The review of all visa holders appears to be a significant expansion of what had initially been a process focused mainly on students who have been involved in what the government perceives as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel activity.
Seems unlikely this will convince anyone that disagrees with Israeli policy that they're wrong. Quite the opposite, I imagine. That can't be good for long term support of Israel by America.
In the short term, it will allow genocide to be finished. In the long term, it is quite possible it will be forgotten, excused and lied about. Eventually everyone will move on as if nothing happened, except small minority
It's unclear from the passage. The "significant expansion" sounds like it could be referring to who is being examined or the violations authorities are looking for or both.
This might be obvious to others but to me this story really made it clear to me that this is probably much about fear. Fear of stepping out of line, drawing attention to yourself and as a result at best getting into trouble, or at worst deported.
The admin makes it clear, if you have opposing views and share them, you're not welcome here.
Fall semester is about to start. Don't think the timing is a coincidence. Israel really doesn't like people criticizing and protesting against them. Especially on college campuses.
They don't care really about Israel I think, what leverage would they have to pressure the US admin to do anything? I think this is about being critical of the people in government in general. If everyone is at risk of being deported, who would go and protest anything? That would certainly make me think twice about it.
Speaking of fear, don't forget that "deport" doesn't mean that you will just be moved to a different country, but rather there is a good chance you will end up in a concentration camp.
How many "mistakes" are going to be made in this process, I wonder? A colleague of mine had his student's visa status suddenly revoked a few months ago. Fortunately, the student's lawyers successfully argued in court that there were no grounds for revocation. It still isn't clear why any of it happened.
This isn't discussed enough. One argument I've heard is that "this only applies to people who break the law".
One thing to consider is how easy is to make minor mistakes that technically count as an infraction. When acting in good faith, the administration can acknowledge this and promptly fix it, as it happened to me during my immigration process.
Then there are random mistakes out of your control. For example, when I first moved to the US and tried to get insurance for my car, I received extremely high quotes from the insurer. When I inquired why, they replied that my file showed several traffic infractions years ago in a different state. Simply clarifying that they'd mistaken me for another person was enough to fix it. Imagine if instead they deported me to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to defend myself.
And this is not talking shadier practices, such as changing the rules so that certain things suddenly become offenses, or simply fabricating evidence against someone.
No, next they'll be reviewing citizenships too in order to make sure you haven't said anything mean about Trump or Vance online. Oh sorry, to make sure you haven't said anything that goes against the fundamental values of the United States.
> As an US citizen, do you really want to fight for the "rights" of muslim students to chant "from the river to the sea" while burning american flags on campuses?
Vehemently, yes.
I will fight with everything available for the right of anyone to say anything critical about anyone else. Including burning the American flag, the Israeli flag, or the Palestinian flag.
Free speech is free speech. Get out of here with this authoritarian take.
Putting aside the dislike of other cultures, you're making several assumptions here. This student was of Asian descent, and was selected for their talents. The student never committed any crime or misdemeanor, was never fined, never spoke out of turn or rallied for any cause, and had no government connections. It's possible a name was mixed up, which isn't surprising as funding is being channeled from legal immigration offices to deportations. He's one of several I've heard about.
Believe it or not, the US enjoys a special status as a prominent place to study and contribute knowledge. I'm talking about students doing fundamental, valuable, possibly even patentable research. The best talent flows through here, and domestic students get to benefit from that. Because of these "mistakes", it is already the case that good talent is choosing not to come to the US. Certain other nations will benefit instead.
If you want a US for existing US citizens alone (immigration "the right way" is rapidly deteriorating), then that is what is happening. One way or another, we'll witness what the US becomes.
Your argument basically calls for ending Blackstone's ratio in the US courts and instead adopting Dwight Schrute's ratio of ” Better a thousand men are locked up than one guilty man roam free" because of your fear of immigrants having differing opinions than you.
Plenty of other responses, but I just wanted to say that your conspiracy theory about a politician marrying her brother for a visa is a complete lie. This article traces the origin of the theory, outlines who has spread it (not surprising), and generally debunks the issue: https://www.yahoo.com/news/everything-know-persistent-unprov...
