By that logic, couttries shouldn't counter tarriff the U.S. and take it on the chin.
Sadly the innocent are always the victims under leadership decisions. The method here involves angering them and hopefully overhtrowing the leaders who caused this. we'll see how it goes here.
> Sadly the innocent are always the victims under leadership decisions
What you have stated is that, following your view, "people should impale leaders".
> angering them and hopefully overhtrowing the leaders
And that you would pester John to turn him against Jack. What should happen instead is that John will rightfully react against you (possibly both of you), with justification.
My in-laws only obtained passports in their late 60's. They took one trip to Canada, which was their only international trip, ever. My FIL is quite proud of having never seen the Pacific Ocean. They are also 3-time Trump voters. If they survive the next 3.5 years while rejection of the constitution continues, will likely be 4-time Trump voters.
These are the types of people who 1) support the policies from TFA and 2) will not notice the loss of visa-free travel.
Perhaps your idea isn't to punish the Trump voters, but to galvanize the non-Trump voters?
The article is rather funny as French are supposedly "terrible at foreign languages", but try to find a Briton that can speak anything else than English, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
People say that, but do we have any proper data, preferably on assessed language knowledge rather than claimed language knowledge?
There's some crap going on in France that English is specified as a requirement for many jobs even when it quite obviously isn't needed. So people lie and nobody cares. On the other hand, it seems to me that people in England are overly modest about their language abilities. I think if you handed out written instructions in French or German on how to win £1000 then a lot of people who wouldn't normally claim to know any foreign languages would successfully follow the instructions.
It's hard for me to be exactly confident when comparing my 25-year-old GCSE grade C (or was it D?) in French to the current numerical grading system, but I think it's it's somewhere around the peaks of these graphs: https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/04/languages-are-sti...
My grasp of French is so monumentally bad, that last time I tried to say "I can't speak French" in French, the French woman next to me didn't understand because I said it wrong.
My German is coming along OK, but only because I've been living in Berlin since late 2018.
They should put travel warnings on every country then.
The woman in question tried to self-sponsor a TN visa after being denied earlier at the Canadian border. I can understand why USCBP starts to think “this woman is trying to commit fraud” not “innocent mistake”.
I know most countries would detain and deport people attempting to commit immigration fraud.
Not sure why people should hold the US to a higher standard than other countries.
This lady is sketchy as hell. First, the U.S. revoked her visa:
> He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.
She's Canadian and lives in Canada, so she returned to Canada. But instead of applying for a visa again, she apparently flew to Mexico and tried to get in through the southern border:
> I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it.
Last I checked San Diego doesn't share a border with Canada. Why is a Canadian with a revoked Visa flying to Mexico to try and enter the U.S. through the southern border?
This whole debacle scares me.
It’s almost impossible to figure out the official reason she was flagged by the first border officer.
She had a prior denial for a work visa. Then flew into San Diego to apply the second time and got it.
Apparently, she should’ve applied via her consulate instead because of the prior denial ?
Can someone explain in non legal terms why this resulted in a visa revocation and detention?
Very likely, that as a Canadian, you can enter the US without a visa as long as you do not work. You need a TN visa+status to work. So probably entered US on passport (no visa status) and then applied for TN... during which things went poorly.
Her point about private contractors being paid by the number of people detained is an important larger warning. Privatized systems are not magically more efficient; they can just as easily be the driver of the bureaucratic labyrinth.
It's not just the US that has these draconian and abusive laws.
In the UK you can be detained at the border without being given any reasons why, you don't have the right to a lawyer and you don't have the right to NOT answer the questions of the border agents. You also have to disclose the passwords to your phone and computer.
Then,they usually seize your devices for an arbitrary amount of time before eventually releasing you.
This applies to British citizens or foreigners.
It seems that the world is slowly but surely sliding in the wrong direction.
The story is good, but there are some interesting bits they mention in passing. Keys for why this all went so wrong:
"I was granted my trade Nafta work visa, which allows Canadian and Mexican citizens to work in the US in specific professional occupations, on my second attempt... I had gone to the San Diego border the second time to apply."
So: she tried to get a work visa, was denied. Hired a San Diego lawyer, entered from Mexico, got her visa granted. Went home, tried to enter the country again, got her visa revoked and told to speak to a consulate. Then tried to enter again from Mexico, at that point she got detained.
Maybe all this could've been avoided if she did the visa paperwork through the consulate, like she was told to do, instead of showing up at a land crossing after her visa was revoked? A land crossing from a country she has no status in (Mexico), especially. Presumably she was detained because they couldn't just turn her around back into Mexico.
I read this story and it struck me as suspicious for the same reason. Peter Roberts (an immigration attorney) commented on it here a few days ago:
> That's extraordinarily unusual and in my experience has only happened when CBP believes that the applicant was lying or has a criminal record so I wouldn't base the decision on where/how to apply on this very low risk. Depending on the TN application, there are better and worse ways to apply for a TN and from an outcome standpoint, sometimes it's better to apply with CBP at the border or with CBP at a U.S. airport by flying directly to the U.S.
My sister accidentally brought a banana across the border from Canada into the US 20 years ago and because of that she gets secondary inspection every time.
Why was this flagged? Aside from being absolutely terrifying (even as an American), it's directly relevant to large swaths of HN who are/might consider coming to the US to work on an H1B or similar visa or are looking to hire people in the same way.
Bad actors like to suppress discussion uncomfortable to them. They use ambiguity in rules to cover their actions as "just following the rules!" They know full well what they're doing and why.
When I was younger I used to dream of living/working in the US. Now I’m hesitant to even visit as a tourist, despite many trips as a child (which we absolutely loved). Not worth the risk.
Not sure if you read the whole article. But what REALLY scared me is not this women's experience, but the stories of the other people she met there:
>I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
That, and a couple of other stories of people stuck there in the ICE concentration camps are crazy! I am scared right now because in a couple of months I have to travel to LA (on a tourist visa) for a connecting flight to Japan ... to think that I can be "disappeared" at immigration just because the immigration agent doesn't like me is chilling.
Make sure you have as much documentation as possible printed in triplicate.
Where you're staying, for how long, receipts and booking confirmation. Be very careful with any text messages that might sound "shady" to the very paranoid customs people.
Have an exact itinerary showing step by step where, when, who.
I don't know if it's just more media attention recently or what not, but I used to joke about not wanting to go to China because of these similar reasons. Strange feeling to recommend to friends visiting the US to now be just as careful. That story is honestly insane.
Why do people want to live in the US and jump through all these hoops and be subject to arbitrary detentions, anyway? The bureaucracy is hellish. Many other countries have decent living conditions and don't randomly mistreat the people trying to make a living, nor do they behave understanding or cruel at the whim of whoever's in office. Or if they do, it's not as bad as in the US.
Is it just that the US is closer to these people than other, saner countries? I can understand if that's the actual reason.
Also: why do border officers have so much power? It seems wrong. They are low level employees, they shouldn't be able to change your life (or trip plans) just because they feel bored and want to spice things up.
> Why do people want to live in the US and jump through all these hoops and be subject to arbitrary detentions, anyway?
Lots of people, especially those from third world countries, don’t know what they are getting into. They’ve been brainwashed into believing “the American dream” (that anyone can find good jobs, be homeowners, etc.) by movies, television, social media, and other immigrants making money in the immigration business (many of whom were, ironically, lured in by their predecessors and ended up not able to find the dream jobs they were promised). This is why you hear about people blowing $10-100k on gang trafficking services to get in from Mexico, which is super puzzling otherwise when you consider that kind of money goes a long way in their home countries.
I would again refer you to the Statue of Liberty, and what America once stood for. You might be right about the brainwashing from media, but there is an older, deeper story and promise of the United States as the land of the free.
I think there is even a song about it, "land of the free home of the brave" or something like that. I hear it occasionally at sporting events.
And it was written while slavery was still in full swing, right? And long before women were given any say in the democratic process. When did the genocides of the natives come into the picture, were they also counted among the free and the brave?
> Also: why do border officers have so much power? It seems wrong.
The US democratic process is not good at protecting small groups of disenfranchised people: Non-citizens, LGBTQ people, prisoners, etc.
Those people get the burden of making their own allies and fighting their whole lives for rights, while most voters prefer not to think about them.
Hell, black people are 12% of the population and their rights have been on the frontline for over 100 years. So many groups are even smaller.
I'm not sure if any other country does this perfectly. Rawls' veil of ignorance is extremely hard to enforce in practice, no wonder we all live in Omelas.
I have family in the US that I used to visit on a yearly basis, and as of this year I am afraid to visit them ever again. I'm an engineer with a very good income and a very stable life where I live. I would never immigrate illegally to the US to do some illegal job for scraps. And yet here we are, no one is safe. Anyone can end up in one of these hellholes.
I'd rather not play stupid games for barely a prize worth it. With other words, I don't want US immigrations officers going through my phone, seeing a Trump critical message and throwing me into a hole for two weeks. I'd rather pick safer destinations :)
If the objective is to scare people off from going to the USA, then they're doing a magnificent job. I've heard other cases of people with green cards being arrested and put in terrible conditions, with absolutely no reason given. This woman was ready to go back home and not enter the US, but instead she was dragged through hell and only released because she was Canadian. All those with different passports get subjected to their own more oppressive and never ending hells, like being deported to a prison camp in Ecuador with no idea when you'd ever be released.
The United States has always been hostile to outsiders—what’s different now is that they’re not even trying to hide it.
As a naturalized Canadian, crossing the U.S. border has always been a frustrating ordeal. Despite holding a valid Canadian passport, I’m routinely subjected to an extra hour of “security” questioning. Maybe I’m just unlucky. Or maybe it’s because I was born in an "undesirable" Middle Eastern country and have brown skin. One time I was detained for 5 hours and were questioned about "Islam" (ironically, I'm a Christian so I couldn't answer their questions).
My belongings are always searched, and I’m treated as less than human by CBP. I suspect that if you’re white, crossing from EU or elsewhere, you were used to an easier time until now.
For whatever it's worth, I'm treated this way as a white American. I'm selected for extra screening every single time I reenter the country. Though, I don't think it's ever been longer that 30 minutes or so. I don't know why but some combination of having a beard, being naturally anxious and having traveled to "unusual" countries -- at least by American standards. Crossing the border makes for a guaranteed panic attack and I've let my passport expire. It's a damn shame, too, because it's depriving my kids of invaluable life experiences and has brought my relationship with my spouse (who loves to travel) to the brink on multiple occasions.
US Border control is always worse than any EU-country (as a white EU-resident I might add). We have lots of umlauts in our names äöå etc. which can seriously mess up you ESTA or travel booking unless you double and triple check :)
But still India had the absolute worst border control I've ever experienced. I probably rather sleep on a cold prison floor a couple of days than having to manually reenter all my information eight times!
I mean, as US citizen I find my interactions with CBP to be easy but it’s because their options are admit me or arrest me vs German guard who questioned me for 15 minutes if my personal laptop was because I was planning on working. Anytime you are entering a country you have right to be in, it’s generally easier.
> Or maybe it’s because I was born in an "undesirable" Middle Eastern country and have brown skin. One time I was detained for 5 hours and were questioned about "Islam" (ironically, I'm a Christian so I couldn't answer their questions).
Scary levels of prejudice and ignorance there. Prejudice against Muslims and I am guessing not knowing about Middle Eastern Christians exist.
I've never been to the US, because I've been scared of these things, for decades, after reading stories about it. I've traveled to Canada and Mexico multiple times, but one time I made the mistake of having a connecting flight in Florida (first and last time).
As expected, I was interrogated by police-looking people about my motivations, yelled at by some other ones to walk faster and use some machine faster, and almost missed my connecting flight because of the "some questions", even though I never actually intended to enter the US, since I was on my way to Mexico.
Me too. A lot of people who are widely travelled have told me that the US is the most hostile country to enter so, although there are places and people I would love to visit, I have never been.
Was traveling to the US that fraught before 9/11? I think people forget just how much 9/11 damaged the national psyche which to me honestly explains things like Trump.
Pre 9/11 we could cross with nothing more than a driver's license, making trips with no reason other than to goof off. I even did the same to Mexico. Passports were for overseas or countries that required visas.
This whole situation -coupled with the outright bans or obstacles in giving visas to people from several countries- cannot but have unpredictable consequences. For example, right now, I cannot imagine any big academic international conference keep taking place in the US. And if they do, they should get boycotted. US right now is neither accessible nor safe for foreign citizens. And I bet recruiting or holding to highly skilled labour force will start being a problem too.
The venue I published in before dropping out of my PhD purposefully alternated between the US and international locations for these reasons. (Some folks would complain that Canada "didn't count", which would of course greatly offend the Canadians present.)
One prominent professor was screamed at, nearly tazed, and had their car torn apart because the CBP thought they were homeless, which would be amusing if this senior researcher had not been obviously traumatized by the experience.
I have heard terrible stories from Canadian academics for years through presidencies of "both sides", and I'm glad this story is getting the traction it deserves but we also need to be mindful we did not arrive at this moment overnight.
> For example, right now, I cannot imagine any big academic international conference keep taking place in the US.
There is a language standards committee meeting that was going to take place in the US that is now not because too many attendees think the US is no longer a safe place to travel to. We're already seeing this damage take place.
Really sad the sibling comment got flagged to death. I code in English! Everyone should code in English! No more C++, no more language standards committees, no more nonstandard languages!
We should actually call it American, not English! The fact that several centuries ago some people in England spoke this language does not give them rights to call it with their place's name, when AMERICA is NOW so GREAT. I code in American, and AMERICAN is the greatest language of all!
And plus we do not need any standards committee for that, just an executive order.
It’s not just foreign citizens: it’s anyone who doesn’t look white. If you’re a U.S. citizen maybe you’ll get the privilege of being let go in less than a week.
Which were already planned. And still, right now increasingly more people cannot go or wont go to them. Let's see after this summer how things are gonna go.
From the article: "Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts."
Yeah, it’s basically “drained pool politics”. The threat of extrajudicial imprisonment objectively makes the US a less attractive place for business and will hurt us economically. The current administration simply cares
more about resegregating the country and will cut off all our noses to spite our faces.
One thing I'm keeping an eye on is if Canada eventually updates its travel advisory warning for the United States https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/united-states (Currently still at 'normal precautions')
I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure all police forces should have very strong and active civilian oversight, because they seem to attract (or maybe even nurture) some very aggressive people.
In my country, some police forces have skulls on their uniforms and vehicles. How twisted is that?
You'll find people of Mexican ethnicity widely represented in ICE, Border Patrol, and other such orgs. People looking in from the outside might find this odd, but it's really quite simple. Getting into the US legally is hard, expensive, time consuming, and oh god - the paperwork. And eventually gaining citizenship makes gaining entry look like the easiest thing ever. So you go through all of this, and then somebody else pays some smugglers (enriching some of the worst of humanity), crosses illegally and now 'Yay - Yo soy Americano, hombre!' How do you think the former is going to feel about the latter?
It's also not just some American or Mexican thing. The same is true in many expat communities (of Americans) around the world. Actually maintaining your visa and other stuff in many places is frequently a massive PITA, expensive, time consuming, and so on. If somebody's there with the claim 'No you see bro, don't you understand I'm just an "undocumented migrant"', he's going to be held in very poor regard by most people there legally.
So even at the most basic level - illegal immigration is deeply unfair to people we want in the country. And that's just one aspect among many. The tales of things gone wrong, or simply of the emotional appeal of somebody trying to make a better life for themselves, can be very appealing - but it's but one dimension of an issue that has affects many, and has many consequences.
