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What am I missing here? Isn't it a good idea to vet people before you let them enter your country? Why would you let in someone that is hostile to your country

What am I missing here? Isn't it a good idea to vet people before you let them enter your country? Why would you let in someone that is hostile to your country? Especially these days with so many individuals being driven by nefarious ideologies?

justrealist 3y ago
Yeah like, there is a broad class of immigrant that endlessly complains about how awful the US is an awful force in the world, and then immigrates here for a high-paying job (and continues complaining). I don't want them! Why should we be required to ignore their personal feelings? There's a long list of people who want into the US. We should prioritize the people who actually like the US, this doesn't feel controversial.
- haswell 3y ago
  Delegating these kinds of decisions to a faceless AI is the thing that is controversial. The ability to systematically analyze a person's life and communications and then derive a "desirability" score is the thing that's controversial. Similar to the subject of client-side scanning for abusive material, the issue is not that anyone supports the abuse. The issues all stem from the implications of the underlying technology and embracing "the ends justify the means".
  - shtopointo 3y ago
    Would you be in favor of vetting some or all publicly available information before letting someone into a country? If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts. If the answer is yes, then you have to delegate to something / someone. Maybe an AI might be better than a human at spotting warning signs.
    - haswell 3y ago
      I’m not saying that there should be no vetting whatsoever. But there’s a vast possibility space between no vetting and the systematic analysis of all public information about a person. Especially when social media - a place where people are rarely their authentic selves - is a primary source. There is far more stupid stuff being said on social media than dangerous stuff. But the two can be nearly indistinguishable without appropriate context. People will be denied entry for being spicy far more than for legitimate reasons I’d imagine. Not to mention that there is a significant amount of public information that should not be public in the first place. Its availability is not a justification for its use in this way. By > If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts. I can’t get on board with this framing. It feels similar to the arguments for more cameras in public places. Put a camera on every corner. They’re public after all. But once you start feeding those cameras into a central AI that can track your every move, they’re no longer just cameras, and the very idea of what it means to be in public no longer means the same thing that it did for most of human civilization. Again, I’m not saying they should look at anything. But I think it’s also necessary to raise red flags when emerging tech will be used in increasingly invasive ways by governments.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  This country can be full of itself sometimes. Having people who are willing to push for change in areas they care about sounds very desirable :)
  - justrealist 3y ago
    I do not want someone to come to the US just to push for dramatic changes. Sorry, but you can do that where you already are. Obviously someone who is 80% positive and 20% "here are some improvements" is one thing, but if they spend all their time whining about US imperialism, I do not want them.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      How do you feel about citizens who do that all the time?
      - salamanderss 3y ago
        Not great myself. Sometimes you move someplace specifically to assimilate with the culture because you feel it's a leg up from where you left. When it is infuriating is when someone comes from someplace that has been torched by failed ideas, or at least failed in the sense it drove them to leave, and they set up shop and do the same damn thing. It ought not be illegal, but for instance you see that with home owners that flee and then vote for the same dumbass stuff that made their origin unaffordable. You have the right to just show up with newly printed residency and demand change, but no right to be liked for it.
- gorbachev 3y ago
  There are good things about the US and bad things about the US. Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    I'm torn on the whole subject. On one hand, techno-surveillance is scary and it rarely marches backward, so letting this happen for citizenship applications will have a chilling effect on foreign intellectuals, and train people who may consider entering this country some day not to speak their mind. I understand the theory that we don't want people coming here who rant all day saying "US is a terrorist state and something should be done about it" on social media. But I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
  - shtopointo 3y ago
    They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism? Maybe closer to the intended end goal here – is a country allowed to deny a visa to a person entering that country, if the level of criticism is on the extreme end?
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      >They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism? A country is allowed to deny a visa for any reason. To put another way, there is no fundamental human right for a non-American to enter the United States.
      - salamanderss 3y ago
