Comment by barishnamazov
7 hours ago
NBC has posted the full list here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/us-sto...
> A U.S. official confirmed the full list of countries will include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Grenada is here because the US asked to install radars here for their Venezuelan operation("drug boat interception") and Grenada declined. They also raised the The Level 2 advisory for US citizen.
Both Armenia and Azerbaijan? At least they aren’t playing favorites.
Russia I presume is on the list because of geopolitical tensions.
I am not familiar with every country in that list but in my experience, what looks like an anomaly is Morocco, which produces a fairly large elite compared to the size of the country (worked with lots of highly educated / highly paid (and therefore net tax contributing) moroccan nationals). I have hardly worked with any other nationality in that list in my professional life (Bangladesh and Tunisia maybe).
I think this move could harm US in two ways: It will reduce the immigrant diversity which might make the population skew towards the biggest immigrant population such as from India and Mexico which are not in this list. Second it will remove USA as top destination for talent, which will help stop brain drain from these countries causing their local industry to benefit and thereby reducing the edge of US companies.
Why Bhutan is here? It's a peaceful small place.
It has Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh too - some of them makes sense.
But overall this list feels too much.
https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/trump-sh...
What did Jordan, Azerbaijan, Macedonia or Uruguay do?
The State Department said[1]: "The State Department will pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates."
Whether or not that's a good/true reason is another discussion.
1: https://x.com/StateDept/status/2011478657680757214
Jordan has been a key ally of the US. No one will make that mistake again.
So was Denmark.
Trump and his whole administration is extremely pro-Israel, even by the standards of US administrations. Jordan is 95% Muslim and around a quarter of the population are Palestinian refugees, so I suspect that has something to do with it
> Jordan is 95% Muslim
And the second Arab country to recognise Israel [1]. (After Egypt. Also on the list.)
In June, Amman was probably "intercepting some of the missiles and drones en route to Israel, with debris from those interceptions causing damage in some instances" [2].
The Israel hypothesis does not hold for this list.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Jordan_peace_tr...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/caught-in-the-crossfire-jordan...
No matter if one is pro-israel or not, there are reasons to not want your country to become an islamist country ruled by sharia (Jordan is partially ruled by sharia law).
What did Fiji do!?
Not only Azerbaijan, but the whole Caucasia is included (Armenia and Georgia too). Given Trump's recent peace middlemanship between Azerbaijan and Armenia, this is actually somewhat surprising.
Crazy that Macedonia and Montenegro are there, and Serbia is not. Even Albania and Kosovo are there, despite them being US puppets
I think it's strictly for financial reasons. A different profile of people from Serbia comes to the US.
I'm from Montenegro, but also lived in Serbia for a sizeable portion of my life and have family there.
Many people from said countries work in the US illegaly. I can speak for Montenegro, but the exact same pattern plays out in Bosnia and Albania.
Sure, there are some people who go to the US to study for a bit, and there are short-term seasonal work arrangements for students like "Work and Travel", but those are short.
I know 20+ people from Montenegro who went to work in the US in the last decade, illegaly or semi-legally. Two things come to mind first: driving trucks and picking marijuana. Usually they go there for a seasonal job or simply as tourists and overstay their visa.
My schoolmate even has a company that facilitates such schemes and sends people to the US as seasonal workers, who then overstay their visas and do shitty jobs. He's a millionare now, not that you'd know. Of course, it's also the diaspora in the US who actually facilitate this scheme and exploit the workers. I've heard the same thing from Albanians.
Every person I know who went to work in the US from Serbia (10+ people) is either a (good) dev, or an expert of some other kind, engineer, maybe a doctor (even though that's a tough path), PhD or something similar. All the best serbian devs and PhDs are overwhelmingly in the US.
There are several reasons for that, main ones being that it seems to be somewhat harder for people from Serbia to go to US to work illegaly, so the US mostly gets the best ones who are a net benefit to the society and pay a surplus of taxes.
Because it's harder to get to the US from Serbia, fo less qualified workers it's much easier to go to Israel and Saudi Arabia (both hugely popular nowadays) and the Emirates. Western Europe used to be popular, but it barely pays off nowadays, you can go there to live an average life, not to make big bucks and come back to flex on your neighbors.
Serbia is also quite a desperate place, but still has enough people to produce a sizeable chunk of professionals and academics, who don't want to put up with the kleptocracy and leave.
Crazy calling sovereign states "US Puppets".
Not white enough I presume.
It's hard to get more Caucasian than Azerbaijan.
It’s telling that Russia stands out in this list. “One of these is not like the others”
Overstay visas more often than South Koreans or Norwegians?
I pulled the latest overstay data from the CBP website (2024) and compared it to the list of countries. Some of the countries have high overstay rates (Haiti and Laos >24%), but others don't. Barbados (0.44%) has a lower overstay rate than France (0.48%). Libya (1.59%) has a lower rate than Portugal (1.68%). Some countries with high rates aren't on the list entirely, like Malawi (22.05%). Also, the hypothesis fails a chi square test. It's not that.
> Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
They forgor Tajikistan. Or may be it was just too hard to spell.
Tajikistan is used by the US for CIA training against Iran. This is why Iran will often deny visas to Americans who have Tajikistan passport stamps.
> Afghanistan Iraq
Comparing to US immigration support following the Vietnam war this is shameful.
> Saint Kitts and Nevis
How many immigrants from an island with less than 50k inhabitants are there?
Also, Cuba surprises me, doesn't the USA usually love to make a big deal about people fleeing big bad evil communists?
Saint Kitts and Nevis sells passports, so I imagine that is the rationale. I see some other microstates on the list that fit that pattern as well.
I suspect that too, and the US is not the only country to be having issues with some of the citizenship by investment countries.
Norway for example, appears to have de-facto banned 5 countries (all on the list) that have such programs: https://www.imidaily.com/europe/confirmed-norway-quietly-den...
Their justification is interesting too, because if the threshold is "citizenship must require personal attendance", then Canadian citizenship is almost certainly invalid too if you obtained yours over Zoom, which is how most new Canadians obtain it.
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Turkmenistan made it through? lol
They just want foreigners to be Indians and the remaining Europeans that will actually want to go to the US.
And chinese