ICE is often the employer of last resort for wannabe cops who can't get jobs at other agencies due to low IQ, poor physical fitness, criminal history, misconduct, etc.
Genuinely. Are they all Trump fans that say "finally we can do what we always wanted to do" or what?
I mean there's the law or some executive order but there's also leeway in implementing. I am not qualified to judge but it just seems to be some sort of preemptive obedience.
I get the impression that a lot of school bullies get into law enforcement. they don't have the skills/credentials to do anything else and they have the streak of cruelty that you need to fit in.
I knew a guy in my early 20's, not white, who wanted to be a cop. Once he told me "If I have a bad day, everyone gonna have a bad day." I dont talk to him anymore because he became a cop and turned into a fucking asshole.
"The bishop's smile, a gilded, hollow thing, hides taxman's greed, and whispers of the king; the knight's sworn oath, a rusted, broken chain, while village elders plot for whispered, selfish gain; no judge's word, nor lord's decree rings true, in thirteen twelve, what's left for us to do?"
Sensible - meeting new hires counts as "work", which is strictly not included under just the ESTA, so you'd have to decide whether to lie to the border guards about it or risk this treatment.
Smart immigrants shouldn't migrate to US anymore, period. Not if you have more than just very short-sighted dollar signs on your eyes. Its just plain out stupid thing to do, to be treated worse than garbage. This is how institutionalized xenophobia looks like.
The fact is, I've read very similar articles about how US treats any non-US citizens a decade or two ago. Nothing changed dramatically, people just bring these up now due to current admin. In US, if you are not a citizen, you are subhuman and treated as such, directly by government. Why the fuck would anybody with any amount of dignity cause it upon themselves willingly?
Europe can offer you tons of opportunities and treat you with dignity. Good quality of life and happiness is much easier to achieve, much less stress, your health and education of your kids will be taken care of. Or Australia. Heck, almost any other free place but current US, and many places experience much more actual personal freedom currently.
We can certainly do more than just boycott some nazi ev cars.
As a Brit: be careful about bigging up how Europe treats immigrants, because the Mediterranean issue has really upped the brutality of immigration enforcement and has resulted in some countries making it illegal to rescue drowning people.
Ironically somewhat corroborated by the photo in the article. What is the solution for Italy and Greece with these massive coast lines and islands? The refugees deliberately lose their passports. If the rescuers dumped them in a random North African country, everything would be fine. But they want to import as many as possible for ideological reasons.
> What is the solution for Italy and Greece with these massive coast lines and islands?
The solution is to once again enable applying for asylum at the embassies and consulates. Then nobody has to drown.
> If the rescuers dumped them in a random North African country, everything would be fine.
Apart from the many people being killed by random North African country, like what is happening currently with migrants in Libya. That's not fine at all.
> But they want to import as many as possible for ideological reasons.
> The solution is to once again enable applying for asylum at the embassies and consulates. Then nobody has to drown.
So you think if those countries don't accept everyone that wants to enter then it's ok for people to try to enter illegally? That's not how borders work.
> Apart from the many people being killed by random North African country, like what is happening currently with migrants in Libya. That's not fine at all.
They can go to a neighboring country without being "stranded" at sea where they need "rescuing".
> Humanitarian reasons, not ideological.
Humanitarian reasons do not require you to pick up people near the coast of Africa and and instead of taking them back back to where they came from bring them to ports much further away. That's purely ideological. One could even call it treasonous.
> The solution is to once again enable applying for asylum at the embassies and consulates. Then nobody has to drown.
> So you think if those countries don't accept everyone that wants to enter then it's ok for people to try to enter illegally?
Right, so let's unpack this. There is no way to apply for asylum at embassies. It was previously possible, but it's not possible anymore. If you want to apply for asylum, you have to be physically present in the country where you want to apply. Since applying for asylum is legal (it's a guaranteed human right and some countries try to respect at least a subset of human rights, wonder for how long), it is also legal to enter a country for the purpose of applying for asylum, no matter what everyone else says.
> countries don't accept everyone
This is not about accepting anyone. Asylum is a totally different legal concept than migration. Asylum is granted (or not), not accepted. People that are drowning in the Med. sea are applying for asylum, if they survive. For most of them, it will not be granted, but they are exercising their rights. People have a right to apply for asylum, countries have a right to grant or refuse at will.
> They can go to a neighboring country without being "stranded" at sea where they need "rescuing".
Everyone has the right not to be killed. Just a basic respect to other human beings would be welcome at this stage.
> Humanitarian reasons do not require you to pick up people near the coast of Africa...
Yes they do, there are again legal reasons for that. The laws can be changed, but until then it is indeed the only legal thing to do. And also some people don't enjoy seeing other people drowning.
> Presumably because their home country treats them even worse
True or not, the important part of why people emigrate is because they believe it to be better. US has been really good at propaganda for a long time, and many outsiders (used to) believe that the US truly is the land of the free, although all the evidence pointed in the other direction.
> Presumably because their home country treats them even worse? At least that's the point of the refugee program.
I personally know multiple non-US citizens who did their PhD at MIT. Most of them faced the requirement to temporarily move to the US as a major but necessary nuisance. I also know others who explicitly opted to skip their MIT application to enroll instead in an European program, with all the hoop jumping required to apply for visas being a major factor.
This was a decade or so ago. I assure you that right now things are not looking at better.
Also, people like you should really try to touch grass and try to learn how things are back in the real world. For a few decades now the US is far from being the top choice. In fact, the US doesn't even feature in the world's top 20 in quality of life, in spite of everything. What exactly do you think is happening?
> Smart immigrants shouldn't migrate to US anymore, period. Not if you have more than just very short-sighted dollar signs on your eyes. Its just plain out stupid thing to do, to be treated worse than garbage. This is how institutionalized xenophobia looks like.
No. The US is still the best place in the world for immigrants. There's no other place in the world (barring maybe Canada) where as many people from as many other countries and ethnicities can feel welcome and a part of society. I have several friends who move to European countries (mostly Germany but also the Netherlands) and they never felt like they belonged, while in the US I feel like everyone else. What's going on right now is a temporary shift in this policy, but hopefully the pendulum will swing back.
London at this point is mostly immigrants from the third world. Huge swaths of Frankfurt and Paris are the same way.
Sure, if you immigrate to a random town (population = 1500) in the French Alps from Africa, I grant that you'll never fit in. But the same goes if you immigrate to a small Iowa farming town (population = 1500) from Ecquador.
>Europe can offer you tons of opportunities and treat you with dignity. Good quality of life and happiness is much easier to achieve
I was wondering how long it would take for this post to generate comments from the smug "as a European" crowd of people with deluded notions of superiority for the complex European continent.
I detest the screaming orangutan politics of Trump and his hardcore followers but the U.S. as a whole mostly remains a fantastic melting pot destination for immigrants like it's always been. One 4-year presidency (after a largely ineffectual and sometimes laughable previous one) does not have to mold the history or legacy of a country. By that logic, barely a state in Europe would be worth recommending at all given the continent's none too distant history or barbaric mistreatment of immigrants.
Even in modern Europe, no, treatment with dignity is not very guaranteed. The old racism of many European countries is seething just below the surface and if it¿s applied even to other Europeans, you can imagine how it might be felt by immigrants from the many countries that have for decades migrated to the U.S and integrated amazingly well for the most part.
Shitting on the U.S has always been de jure in certain circles, and now more than previously (partly deserved thanks to Trump) but it shouldn't happen at the expense of reality.
>I was wondering how long it would take for this post to generate comments from the smug "as a European" crowd of people with deluded notions of superiority for the complex European continent.
Dozen of country are better than US, people point that out, us-american get offended lmao, relax, we didn't even started pointing to oceania and Asian as better alternative than US
"One 4-year presidency does not have to mold the history or legacy of a country." What actually happens after 4 years though? Isn't the concern, the supreme court ruling that the president is above the law? So laws like, you can't run for more than 2 terms, you must have a democratic election where everyone gets a vote, basically all laws around elections, no longer need be followed. Or for that matter any other laws. A president could seemingly behave like Hitler and face no justice. Trump won't live forever, but what's to stop him handing over to someone similar? (BTW to your main point, I agree indeed Europe has its major issues too)
Thanks, the EU is full and has enough immigrants. Why should EU citizens pay outrageous rents, compete against the whole world with their degrees, get lower wages and have prime property bought up by Chinese and Russian oligarchs?
(This does not mean that people should be treated brutally at the border.)
Lack of offspring is a direct result of cultural and financial policies that tell people they shouldn't settle down and prevent them from affording it. You can fix that instead of giving up your country's identity.
The "immigration crisis" is silently saving the retirement programs of EU countries. People are xenophobic to the point of willingly engaging in self sabotaging their countries.
People would literally rather die impoverished, uncared for, and with no dignity in a failing system than maybe have a few brown people around who casually speak a different language and yet, by the testimony of everyone I've ever asked work ten times harder than any local for literally anything.
Like, it's not a perfect solution, there are growing pains, but an adult someone else paid to give a high school education is an insanely good resource. The US's entire gimmick and history has been getting millions of poor immigrants with different ideas and a shred of hope and putting them to work building our country.
But nononono we definitely didn't do this bullshit already with chinese, japanese, german, italian, irish, african, jewish, polish, etc etc etc people. Don't you know it's utterly impossible for people from another country to ever get along with locals? They definitely don't consider themselves just "American" after three generations very reliably, no that would be too easy!
God forbid people in ten generations have slightly darker skin I guess.
> People would literally rather die impoverished, uncared for, and with no dignity in a failing system
False equivalence. You don't have to give up your country to fix it.
> than maybe have a few brown people around who casually speak a different language
The state of most larger european cities is already well beyond that, bringing with it tons of problems.
> "work ten times harder than any local for literally anything"
That's literally saying they help companies regress the standard of living that locals have fought for.
Meanwhile overall these economic migrants are a net negative financial impact overall because most of them do not come to work but to benefit from generous social programs that they have never paid into.
What country are you even talking about? You seem very determined to tell everyone this is the way the world is, but steadfastly fail to show any evidence.
People don't want the responsibility of having kids and raising them properly, so they substitute their posterity for foreigners as a bandaid fix. EU is truly a yikes.
If the rents go up and a native couple that still remembers the living standards of their parents is forced to raise a family in two rooms, they will not have children. Immigrants used to that situation might.
There are other solutions, e.g. that the wealthy boomers pay with their houses for their retirements or are forced to rent out their huge properties.
The retirement ponzi scheme needs to stop at some point anyway. With automation one might also need fewer workers.
Most importantly, many immigrants receive social security and are not employed.
Isn't it obvious that this has more to do with oligarchs hoarding wealth than it does with "being full" of immigrants? Immigrants are nowhere near numerous enough to be doing the kind of damage you claim, but the extremely wealthy do have a stranglehold on resources.
It's both. And immigrants help the wealthy class become even richer by providing cheap labor while everyone makes up the rest in social security payments.
Are you making the frequently repeated but always false assertion that immigrants don't pay into social security?
You know who's not paying their fair share into social security in any country? It's the rich, yo! It's the rich! By a wide margin!
To be perfectly clear, I don't care one way or the other about more immigration or less immigration.
What I am saying is that compound interest and the ability to purchase assets is going to continue to draw wealth away from everyone except the ultra wealthy, and immigration policy has effectively nothing to do with that.
Calling on everyone to hate each other is going to prevent us from acting together to solve this problem. We could instead work together, unionize, vote for policies and politicians that won't let the ultra wealthy continue to hoard their gold like dragons.
As a non american: America can get away with a lot more than this and still be an attractive place to try to move to. SF and many other places offer job opportunities the EU can't, and despite this and much more pain of trying to work there it's still worth it.
> SF and many other places offer job opportunities the EU can't,
Besides a job that just pays more money, what sort of unique opportunities exists in the US that doesn't exist anywhere in Europe? Genuinely curious, as I can't seem to think of any on my own.
Judging by the "intellectual purge" that just started, I'm not sure working as a professor at a college (world class or not) is such a great job opportunity. But I'm not close to academia at all, so maybe I'm wrong.
It's important to note that basically all university rankings are massively, massively skewed by the native English speaking countries.
Additionally, lots of UK and US universities have huge endowments which definitely helps.
That's not to say that there aren't great Universities there, but really international students go to the US (and some of the EU) so that they have a better chance of working there post study.
New? I have advised people to not go to the US ever since they instituted the requirement to provide any and all social media profiles they ever had. Way too many chances for some off-context tweet from a decade or two ago to lead to getting refused at the border by CBP with no recourse.
Additionally, anyone who ever got arrested in their life - and be it a conviction for marijuana smoking as a kid and no matter if you actually got convicted, released or the records expunged/sealed - will either have to lie on their application (which is a bad idea because no one knows if the NSA doesn't have taps on other countries' judiciary systems) or have an additional arbitrary hurdle to pass at the border.
And on top of that you're in a conundrum: you have to book hotels, cars and flights prior to applying for a visa because you need that to prove you're not going to overstay... but if your visa/ESTA application fails, you're out a lot of money for nothing.
It's not just permanent or temporary immigration, tourists have been affected as well for years. But hey, the US seems to be willing to lose thousands of dollars for each tourist they scare off, so if it's worth it for them, I'll gladly spend my money somewhere I feel welcomed instead of like a threat.
All the 45th/47th admin has done is adding even more uncertainty to an already steaming hot pile of dung. At least our government has reacted and updated the hints on travels to the US [1], but shied away for now from issuing an official travel warning.
A better advice would be to avoid social media. You don't have to broadcast your private life to the world but if you do you need to live with the fact that the world includes border control - and it included them even before they started asking for your accounts explicitly.
Sorry, but only modalities are a new thing, not the discretionary part with all disregard to proportion. Already decades ago people (and high profile people) were stopped at the custom and sent back without justification (reconstructed as "apparent dislike") with the first flight.
If your goal is to reduce illegal immigration, a much cheaper way is to heavily fine anyone who employs someone without a valid work permit. For most illegal immigrants the motivation is economic and this would reduce that motivation and bring in money from the fines instead of incurring massive cost from detention and deportation without the negative side effect (?) of deterring tourists and legal immigrants.
(Of course, I think the entire goal is economic foot shooting)
The UK does fine employers, its not sufficient to stop it because people work through dodgy contractors.
The UK also fines landlords which has caused problems for people who look or sound foreign, including some British citizens (especially poor ones who tend not to have passports which are the easiest documents to check).
The best proposal I have heard is to provide a cash reward to illegal immigrants for turning in people who knowingly employ them illegally.
The fact that governments do not try these solutions makes me suspect they want to keep that supply of cheap labour - most illegals here work for well under minimum wage.
Yeah, it's totally doable for the US to deport all the illegal immigrants. The consequences would most likely be pretty high inflation, but it's totally doable.
While I dislike the UK requirement to have a passport on your first day at work, I understand why it exists.
The dodgy contractors take a markup for taking the risk away from employers. A lot of them are criminals with connections to people smugglers, are both willing and able to get away with things someone with a more legitimate business would not. They are a layer of plausible deniability.
Currently, it seems the tactics are scaring people who already arrived and are residents. Is that also a good thing or just unintended consequence of trying to scare away the dangerous outsiders?
What do you think the point is of having immigration laws? It’s to control how many immigrants come in and which ones. If you essentially make all the illegal immigration “legal” then you’ve erased the difference.
> He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.
> I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it.
This lady is Canadian. She has her visa revoked. Then she goes back to an immigration office on the San Diego border to apply for a visa? Last I checked, no part of the San Diego border is in Canada. So how did she find herself in U.S. custody with a revoked visa?
