7 ms·

Administrative Purgatory

221 points by robin_reala 8y ago

hawkice 8y ago
Worth noting: there is a way to do this well. I've been through a visa screening involving domestic and international criminal and espionage background checks that completed in about ten minutes while I waited (that country was the Philippines). There are also a great deal of countries where they allow visas on arrival, where presumably the quite minimal screening happens at the airline.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  While this is true for just about every single other country, the US remains an impossible-to-grok travesty of justice. When I read about what my country does to the people that seek to be a part of it, I can only think back to the 1700s where many many countries wouldn't just deny you entry, they'd imprison you for the horrible horrible crime of just being at their borders. The father of the guy that wrote The Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned for two years in the Kingdom of Naples for the horrific crime of needing provisions after a storm killed their self-reliance. It's exactly the kind of barbarism I think of when I consider the US stance towards any kind of interested interlopers. You must be doing something wrong, wait until I go through the X days process to decide you're not a horrible person. Disgusting.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    Still happening today if you saw the news this year.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
amingilani 8y ago
Despite being someone from a country that end in -stan, I got my US travel visa approved immediately and processed in a week. While I don't know why you were rejected the first time around, I think the 102 day wait time is because your application is at the bottom of someone's work pile, where it will stay until they realize something is wrong. I'd personally ping them again and politely ask if it usually takes this long to process applications of this sort.
- villedepommes 8y ago
  I think this is a very common misconception. DHS and USCIS aren't idiots; they can tell there's a world of difference between a former Soviet republic(e.g. KZ,KG,UZ,etc) and other -stan countries. Also, the US maintains the fairly extensive diplomatic staff in those states. Lastly, if you were to apply for a Green Card, while holding an H1-B, you would get it years before an Indian or Chinese national due to the quota system. I would imagine it should be also easier for people like you to get the Green Card through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    > DHS and USCIS aren't idiots; they can tell there's a world of difference between a former Soviet republic(e.g. KZ,KG,UZ,etc) and other -stan countries. I am a white and Christian European, the sort of person who generally does not get much scrutiny when traveling internationally. Yet quite often when I fly into the USA, the mood of the Customs and Border Patrol officer changes markedly when he notices that I have a Kazakhstan tourist visa in my passport. Since the officer is not allowed to ask you right out “Are you Muslim?”, I once got the indirect question “Did you travel to this country because you sympathize with the belief system of its inhabitants?” I would hope that DHS staff in offices vetting visas are more knowledgeable about the world, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they weren’t.
    - villedepommes 8y ago
      I was actually born in KZ and I can't remember even a single time a CBP officer would give me a hard time because of that. Unless you are from one of Eastern European countries meaning you probably have relatives living in KZ or friends, I can see why a tourist visa for KZ has piqued his interest: it's fairly unusual.
  - amingilani 8y ago
    Thank you for your advice, unfortunately, I'm from the one -stan country ineligible for the Diversity programme: Pakistan.
dsr_ 8y ago
Some Mozilla employees might make inquiries with their congressional representatives and senators; that's what they are there for, in theory.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  I think the SF/BA reps and senators are already pretty well-aware that our borders are terrible, but they lack the political situation and/or acumen to do anything about it.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    They can make specific requests. It's just like tweeting at CEOs: terrible for democracy, but often surprisingly effective.
  - xenadu02 8y ago
    It’s not about that; Congress-people making an inquiry can often cause someone’s visa application to jump to the top of the work pile. Mozilla could also reach out to the State Department, though under the current administration I wouldn’t expect much help.
bodas 8y ago
www.haxx.se: "Haxx is a bunch of friends who work as software developers and hackers in Sweden" Yep, that'll do it.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Yeah, had the exact same thoughts here. Using names like that is just asking for trouble.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    Probably true, but also ridiculous.
- cyberferret 8y ago
  I'm old enough to remember when "hacker" was a term of respect and awe for people with top notch technical skills. Then again, I have come across many Americans who think "boffin" is a derogatory/negative term too...
  - windows_tips 8y ago
    That's probably because it's often used to describe lawyers, which have a pretty notorious representation, as a whole.
  - colanderman 8y ago
    That's because the US has an insidious, persistent, and wide-spread strain of anti-intellectualism. I can think of no time prior to college outside my home when being smart was actually considered "cool". In the US, "cool" is bossing other people around, and smart people get in the way of that. It's why Presidents like GWB purposefully put on a "dopey" persona, and it works. When I first heard "boffin" I too thought it was derogatory, because, why would someone use a slang term to describe someone as smart if it wasn't in a snarky or derogatory manner?