        But there is hilariously due process that probably protects those opinions once you've already snuck in. It's a wonder why people put themselves through the hassle of legal immigration where they have basically no rights, when they could just sneak in and be covered by most civil rights and entitled due process in the unlikely event they do something dumb or unlucky enough to get caught.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  This is censorship. You are advocating for censorship of the majority of humanity through legal reprisals to prospective immigrants for having a negative opinion of the country they want to move to.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    I mean. Ok. The majority of human beings are not people who hold values I want in this country. Do I want someone who thinks that heretics should be killed? Women should be circumcised? China should be sterilizing minorities in Xinjiang? Liberal democracy works when the population has a common baseline of enlightened values and mutual respect for the system they work within, I am not apologizing for attempting to maintain that.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Liberal democracy is already under threat by American citizens, and you don't need to immigrate to America to attack American values. You just go online, register a few hundred troll and bot accounts[0], and push your narrative about how we need to persecute a specific group of people in blatant violation of the 1st Amendment. The thing about America is that it's very good[1] at passing on its politics to immigrants and their children. This is why you get lots of immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind themselves and ban immigrants, which is a hilariously illiberal policy that would actually harm themselves. The far-right Islamofascist nutters who want to kill heretics and forcibly mutilate women's vaginas will, given enough time, absolutely break bread with the far-right Christofascist nutters who want to ban books they don't like from schools and ban trans people from public spaces[2]. Given enough time, even tankies[3] could get in on this and form a pan-authoritarian cult of illiberality and oppression. Insamuch as this necessitates any compromise of liberal values for the sake of the continued existence of liberalism in the United States, such a compromise should be limited to the least invasive change necessary to preserve human rights. Banning immigrants for having grumbles about the US smells like collective punishment, and we don't actually need that. Illiberal and far-right thinking is spread by very small numbers of influential and socially connected grifters, and targeting just them would be less invasive. Furthermore, we don't actually know what speech US ICE is using to deny visas, just that they're using machine learning to scan for some kind of speech. They might be solely targeting foreign liberals because that's what they consider a security threat to themselves. [0] Aided by Elon Musk selling bluechecks and algorithmic boosts on Xitter for $8/mo [1] Relative to other countries, of course, who basically don't even try [2] We don't have to get into why they would do this - or how they'd excuse it given their mutual hatred for one another. Crank magnetism is a powerful force. [3] Far-left authoritarians.
salamanderss 3y ago
My objection is the criteria is likely arbitrary and capricious and have more to do with ideologies of the sorts of people designing and executing this than public safety. Maybe the AI is better, maybe it is worse. On some occasions CBP just takes a good look at you for whiteness or whatever and just waives you through without even opening the passport; other days you end up with your car in 1500 pieces. It's mostly voodoo.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anonporridge 3y ago
  I see it more as an effort to discriminate more based on ideology and less on phenotype, and that's a great thing assuming it can be implemented well (dubious). We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain, because not only is that changeable, but certain software is incompatible with the social order that gives us the privilege to rise above our baser nature.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. Why is not changeable relevant? > But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain. The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.
    - anonporridge 3y ago
      > Why is not changeable relevant? Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. No individual gets to choose the genes they inherit, but they do have some level of agency over how they choose to operate in the world. > The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that. True, but the system in place that enforces the first amendment and the entire Constitution ultimately depends on the vast majority of people to agree and comply with that base ideology. The system of governance isn't omnipotent or omnipresent enough to defend against a large enough minority of the population becoming hostile to these ideals. This is the big reason why Trump's violation of the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is so horrific, because it threatened the foundation of consensus that lets our system operate as a democracy that non destructively lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
These people drive me fucking insane. The number of wealthy immigrants who full-time complain while being from like, Singapore or Ireland is bizarre to me. Why live somewhere you have no connections to and dislike when you prefer your arguably-nicer home country? Can someone enlighten me? I’ve worked with dozens of those people It’s especially wild when you talk to Indians who INSIST America is the greatest nation in history and that we have no idea how lucky we are.
- salamanderss 3y ago
  Money. For the same reason I prefer rich immigrants who hate me and buy my shit over nice ones that end up on stamps after they get their papers.
- d3w4s9 3y ago
  Go to India/China/UK/France etc and live & work for half a year and you'll see why. Look at opportunities/salary/living condition/infrastructure and it's clear. Of course USA is not perfect and has lots of problems, and many people go back to their country after getting a degree from a US institution, for very good reasons. But still a lot of people stay for the benefits.
ed_balls 3y ago
It's a waste of money at best. People that mean harm would bypass it like 9/11 hijacker which were drunk. e.g. someone is sharing a post about killing children in Gaza or any other highly controversial topic. Gov employee wastes resources try to check this person, he gets a stressful afternoon. System is prone to abuse and would have a lot of false positives.
tamimio 3y ago
Because just like most of these laws, on the surface it sounds nice and good like “protecting the kids!!”, but in reality it will be used and abused against you, even if you are a citizen.
- shtopointo 3y ago
  This is not a law
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Do you have any idea how many natural-born US citizens are hostile to our country? It's practically a requirement.