9 FAM 403.11-3(B) (U) When You May Not Revoke A Visa
(CT:VISA-1463; 02-01-2022)
a. (U) You do not have the authority to revoke a visa based on a suspected ineligibility or based on derogatory information that is insufficient to support an ineligibility finding, other than a revocation based on driving under the influence (DUI). A consular revocation must be based on an actual finding that the individual is ineligible for the visa.
b. (U) Under no circumstances should you revoke a visa when the individual is in the United States, or after the individual has commenced an uninterrupted journey to the United States, other than a revocation based on driving under the influence (DUI). Outside of the DUI exception, revocations of individuals in, or en route to, the United States may only be done by the Department's Visa Office of Screening, Analysis, and Coordination (CA/VO/SAC).
20 years after that poem was affixed to the Statue of Liberty, a new immigration law was passed that practically banned almost all immigration. It was passed, because the American population rejected the immigration policy that that poem represented.
I don't think that 120 years later, bringing up that poem is meant to evoke some kind of universal American spirit. This is not what Americans actually believed back then, and it's not what Americans believe today. That poem has been rejected at the ballot box.
I’m 100% Bangladeshi on both sides going back to before anyone knows. I wasn’t even born here.
And yes, of course that’s what I’m afraid of! My family left a country full of people like us to come here. Why would we want millions of others coming behind us to turn here into there?
This administration does not want to reduce illegal immigration. They just want to create fear and headlines. If you wanted to reduce illegal immigration, you have a very easy way of doing it through mandating e-verify.
I agree. It seems like the goal is not reducing illegal immigration, but creating fear. This is why they’re coming after lawful residents for things like political speech.
> Millions of illegal immigrants and putative refugees came over in the last four years
Refugees are good. We do welcome your hurdled masses yearning to be free, after all. People should not be afraid to come to America, and I find the sentiment that they should to be disgusting.
As far as illegal crossings, 4 years is a very odd and politicized way to say that; you don’t care about the millions of crossings that happened in the 4 years before?
Obama deported more people than anyone in history, and Biden deported more than Trump. Deporting “suspected gang members” with no due process is antithetical to the American system. We purport to be a nation of laws and justice.
If you want to decrease illegal crossings then do that - but illegally invoking _war powers_ to perform extraordinary rendition as a deterrent is plainly not the way to do it.
Because this has historically worked so well with the War On Drugs and the sheer amount of people America puts into prison, yeah? Weird how no matter how hard we ratchet up draconian enforcement measures it doesn't seem to work.
And in this scenario, we're chasing away tourists, foreign talent and more. But hey, at least those sweet private prisons get their kickback from the layers of corruption.
Illegal border crossings have dropped to almost zero. The policy is working. Private ICE detention centers don’t get any money if people don’t cross the border illegally.
Border apprehensions have dropped to historic lows. That does not mean border crossings have dropped to historic lows. I also don't fully trust data coming out of this administration.
Lowers guard costs. If you turn down the lights, you need more guards and they are more at risk. Lights on, they can easily see and react so you need fewer.
Her visa was revoked, and then she entered the US again. That's an immigration offense that can get you detained at the border (any international airport).
Wow this sort of scenario is my nightmare. I'm an immigrant in Canada and even though I've been able to go to the US for years, I really have no interest in going, partially due to fear of something like this happening to me.
I could easily drive to the US in less than two hours, but no thanks.
As a young man I travelled a lot (US only twice, Canada once) in democracies and authoritarian regimes and quickly took the habit of always having some sort of paper on me (passport, copy of the visa and passport, city/tax registration...) depending on the place.
I was controlled countless times, I thought at the time I didn't stand out much but I probably did. I was always unlikely to be detained, but vehicle / luggage searches, questions etc can be a huge waste of time so better show some paperwork that will cut the questioning short and not risk missing your bus/flight/train/meeting etc. It sometimes even helped to get into nightclubs...
> That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”
If you don't understand the threat of an authoritarian dictatorship for its inhabitants, this is it; a state apparatus that is completely opaque, offers no explanation for its actions (other than jingoistic rhetoric), and provides no recourse and certainly no remedy.
people okay with this (and there are many on hn that are as bas been made evident in the last months) simply do not understand that none of their privilege (education/money/status) has any effect on the implacable "I don't know"; if you get snapped up for whatever reason, whatever small innocuous infraction or perceived grievance (or manipulation of the system by someone that doesn't like you), you will go into the same blackhole. they will be telling your lawyers, your family, the (remaining) press "I don't know" and you will be rotting until some whim sets you free (or not).
This is what America did in the Middle East after 9/11. Just collect up some random people. Claim they are terrorists and send them to Guantanamo bay where they are tortured and raped for a few years for no reason other than to claim they are solving terrorism.
There was an interesting prelude: once the flight restrictions were lifted after 9/11, the FBI packed up 140-160 relatives of Osama Bin Laden living in USA and quietly flew them out of the country.
Assuming four generations attend, that would work out to over four kids per couple. Older generations often had a lot of kids, but that still sounds like a pretty high number to me.
First gen: 1 person, plus 1 spouse, for 2 people.
Second gen: 4 children of the 1st gen, plus 4 spouses, for 8 additional people.
Third gen: 16 children of the 2nd gen, plus 16 spouses, for 32 additional people.
Fourth gen: 64 young children, no spouses.
Adds up to 106 people in total. For 140-160 people, that would be even more children per couple. Unless I mixed the numbers up somewhere, that sounds like a lot of kids, no?
In my neck of the woods that would only be considered a "family gathering". You will see that group on a fairly regular basis (holidays, birthdays, quiet weekend, etc.) A "family reunion", indicating reuniting of family that doesn't see each other so often, extends further – at least five or even six generations.
But also 4 kids is nothing for a Bin Laden. Maybe if you multiply by 10...!
I'm assuming there's a mixup here with what you take the word "generation" to mean? A generation is generally all the people of a rough age group, so your parents and your spouse's parents are from the same generation. A generation is usually considered to be roughly 25-30 years wide, since that's about when people have kids. I wouldn't really say it's realistic for six generations to attend, that would mean everyone involved had their kids once they turned 18 and the oldest one attending is still 108 years old.
No mixup, but the intent was to mean where the most recent common ancestor goes back five, maybe six generations. The eldest generations may not be in attendance (or alive), but their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren... That is the point where, around here, family starts to fragment enough that they rarely see each other but still maintain enough ties to want to occasionally reunite.
Question for folks not in the USA: has your willingness to travel to the United States changed? Would you attend a conference/meeting/university in the US?
America First means America Isolated.
Also, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen “America first” as a political slogan, and, well, Dr Seuss said it best.
This is normal immigration. People caught in these "constitution free"/immigration zones need to be processed a lot faster.
It's a safe bet this girl got out "fast" because of the outside pressure. We need to be hiring a lot more immigration judges/personnel that adjudicate and process these people out of the public/private prison complex.
I have a close relationship with a Chinese national that is going through the US immigration process.
His view on situations like this are enlightening.
He knows the difference between true dictatorships and political wranglings in the news. No system is perfect, and bad things happen to good people every day.
In this circumstance, it looks like this person didn't follow all the appropriate rules related to the entering the US. (visa issues)
My Chinese friend does not understand why people try to break the rules, get caught, and cry foul. Your treatment in his home country would be considerably worse. He is following all the laws to get US citizenship. Should his due diligence be considered a waste of time?
I also had a relative that overstayed her visa in a foreign country and was constantly afraid of being deported. Why should the expectations of foreigners in US be different from every other country in the world?
She was refused to enter the US, which is fine, this is the US rights to deny if you don't follow due process. But she didn't try to hide it or overstay her visa, she was coming through the border and was forthcoming about applying for the visa.
But instead of sending her back, they put her in jail for 2 weeks. Could have been longer without media attention. There was no process for her, once within the walls, to get herself out.
> Why should the expectations of foreigners in US be different from every other country in the world?
Are you telling me this is common in any other country in the world to be denied entry and then put in jail instead of just be sent back?
The norm pretty much worldwide is that if you present yourself at a border crossing and are found inadmissible, you are refused entry and turned around. Some people have wrongly used the word "deport", but that isn't what it is: Technically she will have never even been in the country until granted entry, so she should have just been refused entry.
She didn't sneak into the US and get caught walking through the desert. She didn't overstay an expired visa. She did what she was legally required to do and presented herself at a lawful border crossing to apply for the necessary visa. And for those who note that she previously had been refused the same visa, by her story the conditions of her visa had changed leading to a new, unrelated application, which again is how it is supposed to work.
And when they refuse that visa, thus denying entry, they say "sorry, you can't come in" and you have to go back to where you came from, which in this case was Mexico. Even if she flew in on an international flight and they refused entry they would make her stay in the international terminal (which is technically not "in" country) until a flight out happens.
That she was quite literally arrested on some unknown pretence is bizarre, and seems like the "feed the private prison" ploy.
Of course police in the US are now demanding that Canadians answer the question "Canada or the United States", so zero Canadians should be travelling in that country. Law has broken down into some bizarre, hyper-partisan charade, and the end result is going to be civil war.
> treatment in his home country would be considerably worse.
If you enter PRC on bad VISA you chill at the airport transit area and deported on next available flight. None of this for profit multi week detention to milk ICE contracts.
And if you come back and try again at a different location? Customs checks aren't perfect so it makes sense to up the consequences if you are found to be trying to work around them.
Guardian is a reputable, sound left-wing newspaper in the UK.
I'm not a fan, because I'm not in favour of State-run services, but they make what seems to me to be a sound point; that where ICE is private, but State funded, processing people takes the longest possible time because the longer the process takes, the more money they earn. This would also be why conditions are brutal and so inhumane; it's cheaper.
Charlie Munger I think wrote something like if you give people stupid incentives, you get stupid outcomes.
On the face of it, this looks like that, with the added complication the lunatics now running place would say this treatment is desirable.
Question then is how do you set up a State-funded privately run system to behave in the ways you do want, with rapid processing and humane treatment of people.
>> The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
>> Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
Yeah, the prisons are privately operated. The cynic in me would bet that the agents have some sort of KPI or even kickback from these companies for filling the cells and costing the taxpayer $$$.
So deny her entry and let her airline deal with returning her? Why did she need to be imprisoned? International Law says that if you're denied entry the onus is on your flight carrier to return you, which is a private matter between you and the carrier.
Denying entry is for honest mistakes. If someone is actively committing fraud you need to up the consequences in order to effectively deter others from trying their luck.
If she was suspected of fraud then inform, arrest her and make plans for this suspicion to be tested by trial, no? As I understand it she was "detained" rather than arrested, told outright that she had not committed a criminal offence, and was offered no further insight into her situation or when/where/how she would be released.
That’s exactly why, as a Canadian, I don’t travel to US, or even transit through US. Border was always a terrible and hostile experience. I’ll fly longer and pay more to avoid this.
I actually spent two days of "quality" time at Otay Mesa detention center (or the male version of it nearby) some 20+ years ago.
I shudder to think what it would be like in the current climate.
I had overstayed my student visa but that was the extent of my crime. For that I had the pleasure of being shackled and bussed from the inland checkpoint (the one on 5 freeway) to the detention center.
The worst part is the uncertainty, once you are at a detention center - you have no idea what/when is something going to happen.
There is no information flow besides my one phone call.
You have to be happy with your daily burritos and then hope you make some friends and no enemies. Weird thing happens to your brain in these type of uncertain places, you sort of dissociate from what is happening to you. Some sort of defense mechanism I suppose.
I mean how do you respond when the boyfriend of the "main" guy at the facility asks "Don't I know you from somewhere?".
In the end I was incredibly lucky - I actually knew a lawyer to call - and that must have helped me. Most of the people inside had been in detention for weeks with only rough knowledge that at some point they would be deported or possibly set free.
So I had my hearing in front of judge some months later and I agreed for "voluntary departure" and 10 year ban.
Since then I am on some sort of blacklist for life.
Each time I've come back to US, I've have had to spend 2-3 hours at CPB interview room, which if you want to hear human misery from around the world is the place to be. There is some sort of queue but it is rather haphazard.
Again you have this incredible uncertainty when you will get out of this room.
Again, I am extremely lucky, I've had very pleasant CPB officers so far and they are either indifferent or sympathetic to my case.
Last time I was simply given passport without explanation after 2 hour wait with no interview at all!
Then again I've only traveled to US when current administration is not aggressively posturing.
It's always been bad, but the difference is that Republicans want it to be bad and get worse. They delight in cruelty and anyone who doesn't see that has been sold a lie
There was another similar story reported previously [1].
On that same week, I traveled to Canada. I'm from America but not the US, I have a tourist visa for Canada valid for the next 5 years or so. I've entered Canada many times in the past, zero issues. Zero criminal records, not even traffic violations on my record in any country whatsoever.
Upon scanning my passport I was immediately sent to a different queue for inspection. Similar behavior, when the border officer asked me why I am in Canada I told them I was visiting, when they asked what I do for a living I told them I didn't have a job, I have a healthy dose of savings that allow me to not work for a while and just travel, as I have done several times in the past.
They told me that was "shady", I was interrogated by two officers for about an hour, they asked me about everything, then was sent to a room to wait (it was a comfortable place, to their favor), about half an hour later they come back and tell me I'm allowed to enter but I have to report back to them, physically, in a month and leave the country the same day.
Obviously I didn't have it as bad as these two girls, but in my own timeline, it was definitely the worse border crossing experience I've ever had.
A few weeks before that I was in Mexico, and the border officers where also quite intrusive and thorough with everybody. This almost never happens in Mexico, everyone just goes in, no questions asked.
Since all of this has happened during these past weeks, my conclusion is that, in general, border officials in North America have been told to be very though with all immigrants, perhaps fueled by the demands of the Trump administration. I also think, unfortunately, that this situation will only get worse as borders and international travel will become more and more scrutinized.
Absolutely terrifying. I'm sure it doesn't technically class as "kidnapping" since the law must have some loophole saying they can detain you indefinitely for any reason (or none at all in this case) but it's what I'd call it.
And her business is selling drinks infused with hemp which is federally illegal.
A TN visa is a non immigrant visa, you should not be building a life in the US with it.
Those people are stuck in detention for weeks and months at a time because there's thousands upon thousands of them, and they all get to have a hearing of some sort. Those hearings take time to process.
> I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations.
This is code for 'illegal alien.' Previous administrations were willfully not enforcing the law, granting temporary status to those who weren't actually eligible. The new administration is not playing that game. Catch and release is over. If you're here unlawfully, you're going to be detained until you have a hearing, which is going to send you back to where you came from most likely.
No, it just means they were awaiting a hearing, and had a temporary authorization. That's what you get when you show up to the country and say 'asylum.'
> Why is it so hard to write "ICE" ? It is an acronym.
Setting acronyms in all-caps is a common American stylistic choice, but far from universal in English language writing; initial-cap for acronyms and all-caps for non-acronym initialisms is also a common style, globally, in written English.
> The officer I spoke to was kind but told me that, due to my previous issues, I needed to apply for my visa through the consulate. I told her I hadn’t been aware I needed to apply that way, but had no problem doing it.
"If she stays so kind and accepts what she's been told without protesting, she must be hiding something. That's criminal enough for us."
>There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.
Okay so, not legal then?
These articles are always like this. "omg I just overstayed a little bit!!! uwu"
Btw, I am European and will never hopefully have to visit the USA again.
> There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.