  - starmftronajoll 8y ago
    Americans instinctively assume “boffin” is derogatory because it’s totally absent from American parlance (iOS autocorrects it to “bogging” in US), so without the cultural context it just sounds like a goofy word, like “doofus.” In an American context, it’s not a word that sounds as if it’s being spoken with admiration, so the true meaning is counterintuitive.
lawrencegs 8y ago
Contact immigration lawyer, maybe?
- oneplane 8y ago
  I wonder if there is a 'job creation system' at play here for those lawyers to have a job or exist in the first place. If a country has a good and functional administrative system in place, that would not be needed.
  - colanderman 8y ago
    This is after all partly why the US tax system is so complex... It's well-known that tax preparers lobby against tax simplification.
olivierlacan 8y ago
This makes me wonder how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in similar USCIS/USCBP purgatories regardless of the type of visa application they're waiting to receive a response about.
n1231231231234 8y ago
Belgium can be equally excruciating. a friend of mine moved from india to belgium. after living here for more than a year, his parents wanted to visit him. the parents have a house in india, family, the father is on a decent indian pension, etc. it took the belgian embassy about four months to decide on the application. however, to be able to apply, you have to make all your travel arrangements. they didn't anticipate the process to take this long, had to first move, and then cancel their arrangements altogether. in the end, the application got rejected, but the official reasons were cryptic. my friend's interpretation was that the embassy was concerned that his parents might not return to india. they had the option to appeal, which can take 6 to 12 months. chances of appealing successfully are low and so are the chances of getting a visa in a renewed application. in the process, they lost about €3000, which is a lot of money in rupees. instead of appealing, the parents booked a vacation in the netherlands. the visa application went through in less than a month. they got a schengen visa, meaning that they could also visit belgium. and this is how his parents visited him in the end. his conclusion was that belgian bureaucracy is out of hand and that the EU has interesting loopholes.
- kurthr 8y ago
  I have a friend who's a musician, that's been coming to the US to tour a month a year for a decade. This last time his visa got stuck for a full year and even his immigration lawyer couldn't figure out who was holding it up. Instead they applied for the EB-'Eistein visa' which was issued in only 3 weeks so that he could tour. It did take a call from said lawyer reminding them that a US corporation would be losing money if it wasn't done on time. Still, he was shocked shocked by a quick EB as a weekend strummer with a few regular US gigs. Lawyer cost $6k.
- justAnotherNET 8y ago
  Just an anon startup story, but we had a similar problem... except we shipped product in an interns carry on to X country and drove it into Germany and then to a post office. We were 100% in compliance, but we had to ship TODAY. We had no choice.
gruez 8y ago
>Among other things it requires me to provide info about [...] and every email address I've used during the last 5 years. the other requirements are quite easy to fulfill, but the last one... what if you used disposable mail sites (think mailinator), or a bunch of registered throwaway emails that you simply don't remember anymore?
colanderman 8y ago
Who lobbies for our awful travel system? I mean, of course there's a large contingent of Americans who are xenophobic and nationalist, but such pseudo-fascist bureaucratic red tape doesn't come into being unless powerful entities who stand to benefit from the bureaucracy take advantage of the populist zeitgeist to bend political will to their favor. Who gains power by arbitrarily rejecting random Swedes' visas and ultimately chilling international intrapersonal relationships and flow of culture?
- zavi 8y ago
  Immigration laws have largely been unchanged for decades and are severely out of touch as a result. Nobody with actual power (i.e. Congress) wants to touch immigration as it's a politically charged subject. Politics is ugly in the US nowadays, everybody knows this but it's hard to break out of the deadlock.
- Niten 8y ago
  > such pseudo-fascist bureaucratic red tape doesn't come into being unless powerful entities who stand to benefit from the bureaucracy take advantage of the populist zeitgeist to bend political will to their favor. I assure you it can arise entirely out of negligence, ignorance, and the mindless application of poorly thought-out rules. The impulse to look for the hidden "powerful entities" behind the curtain is an understandable but unfortunate form of conspiracy thinking, and it's unlikely to guide you to the truth of situations like the author's.
  - colanderman 8y ago
    In principle I don't disagree with you; the US certainly had its share of purely bureaucratic boondoggles (e.g. Veterans' Affairs). And were it not for the TSA, our almost systematically acerbic customs officers, overbroad do-not-fly lists, the excessive systematic distrust placed on foreign visitors (e.g. by requiring visas even from close allies), and (most recently) travel bans designed to cut off families from each other, I would agree with you in this specific case. But these aren't just happenstance resulting from bureaucratic fumbling; these are conscious policy decisions. We did after all just experience a national episode of confusion by a seemingly organic process (fake news) which turned out to be orchestrated by a foreign power for its own benefit. It's not unthinkable to me that (purely as an example) Russia also tilts public discourse in such a way as to make it politically untenable to dismantle, or even let stagnate, these self-destructive security apparatuses. It's entirely possible the answer is very simply, "the xenophobic voter block really is so committed and influential." No conspiracy there, and that's a very useful answer. It tells us exactly where we need to focus our energy to fight these policies. I personally doubt that xenophobes are so educated about international travel as to pay sufficient attention to the workings of the visa system that it matters to them in the voting booth that Swedes need visas for nerd conferences, but I could very well just be biased.
