11 ms·

People I've spoken to seem more comfortable acting like this is part of the current administration's agenda, rather than an encroaching trend which has been gra

People I've spoken to seem more comfortable acting like this is part of the current administration's agenda, rather than an encroaching trend which has been gradually getting worse year upon year. For example this specific policy was added as an "optional" (not really) question on an entry form before the 2016 presidential elections (I know, I wrote a letter protesting it during public comment period). My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit in allowing these kind of activities to continue. And the American public would sooner blame the other "side" in this political dog and pony show, than take responsibility for this being what America's fear based society has brought. As an aside: These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. I own entire domains of email addresses and make them up on the fly, I've also thrown away dozens of "social media" accounts in the last five years for trivial reasons. But the incomplete answers will be very useful when they want to arbitrarily withdraw someone's visa, in the same way that medical insurance used to have intentionally complex registration forms which they could comb through to look for ways to kick people off after they got sick. So people that hold a visa better not protest, write to their representatives, or otherwise stick out or they'll just yank the visa and say bye bye. I'll write in again during this public comment period. But frankly public comment periods just seem like a way to placate the masses, both you and they know this is coming, nothing a public comment could say will change that.

bsder 9y ago
> My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit in allowing these kind of activities to continue. And the American public would sooner blame the other "side" in this political dog and pony show, than take responsibility for this being what America's fear based society has brought. Stop pushing this "both sides are the same" narrative. It's part of the damn problem. While the Democratic administrations may have continued these kinds of policies (and I will challenge you on whether they as bad as the Republican ones), most of the opposition to these policies is coming from rank and file Democrats. Democrats are a bit busy right now fighting a LOT of battles on a lot of fronts--some of them aimed at the core of our democratic institutions. You will have to pardon us if things like visas aren't at the top of the agenda right now. If you want problems like this tackled, you're gonna have to help us bail water on the bigger ones first. In addition, you are giving up just as the political pushback against social media is growing. Don't do that. Politics is a contact sport, but it's slow. Furthermore, you can get significant evangelical (but not mainline Republican) support against this, as well. You simply need to run the narrative of this as "the mark of the beast".
- andrestan 9y ago
  Maybe it's a part of _your_ problem but I don't think it's a part of _the_ problem. What OP said is correct. Democrats continue to escalate and promote legislation that is deeply invasive.
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    This article and this discussion is about this action, not all the other actions that everyone has ever taken. It's a distraction, often an intentional one, to start talking about all the others.
    - Someone1234 9y ago
      > not all the other actions that everyone has ever taken We're talking about this same question (list social media profiles) being added to a different immigration form two years earlier, seems disingenuous to conflate that with "other actions that everyone has ever taken." I'd go as far as to call the change in 2016 a test case for making it mandatory in 2018. And I'd go so far as to predict that it will be mandatory for all tourists entrants at some point in the future (even visa waiver holders), no matter who is in power. We need to be discussing how we stop sliding down this slippery slope, and blaming whoever happens to be in charge today isn't a constructive way to do that unless the other side has committed to stopping it (which neither side has, nor have they historically).
    - opportune 9y ago
      No it most certainly isn't, if this is just but one step in a growing trend with bipartisan support, which it is. We need a president who will pledge to appoint Justices that will respect the rights granted by the 4th amendment so we can roll back all of the unconstitutional and authoritarian legislation/structures that have been created in blatant violation of it. Stopping this one rule is immaterial. As we've seen, if legislation that is unpopular with people but popular with politicians fails to pass, then politicians will simply try to pass the legislation/enact the policy later when nobody's looking. The problem isn't isolated to a single act, it's a pattern that needs to be fixed.