I felt this important to call out because using specific examples as a caricature illustrating a purported more general point is a common discursive tactic used to dehumanize larger groups of people. "Look at what this member of group did, aren't they all barbarians?"
Since I assume your ideology is more individualistic, maybe try viewing people as individuals instead of throwing an entire group of people together and instituting collective blame for purported wrongs.
1) I probably know very little about the rules & laws of your country, so it's fair that you clearly don't know much about America's Constitution/Bill of Rights. One of several violations of the constitution you're espousing, trashing Freedom of Speech is trashing an inalienable right in the US, arguably the MOST important. So yes, I want people incl. visa holders talking smack about the US and burning flags and perhaps most importantly not fearing losing citizenship for criticizing a foreign government. Esp. if it's a foreign power which is likely supplying a list of the visas that are to be revoked. Flag-burnings and criticism of the US govt are the chirping birdies in the mineshaft of freedom. You and other non-Americans think that they are experts in US governance from watching the TV. It's likely that you know more about it than the average US citizen knows about their (your) country's laws, but I'd suggest doing some more research. Or y'know just stick to expressing opinions about your country's govt, if they allow that.
2) Good to hear that my life (a born and bred 9th generation US citizen) and the lives of many others can be torn asunder as a rounding error. My community and myself have built their lives around people who are in the US on a variety of long-term visas that were guaranteed until oh say 213 days ago.
3) Unless your side can get the big dub (100 Year Reich), the pendulum swings both ways, baby. Probably going to be a while because there's no left-wing party in the US, but sooner or later this pain will be revisited upon your American counterparts tenfold. I don't like this, to be clear. I want that pendulum resting right in the middle.
4, I guess? I don't know anything about the Somali guy but sounds like you're admitting you don't either. You could start your research there but like many things foreign conservative critics of America point out, it doesn't sound particularly germane to national American politics.
Sounds like you’re terrified of immigrants for lack of human understanding.
Like a child.
Here’s the thing - this whole experiment was built on stolen land with slave labor and there can never be immigration “justice” on stolen land.
What problem is being solved by making “a few mistakes” because that’s what you have to do in such situations?
Libertarian conservatives like yourself have created a service based economy where labor can’t afford to live where the work is making the economy inherently dependent on immigrants of any stripe.
But like so many other things understood by people who think like 8 year olds we will have to learn the hard way that, for example, scaring away all the illegal Mexicans will result in billions in food losses and price increases on everything, but at least we got some bad immigrants, right?
Officials say the reviews will include all visa holders’ social media accounts, law enforcement and immigration records in their home countries, along with any actionable violations of U.S. law committed while they were in the United States.
The reviews will include new tools for data collection on past, present and future visa applicants, including a complete scouring of social media sites made possible by new requirements introduced earlier this year. Those make it mandatory for privacy switches on cellphones and other electronic devices or apps to be turned off when an applicant appears for a visa interview.
"I have nothing to hide" kind of people will get a nice surprise when they will be deported for liking a post against Trump...
Birthright citizenship revocation being applied retroactively is definitely lower hanging fruit than that. If that happens I would be concerned about naturalized citizens, but only then.
I'm sure there's more. The type of people who clamor for power often do so for the ability to do amoral things.
It's unsuprising theres a mix of nazis and israelis at the helm of America's "self interest" and there's criminals, child molestors, rapists constantly being squeezed out.
There is no way 55 million visas can be reviewed in any reasonable amount of time (cue the "AI can do it" comments). The number of H1B visa holders is a tiny fraction of 55m, if they cared about reviewing those, it'd require a lot less in time and resources.
Targeting H1b would also result in much stronger legal opposition. It takes a year to process less than 100k H1B applications annually, and companies have to pay thousands processing fees for each one. The goal of this is to discourage foreign students, refugee claimants and tourist visa holders from coming to America.
The reason for the flag is always the same: because they don’t want to talk about it here.
The real question is: why don’t people want to talk about it? I’ve found it typically falls into three camps:
One group flags these kinds of stories because they’re exhausted, and can’t stomach any more. I feel bad for this group, and I understand the impulse.