Do you seriously believe that because this student technically violated the law before rectifying her paperwork, that throwing her in an overcrowded detainment center is good practice?
What do you expect, that anyone can violate the law and get off without consequences as long as they say "sorry"? Taking responsibility includes accepting consequences.
These things wouldn't definitely happen if a reciprocity policy would be in effect. The problem is that if you apply this policy against the US, a country pays its consequences either directly or indirectly. If all countries at least in America agree on to apply reciprocity, maybe things would change a little.
I think boycotting the US would be a more effective option, and I say that as someone who lives in FL (which depends on international tourism heavily).
I already generally hate the experience of travelling through ports of entry into the U.S, have been searched numerous times, and often on the way back into Canada but it's usually much less onerous; every country I've visited has been much more tolerable, regardless of Trump. I'm travelling in soon for a reason that's almost work for the first time—attending a work related event—and technically should be able to visa-free, but these stories are making me a bit nervous. Flying 10hrs back is not ideal, but being stuck for 2 weeks would fuck up my year.
> That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”
I'm disappointed, but not surprised. Observing how Americans function, it's very common for them to just let someone higher-up in the system take the responsibility, until the decision reaches a person who is so far removed from the human element they cannot possibly care. Case in point: once I messaged on a public Slack channel "hey I did this thing X, not sure if that's what I was supposed to do". Nobody said anything to me, two weeks later I got scheduled "just a quick sync" with HR. The HR employee was obviously on a different continent.
I'm sorry, but the article seems to obscure a key fact, which is that she travelled to the US AFTER her initial visa was revoked.
It seems dumb to travel to a country that has explicitly revoked your visa without being granted a new one!
Nobody stopped her from getting on a plane because nobody checks if Canadians have a visa or not since they don't need one for short visits or stays. In this case her visa was revoked, so she was probably flagged in the system as temporarily not allowed in.
This is speculation, but maybe somebody here can weigh on the technicalities of the situation.
This is not to excuse the inhumane treatment, which if true is disgusting. Dealing with the CBP is always negative, even as a citizen (when returning from abroad).
Edit:
This really stretches credulity:
> I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”
Edit2 (more dumb):
> There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning
>Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?
Really? Not having your passport on you is the big mistake here?
Edit 3 (Even more dumb):
> One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.
> Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.
Trying to game the asylum system by lying to immigration authorities.
I'm not sure how all these cases are supposed to sustain the main thrust of the article, which is that all these people are innocent victims of some Kafkaesque nightmare for which they bear no responsibility. They clearly do.
We shouldn't be treating people like this period, but this is just really stupid behavior.
So she probably was alright with the law (short stay) but not with the system if I understand correctly. Still, wouldn't her detention be arbitrary and thus fall foul of habeas corpus principles which I have no doubt are in the US law?
I'm sorry, what? You think that stretches credulity?
Oh man you must be lucky to not live around these types of people.
I remember the first time I was told I was going to burn in hell for eternity. At my first job at 16 by some coworkers in their 20s and 30s because I wasn't participating in their constant religion talk so it made it clear I wasn't part of "the group".
Yes, I think it's a generally rare occurrence to be confronted this way about one's belief in God in the US, having lived here most of my life. Perhaps the circumstances warrant it, but I think the statement that the nurse had "never seen a Canadian there before" and that her plight elicited that statement from the nurse is farfetched, seeing as the nurse would have seen much much worse from other detainees.
The story is pretty incredible on its face, so I don't see why some skepticism on the way it's being reported isn't justified, especially in the face of reflexive hysteria over a descent into fascism we're supposedly facing.
Again, if true, it is disgusting, and I'm negatively disposed towards ICE and the CPB in general. But I'd like to know whether this is a case of a really odd situation paired with bad judgement and/or bad advice, or something much worse.
You think it's "reflexive hysteria" to be worried about fascism? Let me ask: when exactly would you recognize it? When would you "step in"?
In Italy, would it be in 1919 when Mussolini founded his party? Or 1922 when he marched on Rome? Maybe 1924 when opposition leader Matteotti was murdered? Or 1926 when all other parties were banned?
For Nazi Germany, was January 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor too early to worry? March 1933 when he got emergency powers? 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws? 1938 with Kristallnacht?
By the time it's obvious enough to satisfy skeptics like you, it's usually too late. What we're seeing now...invoking the Alien Enemies Act, mass detention, ideological purges of government workers, demonizing immigrants, these aren't random events. They're recognizable patterns.
History doesn't announce itself with a banner saying "THIS IS FASCISM NOW." It creeps in while people like you call concerns "hysteria."
Sigh, when will people stop reaching for Hitler / Mussolini analogies to explain every political development they witness in their lives? It really is a remarkable achievement by the propaganda departments of the victors of the 2nd world war that 80 years later this is still the only framework by which their citizens understand the world.
History didn't start in 1918, and if you think the political situation in the US right now is anything like interwar Europe, then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
> It really is a remarkable achievement by the propaganda departments of the victors of the 2nd world war [...]
We know about the horrors of the Third Reich and the Holocaust in large part a) because of the survivors and their accounts of what they lived through and because b) the Nazis kept meticulous records of everything they were doing.
Your dismissal misses the point. I didn't claim "every political development" parallels fascism, I outlined specific concerning patterns: the Alien Enemies Act, mass detention, ideological purges, and demonizing outgroups.
History provides frameworks for recognizing dangerous patterns. If you prefer earlier examples: Consider the Roman Republic's fall where Sulla targeted political enemies, Caesar dismantled institutional checks, or Augustus centralized power while maintaining democratic facades. Or Napoleon's transformation from revolutionary to emperor using emergency powers and populist appeals.
The point isn't perfect historical parallels, it's recognizing warning signs before it's too late. Dismissing valid concerns with sighs and bridge-selling metaphors adds nothing substantive.
This is an important story of US decline. This woman was here to do business. To work with Americans.
If you're flagging this because you're a part of the tech right, who thinks these policies are somehow good for you, maybe hold off on that flag button and let the discussion play out here. Think about what happens if people from the rest of the world are terrified of working within this country.
I mean, at this point, do I just flag everything on the front page too? Is that the only recourse I have as a user in good faith? What other method do I have to show my displeasure with this subset of the community?
> do I just flag everything on the front page too?
Well, if it's all spam/off-topic, I guess flag it all. But unlikely it's all spam, this story certainly isn't, so not sure how it got flagged. Feels extremely relevant to various people who go to conferences, events and even just want to vacation.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Edit: Since someone commented the "If they'd cover it on TV news it's offtopic" line from the rules but promptly deleted their comment, this is the section that might relevant too:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I'd personally consider lawful residents getting sent to detention-centers for no good reasons being "they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon", but we all think differently I suppose.
I think I will just skip HN in the future. The number of relevant post to tech and business in the US now that are getting flagged is becoming ridiculous.
I know it supposedly doesn't work, but @dang : brigade flagging (and user-based unflagging/vouching of submissions) really needs to be looked at, in light of the current political reality.
There's a substantive article here, and a substantive discussion, and it's user shadow-banned off HN because someone didn't like the political tilt.
HN is going to start shedding exactly the sort of quality users that make it great if this isn't addressed at scale.
It is ridiculous, extremely so. It's also bizarre, disturbing, and honestly kind of demeaning. Not to mention dangerous, for the tech community and many more.
And it is very likely being condoned right from the top. Garry Tan is a big DOGE fan on Twitter, as is PG.
Let me offer my approval (over the argument, not necessarily about the conclusion). It is not just about assessing reality, but _there is_ a large and greatly important component of, simply, assessing reality!
First of all, it's about an entrepreneur traveling to the US for a startup, which is directly relevant to a significant proportion of YCombinator founders themselves.
Beyond its direct relevance to the core founding audience of HN, it is not clickbait or wantonly inflammatory, and is clearly of interest to many based on the comment activity and votes.
This is ironic. I thought there was a big push from the right for less censorship and less moderation in social media. Now we’re flagging posts because the comment section may get heated.
This has been HN policy since the beginning, and while HN is usually still quite unpleasant, policies like this one are largely responsible for preventing it from being worse. There are social contexts where discussions of topics like US immigration policy can do good rather than harm, but HN is not one of them.
This is not true, at least according to dang if I recall correctly. There was a change in moderation strategy since the pg days. The way I remember dang's own explanation was that pg was more hands off in his moderation of political topics. Sure, you can say that it wasn't the same community back then, less flamewars etc, but the fact of the matter is the creator of this site moderated things slightly differently.
Maybe you won't find it ironic, but the creator of HN is often sharing posts on twitter that would be flagged to oblivion if someone other than him posted it on here. Regardless of all the reasonable explanations (this is a tech site, journalists/politicians are on twitter), it's still an interesting datapoint that the creator of this forum in this day and age thinks it's more important spending his own time talking politics on twitter more than talking tech on this forum. I'm going to go out on limb and bet that he does this not because he enjoys or prefers talking politics but because he feels compelled to do so more due to the unprecendented nature of certain events.
I think people who say "do it on twitter like pg, instead of HN" forget that pg's positive twitter experience is largely due to the fact that he has a million plus followers on twitter and people in other fields know who he is so he is able to get high value engagement that counteracts the trolls. Your average HN user is not going to have pg's twitter experience, and so they'd rather try their luck posting in the best forum that's hospitable to them, HN.
>But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang
dang explicitly states they do it differently than pg it:
when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today [0]
Are you kidding? There are so many VCs here who have the resources to push for fair treatment of immigrants and foreign visitors! HN is the perfect place to discuss this.
I am not kidding. The problem is that the discussion collapses into an unpersuasive and uninformative partisan flamewar, so it does not improve the choices that those VCs will make. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43413819 for a more in-depth discussion.
Sometimes things get messy discussing important topics, we should err on the side of sunshine rather than darkness for these discussions. HN has a lot of powerful and wealthy people who have a responsibility to protect the system they relied on to become rich and powerful, but instead these people ignore the discussion because it doesn’t mesh with their ideas that America is the greatest.
See my connect from a few comments ago where I mention how interesting it is we can discuss authoritarian slides everywhere else except when it happens in America. It’s almost a conspiracy, IMO.
Also, I can understand demonizing the current admin, they’re flaunting the most important laws that protect us, and for some here the USA is poised to upend their lives or worse.
In any case, this discussion isn’t interesting, and constant complaints of bad behavior are stifling the actual discussion more than those flagged, dead comments that started shit.
I regret that you think that, but I’m not explaining to you why you’re wrong, it’s as pointless as you trying to convince me that I’m demonizing anyone with that comment.
Have you read this discussion? It was already heated, although the comments posted recently have been better.
Before greggyb asked why it was flagged, the top comments were about "the dumbest bully from their grade school" and "team grade school bullies". Does that not sound like flag-worthy discussion to you?
Name calling like that buries legitimate discussion, like the claim that she was not in fact eligible for a TN visa because she "worked for" a startup she co-founded (Holy! Water).
"NAFTA specifically prohibits self-employment for TN visa holders. This restriction poses challenges for entrepreneurs who wish to start a business in the United States."
When the people in charge are acting like the dumbest bully from my grade school, then yes, it does sound like valid critism and a legitimate point of discussion.
It's a race issue. We only know about this story at all because the woman is a milk-white Canadian. It's not supposed to happen to people like her, which is makes it extra outrageous.
While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.
Another commenter (now deleted) made the claim that, saying an issue shouldn't be partisan is “just saying ‘everyone should believe what I do’ but in the lexicon of people who look down their nose at the general public.” They added, “The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like ‘don't murder people’ (but even then the minutia become debatable).” Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because it's a widely held viewpoint, and there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.
There are definitely people who mean, "Shouldn't be a partisan issue," that way, but what I mean when I say it is that from the clash of opposing opinions comes the spark of insight, and partisan struggles in which arguments are soldiers do not permit that process to happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...
I have frequently observed variants of the following exchange in mathematics classrooms:
Professor [writing on blackboard]: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student sitting in the third row of the audience: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: Hmm. [pauses]
Student: Because the x from substituting f doesn't cancel.
Professor: Yes, you're right. So you see that this just reduces down to x³ + a.
Sometimes it goes the other way, and the student is the mistaken one. Neither participant goes into the discussion on the premise that "everyone should believe what they do"; rather, they believe that by discussing the issue they can arrive at an agreement, which may involve changing their own mind. Converting the discussion into partisan struggle prevents that from happening. Imagine what would have happened in my example if the discussion had instead gone as follows:
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: I don't remember paying tuition to come and see you lecture.
Or, alternatively:
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: You didn't even do a modicum of research. It's x³ + a.
Or, how about this?
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: No, it's x³ + a.
Professor: You're being manipulated into thinking that this factor is being canceled incorrectly by the horrible evil professor.
Or, how about this?
Professor: So you see that this just reduces down to x² + a.
Student: "x²" ? Êtes-vous fou ? Restez avec x³ !
This difference comes out in its purest form in mathematics, but it's also possible for discussion and consultation to reach agreement on empirical and even moral issues. But partisanship is an obstacle in that process.
And here in lies the problem: wedge issues. Taking something, blowing it out of proportion and turning into a partisan issue on purpose. Abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration. It becomes impossible to have nuanced, rational discussion about those topics, and its on purpose. One side thrives off of making them emotional, hot-button issues. Shunning discussion of it here or elsewhere because it's an emotional, hot-button topic, is just conceding to the side making it like that.
Abortion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration are inherently deeply emotional issues, but that doesn't in itself make them partisan. It increases the risk that they will become partisan, but often enough and in enough places they have not been. Politicians—not just on one side or even on just two sides—generate support for themselves personally and for the political class as a whole by converting them into partisan issues. Venkatesh Rao has written a very thought-provoking analysis of the current dynamics of the situation in https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/.
> The question we all need to ask is - how many people are personally victimized by transgender Americans? Gay Americans? Green card holders? Once you start asking those questions, the current conservative zeitgeist becomes untenable, and the platform quickly crumbles.
I agree that that statement is technically correct, but I have observed various forms of it in American media, and here's my issue with it: the Conservative platform seems to not have run on it at all.
Broadly, I don't see the point in straw manning (conflating all immigration with illegal immigration, for example) in a good faith discussion. I've seen it a huge amount in left wing media, but I think honestly have to dismiss that discussion as bad faith and try and desperately search for the remainder.
Specifically, they haven't run on "gay Americans" that I've seen at all (I'm not sure what that would look like, even), and they haven't run on green card holders. They have run on trans ideation and surgery for children, and trans women in female spaces, and illegal immigration, it's true, but that is far more specific, and it's those precise issues that got them elected.
This is simply not true. If you turn on Fox News or even listen to the current administration talk, they are talking about transgender people.
Hell, Ted Cruz ran an ad depicting transgender children as big burly men who want to hurt YOUR daughters on the soccer field. He's a senator. He's got bigger fish to fry than that.
Even if you truly believe conservatives aren't making a boogeyman out of nothing, which is very hard to believe, but even if you do - if you look at the legislation being proposed it doesn't target the narrow cases you think it does. It harms all trans people. A lot of it targets gender-affirming care for adults.
And then immigration. How many people have illegally been detained now? Are we in the few hundreds? Where's their due process? I won't mince words. If you think the Trump administration is only targeting "illegal" immigrants, you are stupid.
Not that we didn't see any of this coming. For months leading up to this administration, the left warned about Project 2025 and it's radical ideals. We reminded you that this has nothing to do with children. With illegal immigrants. This has to do with every American. But you, evidently, continue to fall for obvious lies. After a certain point, we must deduce that you have subscribed to some religion, and it is out of our hands.