cozzyd 8y ago
I thought Trump was in favor of granting visas to citizens of Scandinavian countries.
microcolonel 8y ago
Wasn't aware that Swedes needed visas to visit the U.S, wonder why that is.
- ajdlinux 8y ago
  If you're not arriving by land from Canada or Mexico, you need to at least have an ESTA, even if you're from a US-friendly Western country. If you're denied an ESTA (as in this case) you have to go through the regular visa process. This applies to Swedes, Brits, Australians...
  - 0xFFFE 8y ago
    > US-friendly Western country. Wouldn't that be Eastern countries, technically speaking? unless you used it as a synonym for "First" world countries.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    Seems to me that the visa-free program should be expanded to include more VWP countries. Not sure how much risk we'd incur from accepting Icelanders sans ESTA.
  - cozzyd 8y ago
    Hmm is that why Canada is likely to deny him entrance as well?
    - tedunangst 8y ago
      That sounds like rumor, but Canada does require eTA (basically same thing) for everyone who's not from the US.
    - tluyben2 8y ago
      Usually, entry cards (the ones you get on the plane before landing) contain something like; 'have you been denied access to a country in the past 2 years?' Or something like that. You can lie ofcourse, but...
- 8y ago
KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
Administrative processing (a euphemism for a security background check) often takes multiple months. This happens regularly to engineers and students from places like China or Iran. It can easily take half a year. I'm sure it feels Kafkaesque, but it's not unusual or exceptional.
- nhf 8y ago
  I wonder what would come out of Daniel filing a FOIA request about himself to CBP. FOIA is a nice law in that "any person" (as written in the statute) has standing to file a request, regardless of relationship to the U.S.
lowbloodsugar 8y ago
IANAL but ESTA is not a work permit [1], and if you were going to San Francisco for an all-hands meeting at your employer, then that sounds like work? [1] https://de.usembassy.gov/unpaid-work-is-work-make-sure-you-have-the-correct-visa/ https://de.usembassy.gov/unpaid-work-is-work-make-sure-you-h...
- smelendez 8y ago
  You are allowed to travel for business meetings under ESTA/the visa waiver program, same as a B1 visa. https://nl.usembassy.gov/visas/visa-waiver-program/ https://nl.usembassy.gov/visas/visa-waiver-program/ I think attending meetings of a US parent company is a pretty common use case. It is an elitist rule but what isn't.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    Makes a lot of sense; companies need to do business with other companies, often abroad. If you have to get work permits for visits and meetings, that would hamper the economy on both sides. Not sure about the elitist part there.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
  An all-hands meeting seems to be a classic example of "business" assuming they're employed by a non-US entity (even if you work for a US-based company/org, they may have a non-US entity employing you).
NTDF9 8y ago
US immigration is on par (or worse than) third world countries. Having been in it for 10 years now, I highly recommend people to consider doing business in some other country. At the end, there is only so much time left in life. Do you want to spend months and years pandering to third world bureaucracy or do you want to be quick, efficient and productive in this one single life you have?
dmh2000 8y ago
In the first couple of paragraphs I immediately thought 'haxx' is it. In the past at work when I downloaded from haxx.se I was always worried that IT security would swat me.
codeisawesome 8y ago
I am risking down votes and flagging on this, and it's so worth it. I can't help but feel a nasty, uncalled-for sense of schadenfreude at this - White European gets denied entry to the US and it's MAJOR NEWS!! Plenty of equally talented, educated, trained, motivated, law-abiding people face this treatment everyday (or otherwise avoid risking this treatment by just not going) - just because they happen to be from "shitholes" (US Presidential Terminology of course) that happen to be shitholes in no small part because of the greedy raping and looting in quite recent history by regimes (or antecedents) that are today closing their gates (Daniel's own country included). Nothing against Daniel - deep respect for the guy!! I hope this problem resolves for him. But man, can't help the smile on my face. Not in the least bit because of the complaining in Daniel's post of the DS-160 - something I had to fill too, and hated it just as much, and wouldn't have made the news if I was the author of cURL because I'm Indian.
- jnurmine 8y ago
  I don't exactly know which countries are nowadays classified by president Trump as a "shithole", but I wonder what is a country that classifies as such and had been "raped and looted" by Sweden in the past? Thinking back to the history lessons about where the historical Sweden waged wars at all in the past, I still couldn't figure it out... Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Norway, Finland? Nope, none of these.
projektir 8y ago
This is part of the problem with there not being clear rights for people traveling to countries. You end up with a weird case where most people can get in, but some people end up in administrative balderdash with no recourse. It would look very different if the country just wouldn't let anyone in at all, but because it lets some people in, we get this "well, you can't complain" situation.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