Another group flags because suppressing information about what the administration is up to aligns with their personal ideology. This is the more dangerous group, and I’m always sad to see people coming out in support of awful stuff like this.
The last group flags it because it annoys them, and they don’t want to engage with it. It makes them uncomfortable and they feel it doesn’t impact them. They point to the HN guidelines and say it’s not relevant. It is, they’re just lucky enough to have not been affected personally by anything yet.
There are obviously N groups but one you're missing might be the people that just don't think it's a topic that fits the purpose of this space, at least how it's stated in the guidelines.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I can't help but feel that stories like these fall under "off-topic".
Surely includes a lot of tourist visas, and many of these people might be outside the US already but the visa just hasn't expired yet. Or people who need to come frequently for business trips.
Seems inflated. Reliable estimates run around 2/3 of that. Higher numbers always seem anchored only by handwavey 'there must be more because reasons', which is why you regularly see people claiming sums of 20m, 30m, 40m. The current president has a habit of picking arbitrary numbers based on his feelings, but that doesn't sem a very reliable system to me.
this is done to deport all pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist visa holders, with the help of Palantir.
Social media posts have been scrubbed, list of people have been prepared, just a matter of cross-checking whether they are non-citizens and can be deported
I bet it's much more a campaign to instil fear in people with non-citizen status in general and for them to watch what they're doing and saying in general.
People are already spread too thin to revolt anyway, the billionaire masters made sure of that by lowering wages until people were just near enough the poverty line that losing their job would mean ruin. Can't go protest if you have to put food on the table. Now you also have to worry not to be taken out of your community and sent to a random 3rd country. I bet that makes people be quiet real quick. I bet we'll see a widening of what's un-acceptable by the administration.
Nothing really to see here. Normal course of business, except maybe that reviewing all 55m systematically is gonna take a while with all the database joins you will have to do across disparate systems.
Sure, f you trust the administration to rely on objective standards rather than making arbitrary and capricious decisions at scale. Looking at social media, I see a lot of people (including GOP county chairs, example below) saying things like 'deport them all, let them reapply for re-entry,' which kinda proves the argument that it was never about illegal immigration in the first place.
If you have ever had to apply for a Schengen Visa to enter the EU, then you will know how strict the EU is (even hotels want to see your passport and record it).
It's certainly to be some sort of political litmus test with a quick perusal of social media for anything other than rabid Trump support along with a test for darker tone of skin or country of origin that is out of favor, to bulk up their failure to kick out enough migrants (not coming close to their stated goals of 1000s per day) through the means they have used so far with fake justification, ticky tacky legal and paperwork issues used to justify deportation.
Whether or not the person has ever attended an anti-Israel protest is an objective standard that is not arbitrary. There are lots of bad things to say, but it's not arbitrary or unobjective.
They're going to do a few keyword searches for things "Gaza" and "universal healthcare" and try to mass-deport anyone who used those words on social media. And if no one tries to stop them, then it will happen. Habeas Corpus is gone.
This is not normal course of business at all. This is probably a wave of capricious decision making to "meet quota" because they are not able to find and catch illegal immigrants to make news.
This is only about protecting Israel.
From the article:
The review of all visa holders appears to be a significant expansion of what had initially been a process focused mainly on students who have been involved in what the government perceives as pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel activity.
Seems unlikely this will convince anyone that disagrees with Israeli policy that they're wrong. Quite the opposite, I imagine. That can't be good for long term support of Israel by America.
In the short term, it will allow genocide to be finished. In the long term, it is quite possible it will be forgotten, excused and lied about. Eventually everyone will move on as if nothing happened, except small minority
1 reply →
It was originally about that, but this expansion appears to be more general, no?
It's unclear from the passage. The "significant expansion" sounds like it could be referring to who is being examined or the violations authorities are looking for or both.
America first etc etc
This might be obvious to others but to me this story really made it clear to me that this is probably much about fear. Fear of stepping out of line, drawing attention to yourself and as a result at best getting into trouble, or at worst deported.