justrealist 3y ago

Yeah like, there is a broad class of immigrant that endlessly complains about how awful the US is an awful force in the world, and then immigrates here for a high-paying job (and continues complaining). I don't want them! Why should we be required to ignore their personal feelings? There's a long list of people who want into the US. We should prioritize the people who actually like the US, this doesn't feel controversial.

haswell 3y ago
Delegating these kinds of decisions to a faceless AI is the thing that is controversial. The ability to systematically analyze a person's life and communications and then derive a "desirability" score is the thing that's controversial. Similar to the subject of client-side scanning for abusive material, the issue is not that anyone supports the abuse. The issues all stem from the implications of the underlying technology and embracing "the ends justify the means".
- shtopointo 3y ago
  Would you be in favor of vetting some or all publicly available information before letting someone into a country? If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts. If the answer is yes, then you have to delegate to something / someone. Maybe an AI might be better than a human at spotting warning signs.
  - haswell 3y ago
    I’m not saying that there should be no vetting whatsoever. But there’s a vast possibility space between no vetting and the systematic analysis of all public information about a person. Especially when social media - a place where people are rarely their authentic selves - is a primary source. There is far more stupid stuff being said on social media than dangerous stuff. But the two can be nearly indistinguishable without appropriate context. People will be denied entry for being spicy far more than for legitimate reasons I’d imagine. Not to mention that there is a significant amount of public information that should not be public in the first place. Its availability is not a justification for its use in this way. By > If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts. I can’t get on board with this framing. It feels similar to the arguments for more cameras in public places. Put a camera on every corner. They’re public after all. But once you start feeding those cameras into a central AI that can track your every move, they’re no longer just cameras, and the very idea of what it means to be in public no longer means the same thing that it did for most of human civilization. Again, I’m not saying they should look at anything. But I think it’s also necessary to raise red flags when emerging tech will be used in increasingly invasive ways by governments.
saagarjha 3y ago
This country can be full of itself sometimes. Having people who are willing to push for change in areas they care about sounds very desirable :)
- justrealist 3y ago
  I do not want someone to come to the US just to push for dramatic changes. Sorry, but you can do that where you already are. Obviously someone who is 80% positive and 20% "here are some improvements" is one thing, but if they spend all their time whining about US imperialism, I do not want them.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    How do you feel about citizens who do that all the time?
    - salamanderss 3y ago
      Not great myself. Sometimes you move someplace specifically to assimilate with the culture because you feel it's a leg up from where you left. When it is infuriating is when someone comes from someplace that has been torched by failed ideas, or at least failed in the sense it drove them to leave, and they set up shop and do the same damn thing. It ought not be illegal, but for instance you see that with home owners that flee and then vote for the same dumbass stuff that made their origin unaffordable. You have the right to just show up with newly printed residency and demand change, but no right to be liked for it.
gorbachev 3y ago
There are good things about the US and bad things about the US. Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  I'm torn on the whole subject. On one hand, techno-surveillance is scary and it rarely marches backward, so letting this happen for citizenship applications will have a chilling effect on foreign intellectuals, and train people who may consider entering this country some day not to speak their mind. I understand the theory that we don't want people coming here who rant all day saying "US is a terrorist state and something should be done about it" on social media. But I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
- shtopointo 3y ago
  They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism? Maybe closer to the intended end goal here – is a country allowed to deny a visa to a person entering that country, if the level of criticism is on the extreme end?
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism? A country is allowed to deny a visa for any reason. To put another way, there is no fundamental human right for a non-American to enter the United States.
    - salamanderss 3y ago
      But there is hilariously due process that probably protects those opinions once you've already snuck in. It's a wonder why people put themselves through the hassle of legal immigration where they have basically no rights, when they could just sneak in and be covered by most civil rights and entitled due process in the unlikely event they do something dumb or unlucky enough to get caught.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
kmeisthax 3y ago
This is censorship. You are advocating for censorship of the majority of humanity through legal reprisals to prospective immigrants for having a negative opinion of the country they want to move to.
- justrealist 3y ago
  I mean. Ok. The majority of human beings are not people who hold values I want in this country. Do I want someone who thinks that heretics should be killed? Women should be circumcised? China should be sterilizing minorities in Xinjiang? Liberal democracy works when the population has a common baseline of enlightened values and mutual respect for the system they work within, I am not apologizing for attempting to maintain that.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Liberal democracy is already under threat by American citizens, and you don't need to immigrate to America to attack American values. You just go online, register a few hundred troll and bot accounts[0], and push your narrative about how we need to persecute a specific group of people in blatant violation of the 1st Amendment. The thing about America is that it's very good[1] at passing on its politics to immigrants and their children. This is why you get lots of immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind themselves and ban immigrants, which is a hilariously illiberal policy that would actually harm themselves. The far-right Islamofascist nutters who want to kill heretics and forcibly mutilate women's vaginas will, given enough time, absolutely break bread with the far-right Christofascist nutters who want to ban books they don't like from schools and ban trans people from public spaces[2]. Given enough time, even tankies[3] could get in on this and form a pan-authoritarian cult of illiberality and oppression. Insamuch as this necessitates any compromise of liberal values for the sake of the continued existence of liberalism in the United States, such a compromise should be limited to the least invasive change necessary to preserve human rights. Banning immigrants for having grumbles about the US smells like collective punishment, and we don't actually need that. Illiberal and far-right thinking is spread by very small numbers of influential and socially connected grifters, and targeting just them would be less invasive. Furthermore, we don't actually know what speech US ICE is using to deny visas, just that they're using machine learning to scan for some kind of speech. They might be solely targeting foreign liberals because that's what they consider a security threat to themselves. [0] Aided by Elon Musk selling bluechecks and algorithmic boosts on Xitter for $8/mo [1] Relative to other countries, of course, who basically don't even try [2] We don't have to get into why they would do this - or how they'd excuse it given their mutual hatred for one another. Crank magnetism is a powerful force. [3] Far-left authoritarians.