justicezyx 9y ago
Well, the US political structure was designed to make such things happen.
- komali2 9y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - TOGoS 9y ago
    Well, for starters, we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections. Everyone is told that if they don't like what those parties stand for they need to hold their nose and vote for the one of the two that they dislike less, lest the worse one win. My personal favorite (to draw attention to) contributing factors are: - Plurality voting (the possibility of third parties 'splitting the vote' helping otherwise generally unpopular candidate winning) - Money money money money money. There's not much to stop someone with lots of it from influencing elections by e.g. running attack ads against the person they don't want to win. We talk a big talk about the voters having power, but when most people don't have the time or energy after spending it all making money for the guy who's going to run those ads, they're not going to be well informed. And there's no incentive for this system to change on its own. Our politicians and the people/corporate entities who pay for them care more about staying in power than they do about 'freedom' or 'democracy' or their constituents' general well being. Our best hope is that people will come to realize that the problem is systemic and start demanding systemic change.
    - sanbor 9y ago
      > we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections Here in Argentina we use the two-round system (also known as the second ballot, runoff voting or ballotage) to avoid that issue. To win the presidential election, a candidate must get more than 45% votes or 40% AND 10% of adventage over other candidates. If this condition doesn't apply there is a next round where the candidate with most votes wins. Imagine the following situation: You got three candidates for the elections: a. Trump (39%) b. Clinton (38%) c. Sanders (23%) There is going to be a second round, but maybe Sanders voters are going to vote for Clinton to avoid Trump winning. In the current system Trump would have win. You could argue that in the current system Sanders voters would have voted for Clinton but maybe they thought Clinton was going to win since Trump didn't have much chanced. With the two round system this becomes explicit. This let's you vote for your favorite and in the second round you pick between the two big candidates.
staplers 9y ago
My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit In fact, you bringing it up is causing more distraction and confusion regarding the original issue. Quite literally playing into the systems entire purpose..
forapurpose 9y ago
> Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit Everyone is complicit in everything, but this action is being taken by Trump; he is responsible.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
One nice thing about having a President with 50%+ disapproval [1] is all the things that got swept under the rug, previously, can now be made alarming. This might be an unintended way the system clears detritus and scope creep. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...
- opportune 9y ago
  Conversely, it makes running an opposition campaign so easy that the opposition won't need to focus on the big issues. The opposition could focus on morality and pay lip-service to neoliberal diversity theatre while simultaneously selling out to corporate interests. If you're running against Trump in an election, what's the point of drawing the ire of industry (pharma, insurance, military, surveillance, general big-corp) when you can focus on orthogonal issues? You could get more funding by ignoring them and focusing on mostly-irrelevant wedge issues such as abortion (never going anywhere), "decorum", etc. Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
  - adamsea 9y ago
    > The opposition could focus on morality and pay lip-service to neoliberal diversity theatre while simultaneously selling out to corporate interests. Pretty sure any phrase preceded by the word 'neoliberal' is already (by definition) aligned with corporate interests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism "Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980."
    - opportune 9y ago
bambax 9y ago
Yes, it's not Trump, it's the US. I will probably never visit that country again, and I don't much care; but, I'm kind of sad for my kids. That said, the world is a big place. Let's hope not every other country does the same.
- ExcelSaga 9y ago
  It’s not just the US though, the whole ultra-surveillance shtick is very much an international problem. Here in the UK it’s not that great either, and China is full on dystopia. I’m not excusing the US, but we need to accept that this isn’t just the Americans, it’s more and more of the world.