The admin makes it clear, if you have opposing views and share them, you're not welcome here.
Fall semester is about to start. Don't think the timing is a coincidence. Israel really doesn't like people criticizing and protesting against them. Especially on college campuses.
They don't care really about Israel I think, what leverage would they have to pressure the US admin to do anything? I think this is about being critical of the people in government in general. If everyone is at risk of being deported, who would go and protest anything? That would certainly make me think twice about it.
3 replies →
Absolutely. Every single one of those 55M people will think twice about every aspect of their life. It will be debilitating for many of them.
How long can support for this last?
Speaking of fear, don't forget that "deport" doesn't mean that you will just be moved to a different country, but rather there is a good chance you will end up in a concentration camp.
How many "mistakes" are going to be made in this process, I wonder? A colleague of mine had his student's visa status suddenly revoked a few months ago. Fortunately, the student's lawyers successfully argued in court that there were no grounds for revocation. It still isn't clear why any of it happened.
This isn't discussed enough. One argument I've heard is that "this only applies to people who break the law".
One thing to consider is how easy is to make minor mistakes that technically count as an infraction. When acting in good faith, the administration can acknowledge this and promptly fix it, as it happened to me during my immigration process.
Then there are random mistakes out of your control. For example, when I first moved to the US and tried to get insurance for my car, I received extremely high quotes from the insurer. When I inquired why, they replied that my file showed several traffic infractions years ago in a different state. Simply clarifying that they'd mistaken me for another person was enough to fix it. Imagine if instead they deported me to a prison in El Salvador without a chance to defend myself.
And this is not talking shadier practices, such as changing the rules so that certain things suddenly become offenses, or simply fabricating evidence against someone.
Is Freedom of Speech only meant for US citizens?
No, next they'll be reviewing citizenships too in order to make sure you haven't said anything mean about Trump or Vance online. Oh sorry, to make sure you haven't said anything that goes against the fundamental values of the United States.
5 replies →
[flagged]
> As an US citizen, do you really want to fight for the "rights" of muslim students to chant "from the river to the sea" while burning american flags on campuses?
Vehemently, yes.
I will fight with everything available for the right of anyone to say anything critical about anyone else. Including burning the American flag, the Israeli flag, or the Palestinian flag.
Free speech is free speech. Get out of here with this authoritarian take.
“Break a few eggs”. This is digusting rhetoric.
1 reply →
Putting aside the dislike of other cultures, you're making several assumptions here. This student was of Asian descent, and was selected for their talents. The student never committed any crime or misdemeanor, was never fined, never spoke out of turn or rallied for any cause, and had no government connections. It's possible a name was mixed up, which isn't surprising as funding is being channeled from legal immigration offices to deportations. He's one of several I've heard about.
Believe it or not, the US enjoys a special status as a prominent place to study and contribute knowledge. I'm talking about students doing fundamental, valuable, possibly even patentable research. The best talent flows through here, and domestic students get to benefit from that. Because of these "mistakes", it is already the case that good talent is choosing not to come to the US. Certain other nations will benefit instead.
If you want a US for existing US citizens alone (immigration "the right way" is rapidly deteriorating), then that is what is happening. One way or another, we'll witness what the US becomes.
Are you "an" US citizen?
Your argument basically calls for ending Blackstone's ratio in the US courts and instead adopting Dwight Schrute's ratio of ” Better a thousand men are locked up than one guilty man roam free" because of your fear of immigrants having differing opinions than you.
Plenty of other responses, but I just wanted to say that your conspiracy theory about a politician marrying her brother for a visa is a complete lie. This article traces the origin of the theory, outlines who has spread it (not surprising), and generally debunks the issue: https://www.yahoo.com/news/everything-know-persistent-unprov...
I felt this important to call out because using specific examples as a caricature illustrating a purported more general point is a common discursive tactic used to dehumanize larger groups of people. "Look at what this member of group did, aren't they all barbarians?"
Since I assume your ideology is more individualistic, maybe try viewing people as individuals instead of throwing an entire group of people together and instituting collective blame for purported wrongs.