To be blunt, your perspective does not align with reality.
The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades. And nobody, and I do mean nobody, cared. Ultimately you are not inspecting penises in the Men's room. You, yourself, do not care.
What do you believe transgender people did in the 70s, or 80s, or 90s? You've never thought about it because you know, deep down, it's not a real issue. But, if you do think about it - or better yet, just ask them - you'd know they've already been doing these things.
Women do not run into burly men with beards when they go to the women's room. Do you know why? Because those transgender men have always gone to the men's room, and have never been questioned. Never been questioned, until conservatives decided to question it.
I have been alive for a long time now. We always knew trans people existed. Nobody batted an eye. Conservatives too, including conservatives that exist still, and including even you. Yes, that's correct - I am speaking for you, because I know you were not protesting these things in the 2010s, or the 2000s, or the 90s, or the 80s, or the 70s.
So no, you don't care, and no, you yourself believe these are not real issues. You might not say that now, because as I've already stated, the conservatives brought it into the zeitgeist to distract you. And now, you are distracted. Before, you were not.
And, to you and other conservatives, you should focus. The economy is in danger. Due process is being violated. Our constitution is in hot water.
The American right has been able to propagandize you, and others, so completely and so severely, that you not only do not pay attention to these issues, but you legitimately think you willingly chose to not pay attention. You didn't choose anything, this was carefully crafted for you. I challenge you to think back to an earlier time you were alive and question what you saw then.
> The reality is that transgender Americans have been doing these things, all these things, for many decades.
Do you have any evidence for that?
For example, do you have evidence of any of these happening in the US before, say, 1990?
- any openly transgender athlete participating in sports on the team of their preferred gender rather than their sex assigned at birth?
- large numbers of children receiving "gender-affirming" hormones or puberty blockers?
- transgender prisoners being housed with the sex they identify as, regardless of whether they actually "present as" that sex?
- a transgender woman being accepted to attend a all-women college?
Maybe all of these happened quietly, so common and uncontroversial that they were totally unremarked upon. But surely there's some evidence that they occurred?
For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.
Nice steel manning, of course transgender people without bottom surgery don’t walk into nude spas. If you find a single example, great, find me the hundreds of examples you folks claim there are which threaten you. You’re not arguing honestly, just coming up with wild situations that don’t match reality. You may be uninformed, or misinformed, I suggest you actually read more than surface articles on Fox News.
I don't claim that there are hundreds of examples of this.
My claim:
- A: today, the left, broadly construed, insists that there is a right for transgender women to go into women-only spaces, including nude spas. For my point, it doesn't matter how often this "right" is exercised - merely that the left asserts that there is such a right.
- B: this was not true of the left 6 years ago (or 45 years ago).
- Consteval's claim that the left is merely defending "settled," uncontroversial rights that trans people have had for decades is therefore wrong.
Evidence for A:
In 2021, a 52 year old sex offender who had been convicted in multiple instances of indecent exposure went into a nude spa. It caused a huge controversy with dueling protests and counterprotests.
In San Francisco, a Russian nude spa announced a policy that 1 night a month would be "ladies only" for people who were assigned that sex at birth, to provide a "phallus-free environment." For that decision, they were investigated by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. They reversed their policy after this intervention.
In Washington, a Korean spa which requires nudity for some services restricted people from male genitalia from entering the facility. A transgender woman with male genitalia was denied service at the facility and sued: https://www.courthousenews.com/after-banning-trans-women-was...
So it seems to me that either:
- transgender women without bottom surgery could go into nude spas in 1970 without issue, or
- I'm wrong about A, and the left doesn't actually insist that trans women have a right to women-only spaces, or
- Consteval is mistaken, and people on the left are in fact pushing for more rights for transgender people that were not settled 6 years ago (or 55 years ago).
I'm asking for some evidence I'm wrong, you're just saying it doesn't really matter if I'm wrong - it's unlikely to affect me personally. Maybe! Nevertheless...
Are you interested in hearing from the perspective of a trans person who mostly doesn't agree with the person you've been replying to, but does feel there's gaps in your perspective here?
I ask this way especially because I don't know if you'll actually see this since I see one of the comments is flagged, and given how it's been most of a day already.
I would be very interested, thank you. The flag is probably justified since HN is not really the place for these culture war things :) but I'm genuinely trying to understand the perspective here, because it does seem like a big gap between my understanding (the Democratic party has moved left on these issues) and theirs (the Democratic party is just playing defense on these issues).
I personally wonder if people were arguing and complaining that America was moving left or failing back when racial integration was the big fight. I’m sure there were people arguing that letting non-whites drink from the same water fountains was dangerous for white women. Think about that a bit while you lament transgender people.
You're proving my point here - the original comment claimed that the left was merely defending the pre-existing, settled rights that trans people have "always" had against the right's aggression, I'm saying that the left has been actively pushing for change and new rights. I think the left sees trans rights as a continuation of the civil rights movement. This is an empirical question, entirely separate from the question of whether this is a good thing.
No, I'm saying you're derailing the conversation with your "empricism", congratulations. That's what you people do around here. If there are simply a few examples of the "danger" you people claim, then why is it such a problem? Answer is that there is no problem, it's a made up issue that is being used to divide us politically, like abortion or gay rights or weed. It doesn't matter if "the democrats are moving left", you're either for the rights of people to exist as they wish, or you are for limitations on how people can express themselves in this way. I'm finished with this line of conversation, you have wasted enough of my time.
Could you explain the racial analogy in more detail please? It's not obvious how restricting males from using female-only spaces is similar in concept or principle to racial segregation.
> For me it simply doesn't pass the laugh test that a trans woman with a penis could walk into a nude spa in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s without anyone batting an eye.
They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy. You would very much like to believe that is true, because you believe transwomen are inherently perverted sexual deviants. Not unlike how conservatives viewed homosexuals. Of course, this is not so. This is one of the most classical forms of a projection. Meaning, you cannot view transwomen in a light that isn't sexual, so you project your own sexual objectification onto them. Again, exactly how was done with homosexuals in the past. Even today, there are a lot of people I've met who can't see a gay man without thinking "dick in ass dick in ass!". That's not the homosexual's fault.
On the topic of gender affirming care: the primary recipients of gender affirming has always been cisgender people. I take testosterone myself, because unfortunately I lost my testicles to cancer. I identify as a man and I want to present as a man as much as possible, so I take testosterone. And again, with puberty blockers, same thing - mostly cisgender people.
To be clear, gender affirming care for minors typically includes things like a new haircut and new wardrobe. In some cases, particularly for teens, puberty blockers may temporarily be used. The idea that minors are mutilating themselves is, surprise, another conservative fantasy.
But, even then, the Conservative's desire to get in the way of the rights of parents, their children, and their doctors, is very out of character. If you told conservative's 10 years ago that the government is going to want to vet what treatment their children can and cannot receive, they would be aghast. Even today they would be. After all, a lot of them have a big issue with the principle behind vaccine mandates.
> They weren't, and they still aren't. The idea that transwomen want to be around ciswomen and hang brain is a conservative fantasy.
I think you're probably right that the vast majority of trans women are completely uninterested in such a thing. And yet:
In San Francisco activists protested a policy that excluded trans women from a nude bathhouse one night per month for a "phallus free" womens night. They were investigated by the city's Human Rights Commission after numerous reports and reversed course - no more "phallus free" nights. In Washington State a trans activist sued a nude female-only Korean spa for not providing her with service because of her male genitalia.
Are these specific people merely fighting back to try to retain a right that was already "settled" back in 1970? Or are they trying to claim a new right?
While these sub-ideologies did exist, they were fringe. This is now a primary issue for conservatives and it has been brought into the zeitgeist and their political platforms. That is different. Most, close to all, conservatives were not considering this in the late 70s. I know you know that.
Not as fringe as you may believe. Raymond's book sold a lot of copies. But more impactfully, radical feminist ideas on this topic and others continued to develop, and became increasingly influential from then to now.
One aspect of this that often isn't considered is how women with shared feminist ideals but differing political backgrounds have been working together across the aisle. As a result, radical feminists on the left have had significant influence on conservative policymakers via these informal collaborations. Look at EO 14168 for example.
I grew up in locker rooms. I started swimming competitively at age 7. The whole, "you were actually surrounded by trans people your whole life and never knew it till 5 years ago!" is absolutely delusional and my guess is you don't actually have much experience in men's rooms at all.
This will blow your mind: in Hawaiian culture, transgender people held a place of honor and respect. Hawaii is part of America (illegally overthrown), so there’s a cultural history of transgender people that you can point to here that is respectful, though today a lot of Hawaiians use it as a derogatory term due to hate brought in with Christianity and continental culture.
I don’t get why it’s such a threat, please explain that rather than trying to erase transgender people. Gays also have a very long history, and they’re also in the crosshairs today, why them? Did gays not exist to you in the past as well?
I have, of course, been in Men's rooms. In my experiences in Men's rooms, I have seen remarkably few penises.
These transgender people did not suddenly pop out of nowhere. For context, I know several trans women who are in their 50s, and transitioned a long time ago.
I see with transgender people what I saw with homosexuals. That they were some type of phenomena, a new social contagion. That they are on the attack. I thought, surely the general population would never be stupid enough to fall for such an obvious falsehood yet again. Of course they've always existed.
All of the boys in the swim club changed together. All the boys in middle school and high school sports changed together. As an adult, working out at gyms and rec centers, all the men change and shower and talk and joke butt naked. Half the YMCAs I've been to over the years have a group of old guys that will tease you for being shy. The high school swim team I was on was... wild, I guess I'll say. Not buying what you're selling, sorry.
There are children who are transgender today and they're not changing in front of other's.
I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.
For the record, nobody actually cares if you're "buying what I'm selling". You're missing the big picture here. These people aren't a threat to anyone, and to suggest otherwise is un-American. You can either face the reality that lays before you, or you can continue to be ridiculed for having obviously false beliefs. The world around you doesn't rely on you "buying" anything.
> I don't know where this delusional that dudes are just hanging brain around women is coming from. You're right, that doesn't happen. That's a conservative's wet dream. I'm sure you, and others, would be beyond ecstatic if transgender people were doing that. Maybe then, you'd have a smidge of justification for all this.
Me: "I want our society to allow businesses to prohibit people with penises from receiving certain services, for example a nude massage at a women-only spa."
You: "This is not happening, it's a conservative's wet dream, maybe if it were happening you'd have a smidge of justification for all this."
If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it? Like, if no trans women want to hang out naked with natal women, is it a problem for Wi Spa or Olympus Spa or Archimedes Banya to say "as a nude facility that serves women, we are uncomfortable having phalluses on the premise"? Why are there protests and lawsuits and investigations when people implement these policies?
Do you personally think that those policies are objectionable? Do you think they should be illegal?
> If it's not happening, why not allow businesses to prohibit it?
Well, we aren't.
But, more specifically, the stuff the left does have a problem with is not doing this. You, and other conservatives, are trying to play innocent. This "what, lil ole me?" approach to policy making and the publicity associated with it does not fly.
If you read the bills, any of them, take your pick, proposed by states across the US you would understand they aren't doing innocuous things like this. They are targeting transgender people and crossdressers in a much more extreme fashion. Limiting adults access to medical care, enforcing dress codes in public, and even making their very existence untenable.
You, as, I'm assuming, a proponent of government restraint should be against these. These affect non-trans people as well, and set a dangerous precedent for what the government is allowed to know. It harms privacy, autonomy, healthcare.
When these other vast downsides are brought up, you, predictably, put on the "nooo we're not going to do that!" charade. Surprise, after this administration we can no longer believe that. Practically everything everyone thought was off limits is no longer so. You can continue to play stupid, yes. But you should be careful - after a certain point, people might start believing you are just stupid.
You seem more interested in debating the imaginary version of me in your head than in having an actual discussion here, so have fun, I think you can do that on your own.
You and another poster in this thread keep trying strawman me with "trans people aren't a threat" stuff but I never said anything about any threat. I responded, explicitly, to your post that trans people have actually been passing in their preferred changing rooms forever, and I can tell you from years of personal experience (perhaps if I said, "my lived experience", you'd listen better?) that they have not. As another posted has pointed out, women have been complaining about this for decades. Your paragraph about "hanging brain" and conservative wet dreams is simply unhinged and your attempt at putting words in my mouth is unimpressive.
> They added, "The only nonpartisan issues are the most basic of things that all societies have like "don't murder people" (but even then the minutia become debatable)." Although the comment has been deleted, I think this merits a little further exploration, because there is some truth to it, though I disagree more than I agree.
I don't think there is anything to be gained from enumerating the cases when one or another society has condoned killing people, which are so numerous and diverse that they may have accounted for the majority of all of the people who have died. Everyone is aware that such cases exist, I think.
> While I agree with you, it is observably true that many people take different positions on the issue and then demonize those who disagree with them, converting it into a partisan issue.
Sure, but you have to draw a line somewhere. Even on HN, there are opinions that you can't express (repeatedly) without being banned, even though there are clearly people with such opinions. Otherwise it's the Nazi bar problem - everyone who's not a Nazi will eventually leave.
Where exactly to draw the line is left as an exercise to the reader, but I suspect that some people just don't like where the line is currently being drawn.
I am not sure what opinion you thought I was trying to express. Evidently some sort of anti-censorship argument? To the contrary, my comment was explaining that the issue of US immigration has become highly polarized, and discussing highly polarized issues on HN is generally destructive, so probably we shouldn't attempt to discuss the issue here. This is closer to being a pro-censorship argument than an anti-censorship argument. (Later I added an illustration of how well a discussion can go without polarization, and how radically that differs from the current comment thread, but you may not have seen that.)
Your comment begins by signaling partial disagreement ("Sure, but") but then makes no argument tending to show that the issue is not highly polarized or that HN is a good place to discuss highly polarized issues. Instead, it discusses other topics relating to social group dynamics, but not in a way that is relevant to the comment you were replying to.
You're advocating for avoiding polarised discussions because they degenerate quickly. I'm only pointing out that that's not the only option: you could allow these discussions while ruthlessly silencing bad faith actors (for whatever definition of "bad faith" you want to adopt). Those are both "pro-censorship" stances (although I prefer the word "moderation" to "censorship"), but they're going about it in different ways.
That's what I mean by the Nazi bar problem[0]: you can't solve it by just not allowing certain topics to be discussed, because eventually in some completely tangential situation, a nasty flamewar is going to erupt and people who are not Nazis will be appalled that there are Nazis here.
[0]: I'm explicitly not saying that certain opinions expressed on HN are literal Nazi opinions, the Nazi bar problem is just a convenient analogy for the situation when one group of people holds opinions that are utterly appalling to many other people that frequent the same space.
I see. Thank you for clarifying. I indeed had not understood you.
It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.
Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything specific because I understand that the problem is hard. But I feel like some people want to have their cake and eat it too. If you don't silence certain types of discourse, you alienate certain participants (and HN understands this to a degree - you can't use racial slurs here, for example). Maybe that's acceptable - but you just have to be honest about it.
Unfortunately, it also seems to be true that the guidelines aren't enforced on discussions about the Trump administration. We used to have informative, curious discussions about politics here, but it seems like Hacker News is no longer capable of that, so I think these flamewars are best left to one of the many willing political battlegrounds like reddit or X.
I've noticed this a ton lately. So, so many posts completely brigaded. Regardless of if the flag is removed, it can easily stop discussion and visibility of the thread. I emailed Dang about it when I first noticed it happening, and the response...
```
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you—it's been a crazy last few days!
