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No offense but the tone of your post screams 'butthurt'. Leave your national pride and various statistics-based pissing contests out of this (and the sour grape

No offense but the tone of your post screams 'butthurt'. Leave your national pride and various statistics-based pissing contests out of this (and the sour grapes argument is completely emotion-based and irrelevant). There are many legitimate reasons for non-Americans to avoid the US these days and unpleasant immigration procedures are just one of them. I am for one simply afraid of going there, not knowing what kind of horrible treatment I can expect at the border if I rub some immigration officer the wrong way, and this is coming from a white European. Many of my friends feel the same way. I can only imagine what a Middle Eastern-looking person with a few stamps from 'undesirable' countries in their passport must feel like.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Yeah politics suck. I remember when my older brother travelled to India to visit the in-laws. Unfortunately for him some American customs folk had turned away an Indian diplomat the previous day. So it was 'turn Americans away day' and he was the unfortunate pawn. Too a couple of days before it blew over.
tokenadult 12y ago
I have lived outside the United States (in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country) for a large percentage of my adult life, so I am very open to the perspective of people from other countries. And as I have done my own crossing of international borders, I see that each country sets its own rules about who crosses with what kind of paperwork. Unrestricted discretion of border control officers is the general rule of international law, alas, despite a period of history (before when any of us were born) when it was routine for most people to be allowed to travel freely to most civilized countries. I don't imagine what people feel like when I can observe what people feel like. What I observe is that a lot more people on Hacker News and elsewhere desire to visit the United States and to settle in the United States[1] than decide never to go to the United States at all. That's a fact of the world that I have to deal with without emotion or name-calling but just by thinking about what policy implications that fact has. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-immigration-numbers-perucca http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-i... http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destination-for-worlds-migrants/ http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destinati...
kylemaxwell 12y ago
"No offense but" is code for "I am about to say something offensive." And are you really suggesting that statistics - facts - are irrelevant?

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Yeah politics suck. I remember when my older brother travelled to India to visit the in-laws. Unfortunately for him some American customs folk had turned away an Indian diplomat the previous day. So it was 'turn Americans away day' and he was the unfortunate pawn. Too a couple of days before it blew over.

tokenadult 12y ago

I have lived outside the United States (in a non-Western, non-English-speaking country) for a large percentage of my adult life, so I am very open to the perspective of people from other countries. And as I have done my own crossing of international borders, I see that each country sets its own rules about who crosses with what kind of paperwork. Unrestricted discretion of border control officers is the general rule of international law, alas, despite a period of history (before when any of us were born) when it was routine for most people to be allowed to travel freely to most civilized countries. I don't imagine what people feel like when I can observe what people feel like. What I observe is that a lot more people on Hacker News and elsewhere desire to visit the United States and to settle in the United States[1] than decide never to go to the United States at all. That's a fact of the world that I have to deal with without emotion or name-calling but just by thinking about what policy implications that fact has. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-immigration-numbers-perucca http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/united-states-i... http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destination-for-worlds-migrants/ http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/u-s-is-top-destinati...

kylemaxwell 12y ago

"No offense but" is code for "I am about to say something offensive." And are you really suggesting that statistics - facts - are irrelevant?