salamanderss 3y ago

My objection is the criteria is likely arbitrary and capricious and have more to do with ideologies of the sorts of people designing and executing this than public safety. Maybe the AI is better, maybe it is worse. On some occasions CBP just takes a good look at you for whiteness or whatever and just waives you through without even opening the passport; other days you end up with your car in 1500 pieces. It's mostly voodoo.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anonporridge 3y ago
I see it more as an effort to discriminate more based on ideology and less on phenotype, and that's a great thing assuming it can be implemented well (dubious). We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain, because not only is that changeable, but certain software is incompatible with the social order that gives us the privilege to rise above our baser nature.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. Why is not changeable relevant? > But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain. The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    > Why is not changeable relevant? Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. No individual gets to choose the genes they inherit, but they do have some level of agency over how they choose to operate in the world. > The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that. True, but the system in place that enforces the first amendment and the entire Constitution ultimately depends on the vast majority of people to agree and comply with that base ideology. The system of governance isn't omnipotent or omnipresent enough to defend against a large enough minority of the population becoming hostile to these ideals. This is the big reason why Trump's violation of the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is so horrific, because it threatened the foundation of consensus that lets our system operate as a democracy that non destructively lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

These people drive me fucking insane. The number of wealthy immigrants who full-time complain while being from like, Singapore or Ireland is bizarre to me. Why live somewhere you have no connections to and dislike when you prefer your arguably-nicer home country? Can someone enlighten me? I’ve worked with dozens of those people It’s especially wild when you talk to Indians who INSIST America is the greatest nation in history and that we have no idea how lucky we are.

salamanderss 3y ago
Money. For the same reason I prefer rich immigrants who hate me and buy my shit over nice ones that end up on stamps after they get their papers.
d3w4s9 3y ago
Go to India/China/UK/France etc and live & work for half a year and you'll see why. Look at opportunities/salary/living condition/infrastructure and it's clear. Of course USA is not perfect and has lots of problems, and many people go back to their country after getting a degree from a US institution, for very good reasons. But still a lot of people stay for the benefits.

ed_balls 3y ago

It's a waste of money at best. People that mean harm would bypass it like 9/11 hijacker which were drunk. e.g. someone is sharing a post about killing children in Gaza or any other highly controversial topic. Gov employee wastes resources try to check this person, he gets a stressful afternoon. System is prone to abuse and would have a lot of false positives.

tamimio 3y ago

Because just like most of these laws, on the surface it sounds nice and good like “protecting the kids!!”, but in reality it will be used and abused against you, even if you are a citizen.

shtopointo 3y ago
This is not a law

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Do you have any idea how many natural-born US citizens are hostile to our country? It's practically a requirement.