Users flagged that one. We can only guess why users flag things, but there have been so many posts about the current political goings-on that I think there's a lot of fatigue about it. In this case the article was more of an opinion piece than a factual report, so it's probably not one that we'd override the flags on.
Daniel (dang)
```
So the system is setup to allow this abuse. It's weaponizing the flag system. I'm sure this type of flagging is already automated by how fast some posts disappear on /new.
What's to stop someone from buying enough old accounts and mass flagging other topics to chill discussion / dissent? This could easily be done for a few grand. Rotate accounts doing the flagging and make sure they engage in some "high quality" discussion from time to time to avoid detection. Make sure the same groups of accounts aren't flagging the same posts, etc.
E.g. "I never want to see a freaking post about Rust again"...
Note: I had to wait hours to post this comment because my account was rate limited. I'm assuming because I'm involved in this discussion at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157524
Now by the time I can actually post, this thread is well off the front page. This site is really good at effectively silencing people.
Dang, I'd like to know the specific comments where I am going over the line, or are too "low-quality". I have been called out once or twice over the last decade by you, and have agreed that I could have conducted myself better in those instances and tried not to fall back into those patterns.
there's no need to buy old accounts (lol?), there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have extremely strong anti-immigration beliefs, who continue to cheer on the Republican-backed express cruelty for whatever reasons, and some of these people are active on HN
There is if you want to do this systematically rather than adhoc.
> there are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have extremely strong anti-immigration beliefs
Totally understood, and know they are here and will flag things they disagree with while still being a real human.
I wasn't saying that is specifically what's happening with this post. I assume that's more what's happening when posts in /newest are flagged within a few min.
That part was just saying "this really wouldn't be hard to do if anyone put in just a little bit of effort, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening".
I’ve emailed Dan and received the same response. My suspicions completely mirror yours.
I find this line particularly weak:
> We can only guess why users flag things
It’s not that hard to do some clustering analysis to see if bad-faith actors are repeatedly flagging posts in a coordinated manner. Maybe he’s trying to avoid giving away anti-spam secret sauce, but that doesn’t seem likely given the language of the copypasta. Speaking for myself, I would like any sort of assurance that anything other than a 100% laissez-faire approach to flag abuse is happening.
Sure, you can take anything to the extreme and then they'll have to mop that up.
Until that's reality, the system mostly works. Let us know if you ever figure out the perfect flagging system where someone can't "buy old accounts en masse" or something
Sorry, I strongly disagree. Comparing detaining someone for 10 days (for, apparently, a genuine violation of immigration law - self-employment on a TN visa) to killing twenty million people is in no way reasonable, and it's certainly not informative or curious. It's just a snarky ideological barb and a violation of those guidelines.
The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
If someone appears with invalid paperwork to a border crossing you simply turn them away, or in the case of international flights you keep them in a room for a couple of hours and send them back next flight home. You ban her for X years.
She was in some kind of kafkaesque simulacrum of a legal system with "constitutional free zones" and for-profit "detention" centers. Nobody knew anything inside or outside, only with a considerable amount of resources and luck they we are able to find her in the system. This is closer to the stories of my family during a dictatorship, moving earth and heaven to find close ones in jail when initially the police "didn't know anything about that". They were lucky, a lot of people never found their loved ones.
Sure, the US is not there (yet), but even then she could've been there 10 months or more there if she wasn't Canadian or wealthy.
So no, it's not a "snarky ideological barb" it's a good point that doesn't meet your aesthetic standards, at most the "skeptics like you" part makes it a bit too personal. Your strawman about his point seems worse imo.
> The plainly explained point is that democratic backsliding is gradual. The road to 20 million dead isn't someone suddenly declaring "we are the baddies", then a week later they start digging the mass graves.
This is so important and so often overlooked. The Nazis took power in 1933, but the persecution of e.g. Jews ramped up very gradually. At first, it was mostly boycotts and prohibiting Jews from working in government jobs. In 1935, they were stripped of citizen rights. In 1938, Jews had to change their names and carry a mark in their passport and Jewish children couldn't attend school anymore, and later that year Jewish shops were systematically destroyed and many Jews rounded up and imprisoned. But it wasn't until the start of WWII in 1939 that mass killings actually started taking place, and only in 1942 at the Wannsee conference was the holocaust as we know it today actually planned.
Many Jews stayed in Germany until it was too late because they didn't think that it could get worse.
That ellipsis that you put in my comment really is doing some heavy lifting here. Seems like you ignored everything else I said between those statements. It wasn't about one person being in jail for 10 days at all. I actually didn't mention that because I don't think it's one of the most pressing issues even if it is another example on the pile.
I was responding to someone dismissing concerns as "reflexive hysteria." Historical parallels aren't uncivil, they help examine patterns. The HN guidelines discourage flamewars and personal attacks, neither of which I did. I challenged a characterization, not the person. If discussing historical parallels to current events is now considered inappropriate for HN, that would significantly narrow meaningful conversation beyond what the guidelines actually state.
HN has never been unbiased. It is funded by a tech VC company and targeted at tech entrepreneurs. It has always promoted crypto and AI scams to an eager audience and pumped up one useless company that added nothing of value to the world after another.
Despite that there has been a general interest in "tech" and clever things and intelligent discussion here that appeals to a reasonably broad community so the place works.
The massive wealth concentration and power amongst a very few, the Paypal mafia, Andreeson etc has led them down a path that puts them at odds with the rest of us. Regardless of our diverse politics regular engineers aren't going to have more individual or economic freedom in a world controlled by a small group of oligarchs. They care about us about as much as we care about ants.
I wouldn't say the tech world has blessed the regime but many unquestionably revere the financiers of the tech world. We (techies) for all our talk of individual liberties have a problem with cult like thinking. Most of us aren't stupid and we can justify our positions, any position. And while some flagging of discussions might be sock puppets or bots, the truth is a lot of people still thoroughly believe the hype.
Not sure it's that HN has blessed the regime so much as it's flagging them so it can get back to tech etc rather than 527 trump/musk stories. There's always reddit etc.
As someone on neither side of that aisle I can tell you it is the smothering effect of attempting any logical discussion in those topics. The smothering effect comes from one side more often than not.
The best part of it all is that you can post like the above with no clear side chosen and the people whom it applies to will react to it negatively as well.
It is a good point, and I've long been a proponent of this, that everyone needs to flag the excessive elements of "their side" more in the current climate.
Humans are humans. Some humans are dumb and emotion-prone. Some humans who are dumb and emotion-prone think their bad behavior is justified because they're on the side of justice/righteousness.
It's not enough, in our current climate, to look the other way because someone is on a similar team...
Reinvigorating honest, fair discussion requires everyone interact more positively.
In my experience during this last Trump campaign, the most effective way to rile conservatives is not to lie, but rather to tell the truth. Meaning, taking Trump at his word and repeating the words he said, in direct quotes.
I think what's happening is that a lot of his constituents like him due to his personality, but they don't necessarily believe he is honest. So, they're betting on his dishonesty and using that as a justification for their support. Meaning, supporting Trump is really not so bad if you assume Trump isn't going to do half the things he says he is. Then, it's like you're supporting an almost normal candidate.
Well, in that case Trummp has done a fantastic job proving those people wrong. But that still confuses me: who can like this personality when it's on the world platform, and not just a TV stereotype?
Could we at least elect someone likeable like Bill Nye if we're voting based on "personality"?
Most Americans don’t care for someone put together. That’s interpreted as pretentious.
They want someone a bit stupid, who says stupid things. They want someone who’s an asshole because asshole is basically synonymous with badass protagonist.
I think there's also a reasonable proportion of readers who want "political" topics removed from HN, even if the topic intersects with HN-relevant topics.
(I'm not one of them, but I believe many are. I appreciate where they are coming from.)
I hadn't noticed that, but I believe it. Many Americans I know are in "blinders on" mode because the intensity and frequency of American political angst is overwhelming them.
I doubt it's even percentages. It may be as low as a dozen users lurking on /new (or automating the process) to flag based on keywords from the title or article.
There is a lot of discussion in this thread on the implications to tech - you see people actively changing their travel plans as a result. We are going to lose tech workers because of how dangerous it is becoming to make the slightest misstep while traveling in the US.
> There's little-to-no discussion about the implications on tech, based on my reading of the comments.
You commented 3 hours in on a topic that was flagged for hours. How much discussion did you expect period?
The implications are obvious: other countries's businesses will be terrified reading this and refuse to enter the country. No one wants their liasons arrested by a foreign country. I can imagine many businesses in he EU marking the US as a no-fly zone over this story
Given your concern for accuracy why don’t you provide specifics about what the issues with her side of the story are, or at least a link to an article that does? Because so far you’ve only made vague accusations. What illegal drugs was she selling? The article mentions the company she worked for made a drink with hemp. Is that what you’re referring to?
1) It violates the HN guideline that if it's covered by mainstream news it's likely off-topic.
2) It's too political in nature, and violates the HN guideline that political topics are likely off-topic.
3) It violates the HN guideline that the content should be things that good hackers would find intellectually satisfying. Raging partisan hate at each other about the latest political/social snafu is not intellectually satisfying. It has nothing to do with engineering, science, technology, etc., it's purely a social/political issue.
4) Such a submission only draws a mass amount of hate and partisan flamebait which, once again, does not belong on HN. You have every other site on the internet available to discuss political issues.
5) Your appeal to popularity, saying it has lots of engagement and therefore belongs here, has zero connection to the HN guidelines for what belongs here. I don't care if 1 person or 1 billion people engage with it. It doesn't change the fact that it's off-topic and decreases the quality of the site.
It's about someone with an denied visa trying to work around due immigration process (going to a consulate) by attempting instead to get to a far away border crossing and attempting a crossing there because, in her own recollection of the events, she knew/assumed the office was less strict.
And while it's a non story it's framed as a scandal because it resonate with the current political climate and the character is sympathetic to the narrative (productive and upstanding character compared to the ones dominating the previous news cycle on the topic)
>I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”
>“I believe God brought you here for a reason,” she said. “I know it feels like your life is in a million pieces, but you will be OK. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help others.”
You've got to be fucked in the head to think this is an appropriate thing to do as an agent that's part of a federal process. Keep your god out of work!
As an atheist, I too stopped and re-read that particular section to think how I felt about it.
In the end, we don't know the motivation of the nurse. Could be that the nurse isn't even religious herself, which is why she asked if Mooney believed in god first, and since Mooney said she does, the nurse tried to help her mentally in a way that spoke to her. If Mooney said she didn't believe in god, the nurse might have said something else.
I say this because as an atheist who used to work in elder-care, I've had many conversations with very religious old people, where I "play their game" because they respond better to it, and seemed happy about it. Even if I don't believe in god, talking with people as if I did, just makes sense in situations where people seemed to have lost all hope.
The quotes from this comment suggest the nurse was trying to use her position to evangelize to Mooney, but that's clearly not the case when you read Mooney's full account. The nurse was clearly trying to comfort a person in distress. That's part of a nurse's job. "God brought you here for a reason" is not a line that would comfort me but it was evidently comforting to Mooney by her own account, so I'd say the nurse read the room accurately and did the best she could given the terrible situation and her position in it.
Christianity is a popular religion in Mexico, and most of the people that nurse has dealt with recently are probably facing potential deportation back to Mexico. There isn't much you can say to comfort a person in that situation. Appeals to faith could reasonably be one of the few methods the nurse has to offer comfort. That's certainly better than the nurse being cold and uncaring.
Or maybe I'm just "fucked in the head".
Missing context from Mooney's account:
> I told her I had only recently found God, but that I now believed in God more than anything.
> At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept. I felt like I had been sent an angel.
It is also clear that Mooney had already "found God," so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about for this woman to affirm her beliefs in this context. Politics aside, this woman was clearly a comfort to her in a very difficult time. Why anyone would begrudge someone comfort in such a situation is beyond me. It strikes me as a type of cruelty or even sadism.
if your takeaway from this article is that the most objectionable thing was that somebody gave her some religious encouragement but only after first making sure she was actually religious, then I feel like you are giving the rest of us atheists a really bad name.
That is very easy to type from the comfort of your home on your mobile phone.
After several days of deprivations and hardships, including sleeping in a fully-lighted cold cell without even a blanket, you will get any help and support that you can get.
And they make great baguettes. But you didn't get my point.
I am an atheist. I do think that what the nurse did is wrong and unprofessional.
My point is: I would still have absolutely clinged to it, if I was in the same situation as this woman. I would have talked with this nurse, and would have told her that yes, maybe God had something to do with it. And you would have too, probably.
If you are drowning in the ocean, you don't discard a piece of floating wood because it has growing fungi. Claiming virtue is very easy ... until you experience real hardship.
Telling someone in a seemingly hopeless situation that there is a high probability that things will get better because their imaginary friend is more powerful than the machinations of a despotic state is actually preferable to telling them that there's no imaginary friend and nobody is coming to save them. It's a common enough theme in prison camp survival autobiographies.
The so-called "logical" thing to tell them in this hypothetical scenario is not the optimal thing, so maybe it's not the most logical thing to say/do.
Only because that person is an implicit threat, not because they are helping. My first thought would be akin to "oh fuck, the lizard people are here now."
It's really a way for her to externalize the responsibility to blow the whistle on the injustice she sees, enables, and takes part in: In the mind of that nurse, God is in control, so she doesn't have to feel guilty that she's complicit in illegal activities because it must all somehow be part of God's masterful, inscrutable, but absolutely, by definition "good" plan.
You're making a lot of unfair assumptions about this nurse. It's certainly possible that the nurse was a callus asshole who used her faith as justification for her actions. It's also very possible that the nurse was a sympathetic individual who didn't have the power to get Mooney out of her situation but did her best to comfort Mooney despite it.
If it's the latter, I think I'd prefer to have more people like her involved with immigration in the United States - not less.
Isn't the bible involved in the whole inauguration part? Besides, candidates routinely discuss their faith, and "In God We Trust" appears on the currency.
Edit: Hah, I just realized that congressional sessions open with prayer as well. Not sure what other countries does this?
The bible is involved at the behest of the inauguree; we've had christian presidents, and so they've largely sworn in on the bible. John Quincy Adams used a book of laws, and Coolidge didn't use a book at all (there are a couple others, but they were unintentional).
Likewise, the US prayer is non-denominational (it typically is monotheistic though). Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and the UK also have parliamentary prayers.
UK currency often features the letters "D.G.", which are the initials to a latin phrase meaning "by the grace of God", but other European currency references to God have ended with the switch to the Euro.
The US certainly has above average entanglement of religiosity and governance, but hardly in a sense that makes it a theocracy. Politicians talking about faith and God is a very different thing from, eg, the country being run by the pope.
Technically, that's not what the separation clause is about. That was not, however, professional behavior for a nurse, but I see extremely religious nurses on the reg. Much less so with doctors, but then again religiosity is inversely proportional to education.
Superstition can be inversely proportional to education. Cultivation should be proportional to education.
That term you used is very slippery (actually, you used it as the opposite of a "superstition" - you gave it only the interpretation typical of later uses).
Yes, sorry, of course you meant that aspect. But the term remains too slippery, too far away from its real content - as can be apparent already in the stats you mention: first of all they are about a public expression, which are reasonably lower in some demographics for more reasons, and secondly they conflate very different phenomena (such as a very ambiguous idea of attributed "importance" vs the subscription to some dogmatic details).
There are also other reasons why you see different behaviours in doctors and nurses: already linguistically, the "nurse" "nourishes", the "doctor" remains the "learned" - one has a direct rapport, the other detached, out of the basic role construed. It just follows that the nurse more probably consoles and the doctor more probably communicates flatly.