221 points by robin_reala 8y ago

Worth noting: there is a way to do this well. I've been through a visa screening involving domestic and international criminal and espionage background checks that completed in about ten minutes while I waited (that country was the Philippines). There are also a great deal of countries where they allow visas on arrival, where presumably the quite minimal screening happens at the airline.

vinceguidry 8y ago
While this is true for just about every single other country, the US remains an impossible-to-grok travesty of justice. When I read about what my country does to the people that seek to be a part of it, I can only think back to the 1700s where many many countries wouldn't just deny you entry, they'd imprison you for the horrible horrible crime of just being at their borders. The father of the guy that wrote The Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned for two years in the Kingdom of Naples for the horrific crime of needing provisions after a storm killed their self-reliance. It's exactly the kind of barbarism I think of when I consider the US stance towards any kind of interested interlopers. You must be doing something wrong, wait until I go through the X days process to decide you're not a horrible person. Disgusting.
- PakG1 8y ago
  Still happening today if you saw the news this year.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

amingilani 8y ago

Despite being someone from a country that end in -stan, I got my US travel visa approved immediately and processed in a week. While I don't know why you were rejected the first time around, I think the 102 day wait time is because your application is at the bottom of someone's work pile, where it will stay until they realize something is wrong. I'd personally ping them again and politely ask if it usually takes this long to process applications of this sort.