1) I probably know very little about the rules & laws of your country, so it's fair that you clearly don't know much about America's Constitution/Bill of Rights. One of several violations of the constitution you're espousing, trashing Freedom of Speech is trashing an inalienable right in the US, arguably the MOST important. So yes, I want people incl. visa holders talking smack about the US and burning flags and perhaps most importantly not fearing losing citizenship for criticizing a foreign government. Esp. if it's a foreign power which is likely supplying a list of the visas that are to be revoked. Flag-burnings and criticism of the US govt are the chirping birdies in the mineshaft of freedom. You and other non-Americans think that they are experts in US governance from watching the TV. It's likely that you know more about it than the average US citizen knows about their (your) country's laws, but I'd suggest doing some more research. Or y'know just stick to expressing opinions about your country's govt, if they allow that.
2) Good to hear that my life (a born and bred 9th generation US citizen) and the lives of many others can be torn asunder as a rounding error. My community and myself have built their lives around people who are in the US on a variety of long-term visas that were guaranteed until oh say 213 days ago.
3) Unless your side can get the big dub (100 Year Reich), the pendulum swings both ways, baby. Probably going to be a while because there's no left-wing party in the US, but sooner or later this pain will be revisited upon your American counterparts tenfold. I don't like this, to be clear. I want that pendulum resting right in the middle.
4, I guess? I don't know anything about the Somali guy but sounds like you're admitting you don't either. You could start your research there but like many things foreign conservative critics of America point out, it doesn't sound particularly germane to national American politics.
Sounds like you’re terrified of immigrants for lack of human understanding. Like a child. Here’s the thing - this whole experiment was built on stolen land with slave labor and there can never be immigration “justice” on stolen land. What problem is being solved by making “a few mistakes” because that’s what you have to do in such situations? Libertarian conservatives like yourself have created a service based economy where labor can’t afford to live where the work is making the economy inherently dependent on immigrants of any stripe. But like so many other things understood by people who think like 8 year olds we will have to learn the hard way that, for example, scaring away all the illegal Mexicans will result in billions in food losses and price increases on everything, but at least we got some bad immigrants, right?
[dead]
The fell fast on the slippery slope in US.
"I have nothing to hide" kind of people will get a nice surprise when they will be deported for liking a post against Trump...
Naturalized citizens are up next.
Birthright citizenship revocation being applied retroactively is definitely lower hanging fruit than that. If that happens I would be concerned about naturalized citizens, but only then.
Well, the Israeli child abusing officer has left the country.
I'm sure there's more. The type of people who clamor for power often do so for the ability to do amoral things.
It's unsuprising theres a mix of nazis and israelis at the helm of America's "self interest" and there's criminals, child molestors, rapists constantly being squeezed out.
Does this include H-1B fraud?
There is no way 55 million visas can be reviewed in any reasonable amount of time (cue the "AI can do it" comments). The number of H1B visa holders is a tiny fraction of 55m, if they cared about reviewing those, it'd require a lot less in time and resources.
Targeting H1b would also result in much stronger legal opposition. It takes a year to process less than 100k H1B applications annually, and companies have to pay thousands processing fees for each one. The goal of this is to discourage foreign students, refugee claimants and tourist visa holders from coming to America.
It should.
Anything that implicates businesses, unles clearly run by dirty communists, will be ignored.
Why is this flagged, can anyone explain?
Seems relevant since a lot of tech ppl are on visa
The reason for the flag is always the same: because they don’t want to talk about it here.
The real question is: why don’t people want to talk about it? I’ve found it typically falls into three camps:
One group flags these kinds of stories because they’re exhausted, and can’t stomach any more. I feel bad for this group, and I understand the impulse.
Another group flags because suppressing information about what the administration is up to aligns with their personal ideology. This is the more dangerous group, and I’m always sad to see people coming out in support of awful stuff like this.
The last group flags it because it annoys them, and they don’t want to engage with it. It makes them uncomfortable and they feel it doesn’t impact them. They point to the HN guidelines and say it’s not relevant. It is, they’re just lucky enough to have not been affected personally by anything yet.
I pity the last group, honestly.