  - s2g 9y ago
    Surveillance is a worldwide problem, but the US is an up and comer in the whole "rabidly anti-immigrant" race.
  - odiroot 9y ago
    No one asked to see my phone or any device when I entered China two times through two different cities. No one cared about by email addresses or social media accounts.
    - lazerpants 9y ago
      I work for a major academic medical institution. When our researchers attend conferences in China, or go there to give talks, we have to make sure to lock down their computers or give them burners that don't have important research documents. There have been many allegations of government sponsored agents entering hotel rooms while guest were out to copy drives of prominent American researchers. Source: People at my institution who I put a lot of faith in (but are maybe paranoid).
- saagarjha 9y ago
  I’m curious: where do you live?
golergka 9y ago
Wait, how can you have someone representative in US if you're on a visa? Shouldn't you be a citizen to vote? Also, I was under impression that any visa can be revoked at will, why would they need special trick questions for it?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- klipt 9y ago
  Congress members represent everyone in their district, not only registered voters. Green card holders etc are allowed to write to their representatives.
nraynaud 9y ago
Under the previous administration, there was a special policy for Iranian students made so that their visa date interview collide with the beginning of their semester and they would be under-enrolled at the critical date and lose their visa immediately. Some universities had to create special programs with different dates for those students. (now they are outright banned from applying for a visa)
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  Do you have a source for that? This claim sounds especially far-fetched given that the number of Iranian college students in the US more tripled over that time https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Data/International-Students/Places-of-Origin https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Data/In...
  - nraynaud 9y ago
    Sorry, private discussion with a key player at a university.
downandout 9y ago
These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. I own entire domains of email addresses and make them up on the fly, I've also thrown away dozens of "social media" accounts in the last five years for trivial reasons. That's why this initiative in nonsensical. They'll never know whether the answers to these questions are complete and accurate. I'm pretty sure that later tonight, a new paragraph will go into the ISIS handbook saying "create a Facebook account in your real name that you can give to the authorities, that has nothing on it except for pro-American content". That would actually be good advice for all prospective travelers to the US. Lock down your real profile before your trip so that it can't be searched for, and maintain a separate, public, very vanilla profile that you can give to them. That's all it would take for most people to go through with no issues.
- bbctol 9y ago
  It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical in providing actual security; it's here to provide security theater and justify arbitrary punishments.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    That's it. No one will scour every Facebook account, posts and so forth. Even Facebook can't do it (hence hiring folks for the very similar reviewing of posts). Instead, it's used as a future legal leverage, OR as a future check in case they need to look into you. It's insidious, of course, and really makes me regret posting anything to Facebook at all. Who knows if you're friends with someone who did someone naughty or who is suspect for some reason? Social media has turned into a nightmare.
andybak 9y ago
> These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. This is true for me also. And the result is that I'm now not going to risk a holiday in the US. I've never been and I'd love to go but the entry requirements are just too onerous. (I'm from the UK by the way and I don't suspect anything in my past or social profile would cause a problem but the system is too capricious for me to want to engage with) It's interesting to note that the only other countries on my "too much hassle for a holiday" list (other than outright warzones and similar) is the UAE and it's neighbours because of their terrifyingly arbitrary legal system and the risk of being innocently targeted) EDIT - it's not entirely clear whether this affects tourist visas but my concerns extend beyond this particular measure and any visit is likely to be a mixed purpose trip in any case.