villedepommes 8y ago
I think this is a very common misconception. DHS and USCIS aren't idiots; they can tell there's a world of difference between a former Soviet republic(e.g. KZ,KG,UZ,etc) and other -stan countries. Also, the US maintains the fairly extensive diplomatic staff in those states. Lastly, if you were to apply for a Green Card, while holding an H1-B, you would get it years before an Indian or Chinese national due to the quota system. I would imagine it should be also easier for people like you to get the Green Card through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > DHS and USCIS aren't idiots; they can tell there's a world of difference between a former Soviet republic(e.g. KZ,KG,UZ,etc) and other -stan countries. I am a white and Christian European, the sort of person who generally does not get much scrutiny when traveling internationally. Yet quite often when I fly into the USA, the mood of the Customs and Border Patrol officer changes markedly when he notices that I have a Kazakhstan tourist visa in my passport. Since the officer is not allowed to ask you right out “Are you Muslim?”, I once got the indirect question “Did you travel to this country because you sympathize with the belief system of its inhabitants?” I would hope that DHS staff in offices vetting visas are more knowledgeable about the world, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they weren’t.
  - villedepommes 8y ago
    I was actually born in KZ and I can't remember even a single time a CBP officer would give me a hard time because of that. Unless you are from one of Eastern European countries meaning you probably have relatives living in KZ or friends, I can see why a tourist visa for KZ has piqued his interest: it's fairly unusual.
- amingilani 8y ago
  Thank you for your advice, unfortunately, I'm from the one -stan country ineligible for the Diversity programme: Pakistan.

dsr_ 8y ago

Some Mozilla employees might make inquiries with their congressional representatives and senators; that's what they are there for, in theory.

rabidrat 8y ago
I think the SF/BA reps and senators are already pretty well-aware that our borders are terrible, but they lack the political situation and/or acumen to do anything about it.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  They can make specific requests. It's just like tweeting at CEOs: terrible for democracy, but often surprisingly effective.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  It’s not about that; Congress-people making an inquiry can often cause someone’s visa application to jump to the top of the work pile. Mozilla could also reach out to the State Department, though under the current administration I wouldn’t expect much help.

bodas 8y ago

www.haxx.se: "Haxx is a bunch of friends who work as software developers and hackers in Sweden" Yep, that'll do it.

mehrdadn 8y ago
Yeah, had the exact same thoughts here. Using names like that is just asking for trouble.
- tempestn 8y ago
  Probably true, but also ridiculous.
cyberferret 8y ago
I'm old enough to remember when "hacker" was a term of respect and awe for people with top notch technical skills. Then again, I have come across many Americans who think "boffin" is a derogatory/negative term too...
- windows_tips 8y ago
  That's probably because it's often used to describe lawyers, which have a pretty notorious representation, as a whole.
- colanderman 8y ago
  That's because the US has an insidious, persistent, and wide-spread strain of anti-intellectualism. I can think of no time prior to college outside my home when being smart was actually considered "cool". In the US, "cool" is bossing other people around, and smart people get in the way of that. It's why Presidents like GWB purposefully put on a "dopey" persona, and it works. When I first heard "boffin" I too thought it was derogatory, because, why would someone use a slang term to describe someone as smart if it wasn't in a snarky or derogatory manner?
- starmftronajoll 8y ago
  Americans instinctively assume “boffin” is derogatory because it’s totally absent from American parlance (iOS autocorrects it to “bogging” in US), so without the cultural context it just sounds like a goofy word, like “doofus.” In an American context, it’s not a word that sounds as if it’s being spoken with admiration, so the true meaning is counterintuitive.

lawrencegs 8y ago

Contact immigration lawyer, maybe?

oneplane 8y ago
I wonder if there is a 'job creation system' at play here for those lawyers to have a job or exist in the first place. If a country has a good and functional administrative system in place, that would not be needed.
- colanderman 8y ago
  This is after all partly why the US tax system is so complex... It's well-known that tax preparers lobby against tax simplification.

olivierlacan 8y ago

This makes me wonder how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in similar USCIS/USCBP purgatories regardless of the type of visa application they're waiting to receive a response about.

n1231231231234 8y ago

Belgium can be equally excruciating. a friend of mine moved from india to belgium. after living here for more than a year, his parents wanted to visit him. the parents have a house in india, family, the father is on a decent indian pension, etc. it took the belgian embassy about four months to decide on the application. however, to be able to apply, you have to make all your travel arrangements. they didn't anticipate the process to take this long, had to first move, and then cancel their arrangements altogether. in the end, the application got rejected, but the official reasons were cryptic. my friend's interpretation was that the embassy was concerned that his parents might not return to india. they had the option to appeal, which can take 6 to 12 months. chances of appealing successfully are low and so are the chances of getting a visa in a renewed application. in the process, they lost about €3000, which is a lot of money in rupees. instead of appealing, the parents booked a vacation in the netherlands. the visa application went through in less than a month. they got a schengen visa, meaning that they could also visit belgium. and this is how his parents visited him in the end. his conclusion was that belgian bureaucracy is out of hand and that the EU has interesting loopholes.

kurthr 8y ago
I have a friend who's a musician, that's been coming to the US to tour a month a year for a decade. This last time his visa got stuck for a full year and even his immigration lawyer couldn't figure out who was holding it up. Instead they applied for the EB-'Eistein visa' which was issued in only 3 weeks so that he could tour. It did take a call from said lawyer reminding them that a US corporation would be losing money if it wasn't done on time. Still, he was shocked shocked by a quick EB as a weekend strummer with a few regular US gigs. Lawyer cost $6k.
justAnotherNET 8y ago
Just an anon startup story, but we had a similar problem... except we shipped product in an interns carry on to X country and drove it into Germany and then to a post office. We were 100% in compliance, but we had to ship TODAY. We had no choice.

gruez 8y ago

>Among other things it requires me to provide info about [...] and every email address I've used during the last 5 years. the other requirements are quite easy to fulfill, but the last one... what if you used disposable mail sites (think mailinator), or a bunch of registered throwaway emails that you simply don't remember anymore?

colanderman 8y ago

Who lobbies for our awful travel system? I mean, of course there's a large contingent of Americans who are xenophobic and nationalist, but such pseudo-fascist bureaucratic red tape doesn't come into being unless powerful entities who stand to benefit from the bureaucracy take advantage of the populist zeitgeist to bend political will to their favor. Who gains power by arbitrarily rejecting random Swedes' visas and ultimately chilling international intrapersonal relationships and flow of culture?

zavi 8y ago
Immigration laws have largely been unchanged for decades and are severely out of touch as a result. Nobody with actual power (i.e. Congress) wants to touch immigration as it's a politically charged subject. Politics is ugly in the US nowadays, everybody knows this but it's hard to break out of the deadlock.
Niten 8y ago
> such pseudo-fascist bureaucratic red tape doesn't come into being unless powerful entities who stand to benefit from the bureaucracy take advantage of the populist zeitgeist to bend political will to their favor. I assure you it can arise entirely out of negligence, ignorance, and the mindless application of poorly thought-out rules. The impulse to look for the hidden "powerful entities" behind the curtain is an understandable but unfortunate form of conspiracy thinking, and it's unlikely to guide you to the truth of situations like the author's.
- colanderman 8y ago
  In principle I don't disagree with you; the US certainly had its share of purely bureaucratic boondoggles (e.g. Veterans' Affairs). And were it not for the TSA, our almost systematically acerbic customs officers, overbroad do-not-fly lists, the excessive systematic distrust placed on foreign visitors (e.g. by requiring visas even from close allies), and (most recently) travel bans designed to cut off families from each other, I would agree with you in this specific case. But these aren't just happenstance resulting from bureaucratic fumbling; these are conscious policy decisions. We did after all just experience a national episode of confusion by a seemingly organic process (fake news) which turned out to be orchestrated by a foreign power for its own benefit. It's not unthinkable to me that (purely as an example) Russia also tilts public discourse in such a way as to make it politically untenable to dismantle, or even let stagnate, these self-destructive security apparatuses. It's entirely possible the answer is very simply, "the xenophobic voter block really is so committed and influential." No conspiracy there, and that's a very useful answer. It tells us exactly where we need to focus our energy to fight these policies. I personally doubt that xenophobes are so educated about international travel as to pay sufficient attention to the workings of the visa system that it matters to them in the voting booth that Swedes need visas for nerd conferences, but I could very well just be biased.

cozzyd 8y ago

I thought Trump was in favor of granting visas to citizens of Scandinavian countries.

microcolonel 8y ago

Wasn't aware that Swedes needed visas to visit the U.S, wonder why that is.

ajdlinux 8y ago
If you're not arriving by land from Canada or Mexico, you need to at least have an ESTA, even if you're from a US-friendly Western country. If you're denied an ESTA (as in this case) you have to go through the regular visa process. This applies to Swedes, Brits, Australians...
- 0xFFFE 8y ago
  > US-friendly Western country. Wouldn't that be Eastern countries, technically speaking? unless you used it as a synonym for "First" world countries.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Seems to me that the visa-free program should be expanded to include more VWP countries. Not sure how much risk we'd incur from accepting Icelanders sans ESTA.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  Hmm is that why Canada is likely to deny him entrance as well?
  - tedunangst 8y ago
    That sounds like rumor, but Canada does require eTA (basically same thing) for everyone who's not from the US.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    Usually, entry cards (the ones you get on the plane before landing) contain something like; 'have you been denied access to a country in the past 2 years?' Or something like that. You can lie ofcourse, but...
8y ago

KKKKkkkk1 8y ago

Administrative processing (a euphemism for a security background check) often takes multiple months. This happens regularly to engineers and students from places like China or Iran. It can easily take half a year. I'm sure it feels Kafkaesque, but it's not unusual or exceptional.

nhf 8y ago
I wonder what would come out of Daniel filing a FOIA request about himself to CBP. FOIA is a nice law in that "any person" (as written in the statute) has standing to file a request, regardless of relationship to the U.S.

lowbloodsugar 8y ago

IANAL but ESTA is not a work permit [1], and if you were going to San Francisco for an all-hands meeting at your employer, then that sounds like work? [1] https://de.usembassy.gov/unpaid-work-is-work-make-sure-you-have-the-correct-visa/ https://de.usembassy.gov/unpaid-work-is-work-make-sure-you-h...

smelendez 8y ago
You are allowed to travel for business meetings under ESTA/the visa waiver program, same as a B1 visa. https://nl.usembassy.gov/visas/visa-waiver-program/ https://nl.usembassy.gov/visas/visa-waiver-program/ I think attending meetings of a US parent company is a pretty common use case. It is an elitist rule but what isn't.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  Makes a lot of sense; companies need to do business with other companies, often abroad. If you have to get work permits for visits and meetings, that would hamper the economy on both sides. Not sure about the elitist part there.
tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
An all-hands meeting seems to be a classic example of "business" assuming they're employed by a non-US entity (even if you work for a US-based company/org, they may have a non-US entity employing you).

NTDF9 8y ago

US immigration is on par (or worse than) third world countries. Having been in it for 10 years now, I highly recommend people to consider doing business in some other country. At the end, there is only so much time left in life. Do you want to spend months and years pandering to third world bureaucracy or do you want to be quick, efficient and productive in this one single life you have?

dmh2000 8y ago

In the first couple of paragraphs I immediately thought 'haxx' is it. In the past at work when I downloaded from haxx.se I was always worried that IT security would swat me.

codeisawesome 8y ago

I am risking down votes and flagging on this, and it's so worth it. I can't help but feel a nasty, uncalled-for sense of schadenfreude at this - White European gets denied entry to the US and it's MAJOR NEWS!! Plenty of equally talented, educated, trained, motivated, law-abiding people face this treatment everyday (or otherwise avoid risking this treatment by just not going) - just because they happen to be from "shitholes" (US Presidential Terminology of course) that happen to be shitholes in no small part because of the greedy raping and looting in quite recent history by regimes (or antecedents) that are today closing their gates (Daniel's own country included). Nothing against Daniel - deep respect for the guy!! I hope this problem resolves for him. But man, can't help the smile on my face. Not in the least bit because of the complaining in Daniel's post of the DS-160 - something I had to fill too, and hated it just as much, and wouldn't have made the news if I was the author of cURL because I'm Indian.

jnurmine 8y ago
I don't exactly know which countries are nowadays classified by president Trump as a "shithole", but I wonder what is a country that classifies as such and had been "raped and looted" by Sweden in the past? Thinking back to the history lessons about where the historical Sweden waged wars at all in the past, I still couldn't figure it out... Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Norway, Finland? Nope, none of these.

projektir 8y ago

This is part of the problem with there not being clear rights for people traveling to countries. You end up with a weird case where most people can get in, but some people end up in administrative balderdash with no recourse. It would look very different if the country just wouldn't let anyone in at all, but because it lets some people in, we get this "well, you can't complain" situation.

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