Given how much disadvantage being an incumbent was the last cycle across the globe I think she actually would've won in say 2016 but an incumbent candidate was not the one to run in 2024.
All Harris had to do to win was promise to stop sending arms to Israel.
Many, many polls showed this very clearly. 77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo, and over 30% of 2020 Biden voters in key battleground states said that this issue was serious enough to affect their vote.
> A Harris organizer who worked on youth turnout said that senior campaign officials gave them an order: When they sent out mass volunteer or fundraising emails and people replied by asking about Gaza, they were told to mark it as “no response.” The result? They seldom ended up engaging with voters on that issue.
So yeah, if there was one thing wrong with Harris, that would be it. That one issue would have changed the result, and as far as single issues go, I call genocide a pretty big one. It's kinda the biggest.
Far from the only issue though - campaigning with Dick Cheney was pretty fucking stupid, for one thing. Then there was promising to be harsher on immigration than Trump. Promising the world's "most lethal" military (we already are?) while trying to gaslight broke Americans into believing the economy was great. In general, trying to pick up right wing votes was a heinous 'strategy'.
To be fair, they're okay with what they got so long as they're not the ones getting it.
Hamas is a hardline theocratic political party based on a very conservative interpretation of a religion. That means they're anti-free speech/press/religion/assembly, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-free enterprise, anti-secular jurisprudence, and anti-representative government. Neither of the Palestinian Territories have had meaningful elections in over a decade. They're utterly unwilling to discuss any sort of deviation from their foreign policy agenda in good faith.
And yet, that's who many people on the political left-of-center see as the "freedom fighters" of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Is Israel blameless? Absolutely not. They've committed numerous war crimes and atrocities since October 7th. On the other hand, they have shown with Jordan and Egypt that if their neighbors agree to leave them alone, they'll do the same in turn.
Fatah isn't that much better.
Honestly it's a different flavor of the same kind of authoritarianism that many on the right in the US dream of. And with Trump, they're much closer to implementing this, albeit with a different religion. If the idea behind the 2024 election in the US was to prevent more people from coming under authoritarian rule on a global scale, the left in the US failed miserably. And I say that as someone on the political left.
I don't know. I do know when I've worked in Gaza I've had to deal with Hamas because they are the defacto civil service.
It's the same story we're seeing in the west though, from Hungary to America to Turkey to the UK. Strongman comes along and correctly says "your life sucks", then says "it sucks because of this group of people"
Run with that message for generations, throw in members of "this group of people" actually killing your friends and family, and it's easy to see how that message works.
> Run with that message for generations, throw in members of "this group of people" actually killing your friends and family, and it's easy to see how that message works.
Oh, absolutely. But the way to solve that is to realize that it was authoritarianism that started the problem.
If the Arab states had been willing to talk about the concept of a Jewish state in the Middle East immediately after WWII, this probably doesn't happen. Instead a bunch of authoritarian rulers (most of them monarchs) decided to send troops to try to snuff out the founding of the new state. "I was put here by God; what I say goes" was their entire experience, and they tried applying it to the geopolitical disagreement in their region.
A bunch of countries who more-or-less sat out WWII were up against the survivors of industrialized state-backed efforts to wipe out their people during the bloodiest war in human history. As we know, the former lost, and with it, any real chance of establishing a meaningful state for the Palestinian people on their terms.
There's two ways to handle a loss: you can accept it on reasonable terms, or you can keep digging a hole. Egypt and Jordan eventually came around to reasonable terms. So far, those terms have held over multiple governments and decades on both sides.
If the continued method taken by Hamas (and by extension, Iran) is going to be that of violence, particularly against a state they have to know, deep down, that they can't beat, then there's not too much else to be done other than keep the region from falling further into chaos. That, whether it is right or wrong in the minds of American voters, means blunting the impact of enemy action against Israel. It's one of the bloodiest examples of realpolitik.
> People weren't supporting hamas, they were condemning the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
At least within my little bubble, I saw a lot more concern about that than the fact that Hamas had basically committed a massive war crime on October 7th. The only people consistently talking about the hostages that I saw were my Jewish friends. Otherwise, it was mainly "Free Palestine".
It's worth remembering that they also mainly targeted civilians, and that basically no nation-state today would do too much different from what Israel has been doing. If you were to kill, rape, and kidnap the proportional equivalent of any country's civilian population, you are likely to see their military attack you, and not stop until you at the very least returned the hostages.
How many Palestinians, mostly civilians, were held hostage in Israeli prisons on October 6th? (Hint: over 5,000).
> If you were to kill, rape,
Are you referencing long debunked fabricated accounts [0]? Or do you have any actual evidence of rape?
> and kidnap the proportional equivalent of any country's civilian population
Again - over 5,000 Palestinians were being held hostage by Israel on October 6th, including 170 children [1]. That's a huge proportion of the population.
That's what October 7th was about. That's why they did it - to free kidnapped Palestinians. So, if you were to apply your own logic equally, you would then have to justify what Hamas did on October 7th.
You can compare any statistic you like - kidnappings, murders, torture, rape. Per capita, or absolute, Israel comes out worse every time.
> you are likely to see their military attack you
Most countries attack military targets. Not tens of thousands of children, or every hospital, or record numbers of journalists, and refugee camps. Because the numbers (real people) are unprecedented. Unprecedented.
> and not stop until you at the very least returned the hostages.
Hamas offered to return the hostages on October 9/10 in exchange for Israeli troops not entering Gaza [2].
Netanyahu has scuppered many deals since.
You may live in a bubble, but you can leave it any time you choose.
> How many Palestinians, mostly civilians, were held hostage in Israeli prisons on October 6th? (Hint: over 5,000).
How many were there after trial?
> Are you referencing long debunked fabricated accounts [0]? Or do you have any actual evidence of rape?
Your own source indicates that there are UN investigators who found evidence of rape being carried out by Hamas terrorists.
> Again - over 5,000 Palestinians were being held hostage by Israel on October 6th, including 170 children [1]. That's a huge proportion of the population.
That's what October 7th was about. That's why they did it - to free kidnapped Palestinians. So, if you were to apply your own logic equally, you would then have to justify what Hamas did on October 7th.
You can compare any statistic you like - kidnappings, murders, torture, rape. Per capita, or absolute, Israel comes out worse every time.
Tell that to Jordan and Egypt. When the Israelis are offered a chance to sit down and hammer out a good-faith deal, they do so, and generally stick to its terms. It's almost as if they're going tit-for-tat with a group that is both willing to use shocking levels of violence to achieve their aims while also being far less able to counter any response using their own tactics.
> Most countries attack military targets. Not tens of thousands of children, or every hospital, or record numbers of journalists, and refugee camps. Because the numbers (real people) are unprecedented. Unprecedented.
Israeli war crimes should be punished. That being said, Hamas is the aggressor that decided to launch a military operation from one of the most densely populated territories on Earth. They also didn't seem to mind attacking civilian targets like a music festival or kibbutzim. If they had launched attacks on IDF bases, that's one thing. They didn't.
> Hamas offered to return the hostages on October 9/10 in exchange for Israeli troops not entering Gaza [2].
Think about that offer for a second. "We know we just killed over a thousand of your citizens - and fundamentally disagree with your state's very existence - but you can have the ones we kidnapped back, so long as you make no real attempt to find those responsible or prevent further attacks on your territory." Which brings me to my next point...
> Netanyahu has scuppered many deals since.
Of course he has. He doesn't have to take the deals Hamas (and by extension, Iran) wants. He's a bastard and is leaning too far towards authoritarianism to make me happy, but there was absolutely, positively no way that the attacks of October 7th were going to lead to anything but what you see going on now. Hamas is a militia. One backed by Iran, but still a militia. They lack the logistical, geographic and economic means to make any sort of sustained war against Israel, and they likely knew that before attacking.
When you're the leader of a country made up of a historically persecuted people and have been dealing with decades of attacks from an opponent, you're going to take advantage of their miscalculations to protect your people. Hamas made a massive miscalculation with October 7th. Netanyahu has been able to stick to power despite the violence of his response, and likely will until next year. Americans voting in the 2024 election, on the whole, didn't care if their government kept backing the Israelis. Iran's attempts to deliver reprisals generally failed to have any effect on Israel's ability to make war. The IDF operates in and around Gaza at will, able to destroy Hamas' token pockets of resistance. And since it's such a densely populated area, Palestinian civilians pay the price.
Furthermore, everyone who's anyone of consequence in the Middle East, save Iran, hates Hamas. There's a reason Egypt has stopped refugees at the border: they don't want a massively destabilizing force potentially entering their country. They're an existential threat to Egyptian society; Israel has shown it is not.
The only way to immediately prevent further civilian deaths in Gaza at this point is for Hamas to surrender, repatriate any hostages/remains, and disarm. Otherwise the Israelis will continue to push their advantage. You can't do what Hamas did on October 7th and run back behind the skirt of international law to stop your opponents; it simply doesn't work. You can screw up so much that it puts the survival of the entire population under your control at risk, and screw up is exactly what Hamas did by exercising the military option.
And, is it really a trial when the conviction rate is over 99%?
> Your own source indicates that there are UN investigators who found evidence of rape being carried out by Hamas terrorists.
No forensic evidence, no survivor testimony.
The "credible evidence", when you read it, is that some people had their pants pulled down, and blood, which are both things that can happen when your own forces are firing tank shells at you [1].
And, pretending to ignore the fact that the most lurid claims of rape on that day were totally debunked doesn't make you look like you're debating in good faith, or willing to change your position when presented with new evidence.
> Israeli war crimes should be punished.
When? After the last 10% of Gaza is reduced to rubble? After they've built the "riviera" Trump keeps talking about? When a few more hundred thousand Gazans have died? When? How?
> Hamas is the aggressor that decided to launch a military operation from one of the most densely populated territories on Earth.
> Of course he has. He doesn't have to take the deals Hamas (and by extension, Iran) wants.
Deals negotiated in good faith, some of which he agreed to like the ceasefire he just broke by murdering hundreds of people, and stopping food and aid.
> He's a bastard and is leaning too far
Ya think? You sure seem to be carrying a lot of water for him.
> everyone who's anyone of consequence in the Middle East, save Iran, hates Hamas
Ah yes, because only the wealthy and political class are "of consequence", and the opinion of the actual population [2, 3] means nothing.
> The only way to immediately prevent further civilian deaths in Gaza at this point is for Hamas to surrender
Not going to happen lol.
And collective punishment is still a war crime and an atrocity. You really, really need to understand that point, because right now you're spending a lot of time defending the indefensible. Genocide is never justified, ever, ever; and that's not just opinion but international law.
> You can't do what Hamas did on October 7th and run back behind the skirt of international law to stop your opponents
International law is international law. If someone breaks it once, it doesn't give you the right to break it ten times, or a hundred times in response. Do you understand that? It really seems like you don't.
You can’t pretend that every issue that is contentious is some Russian propaganda designed to cause infighting. If you misplace your keys, do you blame Putin as well?
No, sorry, you don't get to declare moral superiority because people refused to vote for a candidate who promised to keep arming genocide. "The lesser genocide" is an incredibly weak campaign pitch, and that was proven.
Everything Trump has done, from rearming Netanyahu, to allowing more bombing during a ceasefire, to making efforts for ethnic cleansing was initially proposed/endorsed by Biden; and Harris had promised to do the same.
77% of Democrat voters wanted an arms embargo. The vast majority of elected Dems keep voting to rearm. You can't blame voters for abandoning a party which point-blank refuses to even listen to them, never mind represent them.
The question was, why did Harris lose, and the answer is that many Americans are still too decent to vote for someone who promises to arm the world's most live-streamed genocide.
Millions of potential Dem voters saw atrocities being committed with weapons sent by Biden and Harris. Every day, for over a year. Harris promised to keep doing that. That's viscerally disgusting, and a red line for decent people everywhere.
That's why she lost, which answers the question. Polls before during and after the election back that up unequivocally.
Now, you can argue that it's practical and more moral to vote for the lesser genocide all day, and you can point to all the ways that Trump is worse all night, but you can never, ever convince me that Democrats actually wanted to win more than they wanted to fuel genocide. Because they knew. They knew Harris' numbers, they knew the margins, and they knew what the polls were saying about Gaza. And then they campaigned with Dick Cheney. They managed to lose to a rapist insurrectionist, despite outspending him and his billionaires.
One more time - it's not the voters fault that they couldn't stomach voting for someone actively enabling the mass murder of tens of thousands of children, even if the alternative was openly worse. And it's weird that this is in any way confusing to people.
> All Harris had to do to win was promise to stop sending arms to Israel.
That might be true but it would have set herself up for a lie that would then be weaponized by Trump for another four years. A lot of people in this country don’t want a liar in office, that’s why they didn’t vote Trump.
So while she said she wouldn’t do anything different than Biden on immigration and not stop funding Israel. Those would have been lies if she did. Saying you’ll change things also builds distrust in past government and our well working systems. This rhetoric Trump champions and puts us in the problem we have today. We can see those lies in effect today as Trump ignores the voters he won from briefly talking about Gaza and still funding those wars.
No. Committing genocide - murdering tens of thousands of children - nullifies any previous weapons contracts. That's obvious.
Here's the specific law against it [0]. If you want to insist that Harris would be "forced" to keep arming Israel because of contracts, I do hope you'll have a read of it first.
0 - Section 502B of the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2304(a)
Unfortunately like Trump, that spending is out of her hands. That spending like all spending is set by the legislature through bills. She could have done nothing and saying she could is a lie you’re telling yourself.
Extremist positions on trans issues. To quote Sam Harris: "Congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks."[1]
Allowing bad actors to claim they have a female gender identity so they can get transferred to women's prisons is not "leaving trans people alone". There are clearly people abusing these policies to bad ends and the refusal to grapple with the idea that not every person who claims they're trans is a pure and honest snowflake is going to do tons of damage to the cause of "leaving trans people alone".
Could you please engage with the issue instead of making emotional appeals. You're saying this isn't a problem at all? What about the rights of the women affected by the bad actor(s)? Do you have some proposed solution for identifying the "one person" doing bad behavior?
The Democratic Party refused to grapple with these questions either and their electoral loss is going to do far more harm to trans rights than some reasonable policies (for example some gatekeeping of "self-ID") would have.
In the case of prison policy, keeping prisoners strictly separated by sex, with no transfers of male prisoners into women's prisons allowed, under any circumstances.
Prisons should of course have safeguarding policy for further separation of vulnerable inmates within the prison.
> He teamed up with Lorena Borjas, the unofficial den mother to transgender Latinx women in New York City, to start the bail fund for transgender immigrants, and he joined a working group of lawyers who were drafting recommendations for President Obama's Department of Justice on the incarceration of trans people. "We asked people in prison what they needed, and they all said that they wanted a trans unit," Strangio said. But the lawyers in the working group, including Strangio, believed that L.G.B.T. units were stigmatizing, and only served to perpetuate the prison system.
However they were ignored, and instead of this, a policy of transferring males to women's prisons was introduced.
Do you think the status quo of American prisons is good for anyone? I agree that this issue could be handled better, but as a non-American I've been horrified by many more things in the American prison system than this.
Placing female prisoners at risk of physical violence, sexual assault, rape and impregnation by male prisoners is an obvious wrong to undo, but I agree there are many other horrifying aspects of prison conditions that need to be addressed as well.
I have worked with (born male) non-binary people who alternate between wearing male and female clothes. I have seen them enter the female toilets, and win awards for women.