bsder 9y ago

> My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit in allowing these kind of activities to continue. And the American public would sooner blame the other "side" in this political dog and pony show, than take responsibility for this being what America's fear based society has brought. Stop pushing this "both sides are the same" narrative. It's part of the damn problem. While the Democratic administrations may have continued these kinds of policies (and I will challenge you on whether they as bad as the Republican ones), most of the opposition to these policies is coming from rank and file Democrats. Democrats are a bit busy right now fighting a LOT of battles on a lot of fronts--some of them aimed at the core of our democratic institutions. You will have to pardon us if things like visas aren't at the top of the agenda right now. If you want problems like this tackled, you're gonna have to help us bail water on the bigger ones first. In addition, you are giving up just as the political pushback against social media is growing. Don't do that. Politics is a contact sport, but it's slow. Furthermore, you can get significant evangelical (but not mainline Republican) support against this, as well. You simply need to run the narrative of this as "the mark of the beast".

andrestan 9y ago
Maybe it's a part of _your_ problem but I don't think it's a part of _the_ problem. What OP said is correct. Democrats continue to escalate and promote legislation that is deeply invasive.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  This article and this discussion is about this action, not all the other actions that everyone has ever taken. It's a distraction, often an intentional one, to start talking about all the others.
  - Someone1234 9y ago
    > not all the other actions that everyone has ever taken We're talking about this same question (list social media profiles) being added to a different immigration form two years earlier, seems disingenuous to conflate that with "other actions that everyone has ever taken." I'd go as far as to call the change in 2016 a test case for making it mandatory in 2018. And I'd go so far as to predict that it will be mandatory for all tourists entrants at some point in the future (even visa waiver holders), no matter who is in power. We need to be discussing how we stop sliding down this slippery slope, and blaming whoever happens to be in charge today isn't a constructive way to do that unless the other side has committed to stopping it (which neither side has, nor have they historically).
  - opportune 9y ago
    No it most certainly isn't, if this is just but one step in a growing trend with bipartisan support, which it is. We need a president who will pledge to appoint Justices that will respect the rights granted by the 4th amendment so we can roll back all of the unconstitutional and authoritarian legislation/structures that have been created in blatant violation of it. Stopping this one rule is immaterial. As we've seen, if legislation that is unpopular with people but popular with politicians fails to pass, then politicians will simply try to pass the legislation/enact the policy later when nobody's looking. The problem isn't isolated to a single act, it's a pattern that needs to be fixed.

justicezyx 9y ago

Well, the US political structure was designed to make such things happen.

komali2 9y ago
Can you elaborate?
- TOGoS 9y ago
  Well, for starters, we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections. Everyone is told that if they don't like what those parties stand for they need to hold their nose and vote for the one of the two that they dislike less, lest the worse one win. My personal favorite (to draw attention to) contributing factors are: - Plurality voting (the possibility of third parties 'splitting the vote' helping otherwise generally unpopular candidate winning) - Money money money money money. There's not much to stop someone with lots of it from influencing elections by e.g. running attack ads against the person they don't want to win. We talk a big talk about the voters having power, but when most people don't have the time or energy after spending it all making money for the guy who's going to run those ads, they're not going to be well informed. And there's no incentive for this system to change on its own. Our politicians and the people/corporate entities who pay for them care more about staying in power than they do about 'freedom' or 'democracy' or their constituents' general well being. Our best hope is that people will come to realize that the problem is systemic and start demanding systemic change.
  - sanbor 9y ago
    > we have 2 political parties that dominate most elections Here in Argentina we use the two-round system (also known as the second ballot, runoff voting or ballotage) to avoid that issue. To win the presidential election, a candidate must get more than 45% votes or 40% AND 10% of adventage over other candidates. If this condition doesn't apply there is a next round where the candidate with most votes wins. Imagine the following situation: You got three candidates for the elections: a. Trump (39%) b. Clinton (38%) c. Sanders (23%) There is going to be a second round, but maybe Sanders voters are going to vote for Clinton to avoid Trump winning. In the current system Trump would have win. You could argue that in the current system Sanders voters would have voted for Clinton but maybe they thought Clinton was going to win since Trump didn't have much chanced. With the two round system this becomes explicit. This let's you vote for your favorite and in the second round you pick between the two big candidates.

staplers 9y ago

My point is: Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit In fact, you bringing it up is causing more distraction and confusion regarding the original issue. Quite literally playing into the systems entire purpose..

forapurpose 9y ago

> Both Democrats and Republics have been complicit Everyone is complicit in everything, but this action is being taken by Trump; he is responsible.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

One nice thing about having a President with 50%+ disapproval [1] is all the things that got swept under the rug, previously, can now be made alarming. This might be an unintended way the system clears detritus and scope creep. [1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...

opportune 9y ago
Conversely, it makes running an opposition campaign so easy that the opposition won't need to focus on the big issues. The opposition could focus on morality and pay lip-service to neoliberal diversity theatre while simultaneously selling out to corporate interests. If you're running against Trump in an election, what's the point of drawing the ire of industry (pharma, insurance, military, surveillance, general big-corp) when you can focus on orthogonal issues? You could get more funding by ignoring them and focusing on mostly-irrelevant wedge issues such as abortion (never going anywhere), "decorum", etc. Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
- adamsea 9y ago
  > The opposition could focus on morality and pay lip-service to neoliberal diversity theatre while simultaneously selling out to corporate interests. Pretty sure any phrase preceded by the word 'neoliberal' is already (by definition) aligned with corporate interests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism "Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980."
  - opportune 9y ago

bambax 9y ago

Yes, it's not Trump, it's the US. I will probably never visit that country again, and I don't much care; but, I'm kind of sad for my kids. That said, the world is a big place. Let's hope not every other country does the same.

ExcelSaga 9y ago
It’s not just the US though, the whole ultra-surveillance shtick is very much an international problem. Here in the UK it’s not that great either, and China is full on dystopia. I’m not excusing the US, but we need to accept that this isn’t just the Americans, it’s more and more of the world.
- s2g 9y ago
  Surveillance is a worldwide problem, but the US is an up and comer in the whole "rabidly anti-immigrant" race.
- odiroot 9y ago
  No one asked to see my phone or any device when I entered China two times through two different cities. No one cared about by email addresses or social media accounts.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    I work for a major academic medical institution. When our researchers attend conferences in China, or go there to give talks, we have to make sure to lock down their computers or give them burners that don't have important research documents. There have been many allegations of government sponsored agents entering hotel rooms while guest were out to copy drives of prominent American researchers. Source: People at my institution who I put a lot of faith in (but are maybe paranoid).
saagarjha 9y ago
I’m curious: where do you live?

golergka 9y ago

Wait, how can you have someone representative in US if you're on a visa? Shouldn't you be a citizen to vote? Also, I was under impression that any visa can be revoked at will, why would they need special trick questions for it?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
klipt 9y ago
Congress members represent everyone in their district, not only registered voters. Green card holders etc are allowed to write to their representatives.

nraynaud 9y ago

Under the previous administration, there was a special policy for Iranian students made so that their visa date interview collide with the beginning of their semester and they would be under-enrolled at the critical date and lose their visa immediately. Some universities had to create special programs with different dates for those students. (now they are outright banned from applying for a visa)

lazyasciiart 9y ago
Do you have a source for that? This claim sounds especially far-fetched given that the number of Iranian college students in the US more tripled over that time https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Data/International-Students/Places-of-Origin https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Insights/Open-Doors/Data/In...
- nraynaud 9y ago
  Sorry, private discussion with a key player at a university.

downandout 9y ago

These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. I own entire domains of email addresses and make them up on the fly, I've also thrown away dozens of "social media" accounts in the last five years for trivial reasons. That's why this initiative in nonsensical. They'll never know whether the answers to these questions are complete and accurate. I'm pretty sure that later tonight, a new paragraph will go into the ISIS handbook saying "create a Facebook account in your real name that you can give to the authorities, that has nothing on it except for pro-American content". That would actually be good advice for all prospective travelers to the US. Lock down your real profile before your trip so that it can't be searched for, and maintain a separate, public, very vanilla profile that you can give to them. That's all it would take for most people to go through with no issues.

bbctol 9y ago
It doesn't matter that it's nonsensical in providing actual security; it's here to provide security theater and justify arbitrary punishments.
- mancerayder 9y ago
  That's it. No one will scour every Facebook account, posts and so forth. Even Facebook can't do it (hence hiring folks for the very similar reviewing of posts). Instead, it's used as a future legal leverage, OR as a future check in case they need to look into you. It's insidious, of course, and really makes me regret posting anything to Facebook at all. Who knows if you're friends with someone who did someone naughty or who is suspect for some reason? Social media has turned into a nightmare.

andybak 9y ago

> These questions are almost impossible for some of us to answer completely. This is true for me also. And the result is that I'm now not going to risk a holiday in the US. I've never been and I'd love to go but the entry requirements are just too onerous. (I'm from the UK by the way and I don't suspect anything in my past or social profile would cause a problem but the system is too capricious for me to want to engage with) It's interesting to note that the only other countries on my "too much hassle for a holiday" list (other than outright warzones and similar) is the UAE and it's neighbours because of their terrifyingly arbitrary legal system and the risk of being innocently targeted) EDIT - it's not entirely clear whether this affects tourist visas but my concerns extend beyond this particular measure and any visit is likely to be a mixed purpose trip in any case.