There are obviously N groups but one you're missing might be the people that just don't think it's a topic that fits the purpose of this space, at least how it's stated in the guidelines.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I can't help but feel that stories like these fall under "off-topic".
5 replies →
Possibly a fourth group of startup founders and investors that don't want H1B pipelines to dry up as a result of constant bad news.
1 reply →
55M visa holders ???
I had no idea it was that many.
I thought 18M undocumented was a high %age!
342M people in the US. 16% visa holders
I wonder how that compares to other countries?
https://www.census.gov/popclock/
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born/about....
Surely includes a lot of tourist visas, and many of these people might be outside the US already but the visa just hasn't expired yet. Or people who need to come frequently for business trips.
Historically this isn't exceptional, and is arguably a reversion ot hte mean following the disruption of a WW2 and its aftershocks.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...
I thought 18M undocumented was a high %age!
Seems inflated. Reliable estimates run around 2/3 of that. Higher numbers always seem anchored only by handwavey 'there must be more because reasons', which is why you regularly see people claiming sums of 20m, 30m, 40m. The current president has a habit of picking arbitrary numbers based on his feelings, but that doesn't sem a very reliable system to me.
https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...
Tourist visas, Business visas, temporary work visas
There are 55m visas, majority of which are non immigrant visas.
Think about what a "visa holder" might be and then try your comment again.
this is done to deport all pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist visa holders, with the help of Palantir.
Social media posts have been scrubbed, list of people have been prepared, just a matter of cross-checking whether they are non-citizens and can be deported
I bet it's much more a campaign to instil fear in people with non-citizen status in general and for them to watch what they're doing and saying in general.
People are already spread too thin to revolt anyway, the billionaire masters made sure of that by lowering wages until people were just near enough the poverty line that losing their job would mean ruin. Can't go protest if you have to put food on the table. Now you also have to worry not to be taken out of your community and sent to a random 3rd country. I bet that makes people be quiet real quick. I bet we'll see a widening of what's un-acceptable by the administration.
https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/palantir-babel-street-s...
[dead]
Nothing really to see here. Normal course of business, except maybe that reviewing all 55m systematically is gonna take a while with all the database joins you will have to do across disparate systems.
Sure, f you trust the administration to rely on objective standards rather than making arbitrary and capricious decisions at scale. Looking at social media, I see a lot of people (including GOP county chairs, example below) saying things like 'deport them all, let them reapply for re-entry,' which kinda proves the argument that it was never about illegal immigration in the first place.
https://x.com/BoFrenchTX/status/1958611053119775213
It is worth familiarizing oneself with VISA rules in other countries and how they enforce them, before the automatic outrage.
Let's take The Netherlands as an example to get a feel.
- Pronouncement of undesirability: https://ind.nl/en/pronouncement-of-undesirability
- Entry bans: https://ind.nl/en/entry-ban
If you have ever had to apply for a Schengen Visa to enter the EU, then you will know how strict the EU is (even hotels want to see your passport and record it).
11 replies →
It's certainly to be some sort of political litmus test with a quick perusal of social media for anything other than rabid Trump support along with a test for darker tone of skin or country of origin that is out of favor, to bulk up their failure to kick out enough migrants (not coming close to their stated goals of 1000s per day) through the means they have used so far with fake justification, ticky tacky legal and paperwork issues used to justify deportation.
Whether or not the person has ever attended an anti-Israel protest is an objective standard that is not arbitrary. There are lots of bad things to say, but it's not arbitrary or unobjective.
34 replies →
They're going to do a few keyword searches for things "Gaza" and "universal healthcare" and try to mass-deport anyone who used those words on social media. And if no one tries to stop them, then it will happen. Habeas Corpus is gone.
That's probably true.
This is not normal course of business at all. This is probably a wave of capricious decision making to "meet quota" because they are not able to find and catch illegal immigrants to make news.
You say that as if Palantir does not already have all this information ready for AI analysis today.
Or that the NSA doesn't have it all centralized, tagged and sorted.
Which is why the Trump admin will just default to Betar US, repping a foreign entity ethnostate, for their list of visas to revoke.
[flagged]