But tbh, this is a daft question. It's like saying you can't have a policy position on gun control unless someone has shot at you.
No emotional distress, but obviously it does for women who have to share toilets and changing rooms with them. That has been well documented and isn't a controversial position, apart from amongst male to female trans people.
Dang you saw a trans person? How many trans people are the equivalent of a loaded weapon? Because that's the completely bonkers question that somehow is being equivocated here - that someone wearing different clothes or identifying differently is a potential harm just waiting to get you... how exactly?
Did you deserve the woman only award? Would you assume that identity to get that award? Are you saying that people dishonestly assume trans identities because its an easy way to assume power in our society? Are you a serious person?
Apologies, but I really do not care about sports awards or whatever - we're basically at the point in the USA that we're trying (or succeeding) to force de-transitioning because of bullshit like "He took her awards!"
When there's an impact that individual bad actors have, that's why we have individual punishments - we don't punish all men or all women for one bad actor, its nonsensical to treat trans folks as some homogeneous group when they literally embody the opposite :]
Harris said almost nothing about trans issues during the election. You're attempting to rewrite history if you're claiming it was somehow a core tenant of her campaign. That was entirely propaganda by the opposing party.
She was loudly accused of having extreme positions on a hot button issue. Saying nothing was tantamount to admitting the accusation was true. That's how the court of public opinion works.
> She was loudly accused of having extreme positions on a hot button issue.
She was accused of many things in bad faith, e.g. not being Black, being a Marxist, being a communist, and more. Spending time and effort to address every single one of these would have been tantamount to allowing her opponent to dictate her campaign.
Are you suggesting that Harris would have reeled in some of the most outrageous policies on this issue? She said no such thing so the reasonable assumption anyone would make is that it would be business as usual. Not talking about it is the problem.
Are voters only supposed to limit their votes about things candidates say during the election? If so does that mean voting against Trump for Jan 6 insurrection was wrong? Or can voters vote against Harris because of policies she has endorsed before the election?
It is reasonable for voters to consider politicians' behavior before the most recent election cycle and ridiculous to say voters should have ignored Harris' earlier statements. (And I say that as someone who voted for Harris.)
And that impacts you on a daily basis exactly how? Think long and hard about why that would even begin to bother you. Not to mention is was barely a passing side issue for Harris
Are you implying that people should only vote on things which they encounter in their day-to-day lived experience? That's silly and not how the world works. Why are you mad about Gaza? You aren't getting JDAMs dropped on your roof, are you? How does Gaza impact you on a daily basis?
Harris failed to distance herself from positions that are deeply unpopular with the majority of Americans (e.g. sex changes for illegal immigrants). That's all there is to it.
If you want to step away from this particular issue, she failed to distance herself from the Biden administration's policies. There's a pretty famous clip of her failing to answer a question to that point, definitely on the youtubes.
I tend to care about policies that don't impact me personally when they harm other people. I'm a natural born citizen, I'm not going to get deported with out process, but I still care about that. I'm not in grade school, so I'm not going to be a victim of a school shooting, but I still care about that. If it is a policy that doesn't impact me personally, but benefits someone else, yeah I tend to not give a shit. Why would I be against a position that has no impact on me whatsoever when it only meant to help someone else as in the case with civil rights?
> If it is a policy that doesn't impact me personally, but benefits someone else, yeah I tend to not give a shit.
You're excluding a key point - the policy often benefits one party at the cost of another. You mentioned immigration and that's a great example of this sort of pathological empathy that has infected the left.
There's a cheap and fleeting sense of virtue attained when you champion illegal immigration and decry deportations. You post photos of mothers and their children crying at the border because the human trafficking organisations are having a hard time getting them across nowadays. But it's important to remember the negative pressure illegal immigrants place on wages and why there's a gross cabal of large corporations, lobbies, and affiliated NGOs, who virtue signal immigration as a means to lower their labor costs. It's important to remember the entire pipeline of illegal immigrants is owned and operated by extremely violent cartels - humans are now their most valuable product. Your desperate craving for that high of in-group acceptance is propping this up.
It's not that you're empathetic - you just don't care about the negatively impacted party. Nothing new under the sun.
Yeah you don’t get to use the claim of “virtue signaling” to shut down conversation any more, we all understand that is a manipulative play to make someone feel a chump for having standards. Your claims on immigrants don’t match stats, they are less violent than the American population at large. And your example wasn’t that, it was about trans rights. Why would you be singularly opposed to recognizing someone’s basic rights to be who they are?
She had only one really important job to do as vice president—become president if the president was incapable of doing the job. She, like many administration (and media), put her political party’s optics over the good of the country and tried to hide Joe Biden’s mental decline from the population. She was literally derelict in her most important duty as vice president. How could she be trusted as president?
I’m an independent and I could not and would not vote for her for this reason. I could not and would not vote for Trump either, so I simply didn’t vote.
Why? I hear that all the time, but no one can ever really explain why its important for me to need to feel like I am on the “winning side” of two subjective evils in a contest?
I remember in 2016 I had the luxury to vote third-party. Now my life is on the line, though, so I always vote. It'd be super nifty if you voted too so I don't die before my time
If the country falls to fascism it will be due to the democratic party choosing to run absolutely shitty candidates for the last 3 election cycles more than my single vote not being registered for any given candidate.
The democratic party is an embarrassment (that is coming from a former democrat, now independent BTW). Whatever we “get”, they own it.
If you don’t vote then your opinion is meaningless. Voting is applying your opinion.
Your view of Biden’s mental state is lies spewed by all the media. How many videos of Biden speaking have you actually watched? He is actually 10x better speaker than Trump or George W Bush ever was. It’s ridiculous how people take those lies verbatim.
My view of Biden’s mental state is colored by my own experience with my father’s dementia that was happening alongside Biden’s administration. What I saw in Biden, mirrored my father’s decline minus about 18 months.
We took the car keys away from my dad when he was measurably more mentally capable than Biden appeared to be in 2022. I worried every single day between when I recognized the signs and when he left office about the dangers of having someone in his state as the presumed most powerful person in the world. What I do know is that whoever was running the country for the last 3 years, it wasn't someone elected to do it.
Not voting is a vote. It’s applying my opinion that there was not a reasonable candidate worthy of my vote.
This is the exact same thing my father said before Biden stepped down, only instead it was my grandmother. Suddenly everyone’s an expert in mental decline and that was worrying for voters with Biden to stutter infrequently but with logical talking points. However it was acceptable for Trump to stand there and literally drool out of his mouth with nonsensical hate. That is a reason to not vote is unfounded medical hysteria and lies. Something you have no proof for other than your own bias and stigma on mental health as you have stated.
Joe Biden was running the country, he signed bills, gave speeches, and helped restore our economy. Because you chose to only read headlines and drink the “Joe is practically dead” kool-aid. That is how you led yourself to the lies and not voting.
Not voting is not a vote in a national election system. It is a vote for your own smugness. It is opting out of voting because you’re looking for a reason to stay neutral instead of a reason apply your opinion in a meaningful way.
That is what makes your opinion today meaningless because you voted for meaninglessness.
Got it. You disregard the opinions of people who have seen dementia first hand in favor of a DNC talking point. “Don’t trust your lying eyes! Biden is as sharp as a tack”.
I know what I saw, and I am sure your dad did too. I spent years as a caregiver to an Alzheimers patient, I may not be a “medical expert” but I am capable of recognizing similarities, especially when they are obvious and frankly common for dementia sufferers. I can also make judgements of who I vote for and not vote for based on my own observations. Whatever your opinion of my decision and my reasoning for it—-that is meaningless to me.
It's kind of humorous reading this and thinking about trump during the same campaign. He looks utterly confused and has no idea what he is talking about all the time, he was a doddering fool during his last administration, and this one he's not at the wheel at all.
So it's just funny to think that people looked at the mental capabilities of Harris and trump and decided... yep trump is the guy!!
Oh yeah I wasn't accusing you of supporting him, just thought it was interesting how people treat him as if he hasn't lost his marbles. It's night and day to how he spoke ~15 years ago. His brain is mush.
You’re proving exactly my point is that you hold disdain for Biden being old but Trump who can’t talk either is given a free pass. Yes that discounts your nonvoting opinion to valueless because it is nonsensical. Regardless if Biden is early stage dementia or not.
You can “see” all the dementia signs you want. It doesn’t make it true and you should really seek out more material than the few times you’ve probably watched him speak. He really was a good leader that got thrown under the bus for a few bad performances. Right now you’re just carrying on how you’re not qualified to diagnose dementia but it doesn’t matter because you know what the media circus told you and that lines up with your baseless theory.
Is there a Democrat doing ANYTHING beside Bernie Sanders? Chuck Schumer is actively aiding the Republicans at this point. Where are the other Democratic leaders to rally people? Where's Kamala Harris or Hillary, I thought they were supposed to be strong leaders? I only see the far left of the party doing anything at all. I honestly think the Democrats are so captured by corporate interests that they would prefer Trump than to build on any leftist sentiment while America absolutely burns its reputation to the ground. And half the country still supports this which is its own can of worms (and I could go on about worldwide attacks on democracy in general but it's depressing enough). I hope the Democrats are cooking something up or hopefully they get reformed in time to do something.
Well almost half of them are supporting this. Then there's that story yesterday about Erdogan banning his opponent in Turkey. South Korea just narrowly avoided turning into a dictatorship (and honestly they're still in the weeds a bit). And something like 1/3 of South Koreans still support that would-be dictator. I've just been extremely depressed lately about the prospect of democracy and freedom of speech just being dead ends.
Even here in Canada my local Conservative Party leader is trying to remove checks and balances on his power in my province. I guess the paradox of tolerance is real. Too many people want strongmen or are at least indifferent.
Trump won because he took all the liberal policies that the Democrats abandoned for more extreme values and made them his core values. This is why he had the most diverse set of voters in the history of the Republican Party, because many were ex-Democrats.
It's the other way around. Since Clinton the Democrat party has become more and more republican-like. Now they are economically the same, and the only differences left are social signals. Both parties favor corporations and profit over people.
Trump has wielded the (understandable) disgust that people had with that system, pointed at the Democrats and made them the enemy. And then is lowering taxes for rich guys and cutting benefits for millions.
Trump has been anti-war (with Putin, specifically) since his first term.
The Democratic party has never been anti-free trade either.
Nevertheless, what helped him win working class votes was discontent with the economy situation. Which is now going to get even worse. For the working class of course.
>Trump has been anti-war (with Putin, specifically) since his first term.
Yes, that's my point.
> The Democratic party has never been anti-free trade either.
They absolutely were anti-free trade and protectionist during the 1970s and 1980s. For example, they were the ones who were leading efforts against Japanese cars in the US that decimated Detroit during that time.
Clinton and more importantly Obama changed this shift, including the TPP that would have opened up more free trade with Pacific nations. Trump ripped that up as soon as he came into office because that was very unpopular with the working class.
> Nevertheless, what helped him win working class votes was discontent with the economy situation
According to Biden, the US economy was the best its every been when he left office and the lowest unemployment and the stock market was at its highest. What economic situation are you talking about?
If we go back long enough, the democratic party opposed Abraham Lincoln. We have to put a line somewhere.
> According to Biden
To be clear, I'm not a US citizen. If you think telling me that Biden lied is a shocker, you are wrong. I do think that in general he lies less than Trump, though.
But to answer the spirit of your not-in-very-good-faith question: GDP means nothing if all the wealth is concentrated in 10 individuals. Unemployment means nothing if most folks need to take 3 jobs and food stamps just to make ends meet.
I'm putting a line at the 1970s and 1980s and then explained how things changed immediately after that and that's when they started abandoning the working class.
> If you think telling me that Biden lied is a shocker, you are wrong.
I'm not saying you should be shocked. I'm giving strong evidence that your assertion that the economy was bad is wrong. What is your proof that the economy was bad?
The Republican party also finally turned away from racism as an explicit election strategy circa 2010, which probably helped it with non-white working class voters.
You probably aren’t paying attention but Trump has fulfilled more of his campaign promises in the last 2 months than Biden or Obama did in their entire presidencies.
The Democratic Party loves nothing more than doing nothing and losing elections. Doing things risks upsetting donors. When you don't have power, it's easy to promise progressive policies that you have zero chance of enacting (eg Kamala Harrais was for Medicare-for-all in 2019 [1]). They are the controlled opposition party [2].
Trump advertized everything he was going to do and is now doing [3], despite briefly distance himself from it [4] when it became unpopular for the brief period Democrats messaged about it. Nobody actually believed that. The majority of the authors are former Trump staffers. No one in politics can feign shock or surprise.
We know Democrats are capable of fighting. The problem is they only do that against progressive elemnts of their own party. It's not just Bernie Sanders either (both times). Look at the history of Buffalo mayor Byron Brown [5].
Progressive policies are incredibly popular. Democrats are not. In places like Florida, Kansas and Missouri, ballot initiatives outperformed Harris-Walz by as much as 20 points.
Democrats won't even lie to us about enacting progresive policies. The Democratic leadership and donors are more comfortable with Trump being in power than Bernie Sanders. They're also more interested in protecting the Israeli settler colonial project than winning elections.
Not every Trump voter is a Brownshirt either. Many are simply working people who have legitimate grievances, abandoned by the Democratic economic policies that favor corporations over the New Deal that allowed Democrats to control Congress for almost 60 years.
Whatever bad stuff is going on now, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are absolutely complicit in it.
> Not every Trump voter is a Brownshirt either. Many are simply working people who have legitimate grievances, abandoned by the Democratic economic policies
To clarify, Trump has not been good economically for the working class
But we can have the correct answer for the audience via my Serbian colleague: local construction corruption got sufficiently bad that people got killed, and then it escalated into general complaints about not listening to the public and complicit media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Sad_railway_station_canop...
> hat's how you get EU and USAID funding to standup to a president outside of the WEF overton window, certainly.
Is this some US-based fiction among maga fanatics to pat on their wobbly backs?
Those people protest for they want freedom and self-determination in their lives, something even maga supporter with lowest IQ in the crowd should comprehend - the need for personal freedom is natural to all humans, yes even those without US passports. Something all dictators in all forms are very keen to take away as we are seeing everywhere including US.
Agree, but that collection certainly amounts to more than 1 source, since many of the articles have first-hand reporting, and some even their own interviews with Mooney.
> It was unclear why Mooney’s earlier visa was revoked, or why she was at the southern border this month. However, she told ABC she got her first visa at the San Ysidro border crossing on the advice of a Los Angeles attorney, who met her at the border, and therefore may have thought it would work a second time at that location.
Is her incompetent attorney committing some violation here?
Or is it just a trash PR to grab some likes and subscribers?
> There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.
Yet they chose to feature this white person from a white country.
This article reminds of beginning of ukraine war when US press was showing white ppl and saying "we need to stand with them because they are like us".
I am a dual-nation Canadian, with the other nationality held in much lower regard by the USA administration, meaning American conduct toward much of the world is not news to me.
I believe a lot of resentment Canadians currently feel towards Americans boils down to being treated the way they treat any other undesirable country.
most ppl in canada ( and usa) don't know where Norway is or if such a country actually exists.
why are you worried about someone who doesn't give a fuck about norway.
Why can't Norwegians mind their own business why is this so offensive to them that americans don't want to be friends with norway. totally entitled . " how dare you don't want to be friends, we are white too"
> I believe a lot of resentment Canadians currently feel towards Americans boils down to being treated the way they treat any other undesirable country.
yeah you nailed it perfectly. "how dare you deny us white status"
The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense."