What blows my mind is that the US gov (of which I am a "citizen") considers my opinions to "pose a threat to U.S. national security".
The idea that they'd like kick me out of my own damn country for thinking what I think about them is worrisome, at best.
If I can only think what I think because I have some special status as a citizen, and "what I think" has been proscribed as illegitimate by the government, it feels a bit chilling.
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I spent considerable time in the U.S. on a J visa, so did my partner.
We both agree that we would have not chosen to visit under the current visa regime, and I assume many others agree with our sentiment.
Universities in the US are currently advising students (F or J visa) to not travel out of US to avoid potential challenges at the port of re-entry.
Unfortunately that's the goal. Your call and I respect that, but the current administration doesn't care, they want folks who they determine have the wrong point of view out.
It's not just international students either, in their demand to Harvard the Trump administration demanded Harvard hire an outside group to survey Harvard staff and STUDENTS for "viewpoint diversity" and if they felt the diversity wasn't what the administration wanted, adjust staff and students to fit their view.
> Unfortunately that's the goal. Your call and I respect that, but the current administration doesn't care, they want folks who they determine have the wrong point of view out.
I agree with you, but I also think it would be unfortunate to frame this as somehow the responsibility of those who would be suffering the risk to come here to combat this. As much as I'd love for people to come just to stick it to the current government, I honestly think it's probably a better idea for them to prioritize their own safety and security over trying to fight against it. The rest of the world doesn't owe it to us to fix our mess for us.
Federal anti-wrongthink enforcement. Everything they accused the other political side of doing, but 100x, and actually occurring in reality.
Am I off-base here, or is this exactly what is happening?
This is basically what’s happening.
The left opened the doors of academic and internet censorship and the right went ‘two can play that game!’ And kicked it wide open.
Opened what door?
"If only students didn't complain when Milo Yiannopoulos got invited to campus, the Trump administration wouldn't be kicking out (or imprisoning) international students based on their political beliefs, rejecting papers about gay people from conferences at military academies, and imposing quotas for hiring reactionaries." Is that the claim?
The underlying forces have been at play since the 1970s, with a party policy to eschew bipartisanship and further charged by creating a dedicated party media.
This setup has been constantly improved, to the point that Intelligent Design could successfully be held up along side the theory of evolution in American media - BEFORE the internet made itself felt.
There is an asymmetric media failure at play, and the idea that “both sides” have the same faults, allows this failure to persist, because it drastically downplays the propaganda machine that operates on the right of the content economy.
This is not an opinion, this is an open secret, as the people within the right wing ecosystem may as well be entirely captured. “Network Propaganda” does a better job of making the case, and should be required reading for most tech people interested in the market place of ideas.
> The left opened the doors of academic and internet censorship
This was almost entirely an astroturfed campaign, which very effectively worked to whip people up into believing that they were being censored.
Whenever it came up in the last few years in online conversations, I would ask "OK, so what are you being censored from saying?" Dozens, maybe a hundred times, of me asking that question, and it was nearly always crickets in response.
What is the evidence of "the left" censoring academia? Whenever I dig into that, it's sloppy science, fringe theories, or straight up crackpots who couldn't get published in a journal, who then found popularity on youtube and podcasts doing the "I am being censored by Big Science" grift.
If anyone would care to educate me on this, with evidence, I am here for it.
To prevent premature downvotes, preface: this comment is not about the merits or demerits of the censorship, just that it took place. Whether it's good or bad was a different question, but it very much happened. One might say that it wasn't "the left" behind it, but if you'd take approval ratings of this censorship at the time across left/right, the latter would've been strongly opposed with the former mixed at best, if not broadly in favor.
> If anyone would care to educate me on this, with evidence, I am here for it.
Sure, happy to. I'll focus on the "internet" part. There was mass censorship on the major US social media platforms during COVID in the name of "preventing racist attacks against East-Asians". This is widely documented and admitted.
Yishan Wong, ex-Reddit CEO:
> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic
That Meta and Twitter banned accounts for discussion of it is easily verifiable, Wikipedia also banned discussion of it.
In Twitter's case, they even had a CCP figure on their board of directors during this time [1][2].
[1] - https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/3940206
[2] - https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2020/5/25/twitters-new...
> What is the evidence of "the left" censoring academia?
Here's a decent summary of how some of these censorship doors were opened: https://www.acsh.org/news/2024/02/25/covid-censorship-yes-bi...
There are also more vivid and recent examples, like barring universities from divestment from Israel (ie, 0]), which has happened in quite a few 'blue' states. Not to mention sending in armed police (ie, [1]) to break up peaceful anti-genocide protests.
0 - https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-israel-gaza-campus-p...
1 - https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-campus-p...
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Right now there's a lot of
"In-state tuition: $10,000
Out-of-state tuition: $25,000
International student tuition: $50,000".
going on. Being the world's academy is one of our most overlooked, but most significant industries. Eliminate the moneymakers trying to escape the Gaokao and the cash has to come from somewhere; It certainly isn't going to be this administration.
There are a limited number of seats at the best universities.
These top universities already have enough money to operate for a century as non-profits.
They're selling 15-20% of the seats to international rich people.
The appropriate number is probably more like 1.5% - 2.0%, with the rest going to American citizens.
I'll provide an alternative narrative: Additional seats at a significant premium are created for international students to allow subsidizing tuition for domestic students and offering of additional services on campus, research positions etc
If you get rid of international students then domestic student tuition will increase and/or campus services offered will decline.
Universities do not want to decrease their endowment. They want to find ways to grow it. And another goal is to increase the international reputation of their institutions. Here international students act like a kind of missionary.
This narrative describes public companies focused on growth and brand instead of schools focused on offering the best education possible in their country.
They have lost their way. They have been corrupted by bribes heaped upon them by rich international people buying their children advantage.
> There are a limited number of seats at the best universities.
This is only true for a few elite universities.
In particular, for public universities, the vast majority, including many/most of the top ones, do not have any cap on the amount of incoming students. Whoever meets the bar gets in.
Maybe you're thinking of community colleges where this can be the case?
All private and public top schools set admission targets and hit them every year using modeling and adjusting various levers.
There are a tiny number of seats at elite schools and that's how they remain the elite schools.
Nope. I'm talking about regular, R1 schools.
Source: Local state university in an interview. This came up during the issue of affirmative action. They pointed out (with actual statistics) on how most of them have open admission. The context was that admitting someone via affirmative action was not depriving anyone of a seat.
This was for "regular" undergrad admission. Grad school/business/law/medicine (perhaps pre-med) may be different.
That's not a source at all, just a claim someone made to support their argument. And it's an easily disproved lie.
All of these schools have quotas and admission targets and effectively raise/lower the bar to hit their targets.
Just look at the numbers for yourself.
Most of them admit an almost identical number of students each year. The admission rate is what changes.
The good news is if you go down the list of "best" universities until you get to one with >30% acceptance rate, you still get a world class education that will more than prepare you for just about anything other than the bare few handful of jobs moronic enough to overvalue an "elite" education.
Though the reason they are top universities is partly their ability to attract top talent (as most of these top university measures are based on things like "number of papers published"), which this is going to impact.
The American rags will publish the same number of articles which all need to cite from earlier rags, and they will probably keep or increase biases toward more American authors, so no one will notice when the US is irrelevant by a quantitative analysis.
Weird... "No American grads on Meta’s top AI team, all 11 hires are immigrants"[0]
[0] - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/latest-updates/no-a...
Aren't those spots for international students often created because international students pay the full (or even more than full) cost, thereby subsidizing other operations at the university. Sometimes international students pay more than out of stage students too.
Depending on the financial model, eliminating spots for international students may in fact have the adverse affect of also eliminating spots for domestic students.
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shame they won't be as good
People won't like how you said it but there is truth to it. Pretty much all students from my uni who went on exchanges to the US said the level over there is much lower and they were way above the local students.
This was not the case elsewhere, most notably in Asian countries.
There is some truth to every stereotype.
Given how easy it is for rich people to buy grades for their children in most countries, we might see an improvement.
It won't.
Looking at public profiles is one thing… requiring people to switch their profiles to “Public” so they can be looked at seems like another thing. How is that even enforceable? What if they find some profile that happens to have my name and is private, but isn’t mine? To say nothing of the legitimate reasons to have a private profile in the first place. And who defines “hostility?”
It’s hard not to see this as another “freedom of speech (but only for the kind of speech we like)” situation.
Yeah, I wonder how this is checked/enforced as well, it doesn't seem trivial and especially in the time at entry. Is it something they take action over retroactively, after correlating records from multiple companies?
Like everything else the government does they'll take you at your word and scrutinize it later looking for an excuse to screw you if you do anything they don't like.
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Does/should one have freedom of speech if they are a non-citizen and not in the US yet? If so, should the US police around the world to ensure that?
Yes, they do. Full stop. The constitution is not ambiguous about this, at all. The Bill of Rights starts, right out of the gates with:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "
Note the wording. It's not in the business of granting rights (those are natural and inalienable). It restricts Congress's ability to pass any law that infringes upon those rights.
You don’t have a right to a US visa. You can choose not to comply with the request.
The issue is retaliating against free speech using the visa process. A person doesn’t have a right to a visa but they have right to free speech. Using the visa process to retaliate against free speech violates a foundational principle of our government the human right to free speech.
To play devil’s advocate, this has more to do with the concept of sovereignty. A country can choose who gets to enter its borders. We may or may not agree with the rules they impose but they can set them. The constitution only applies to people that are already on US land.
The devil has enough advocates.
I like this take.
The rights of non-citizens outside the US are not well protected by the constitution.
There was case a while back where a border patrol agent in Texas shot a person in Mexico. No ability sue.
The constitution only restricts the government (some exceptions), and is therefore unusually silent in where the government isn’t the government.
This is unfortunate, because the US government absolutely operates in foreign countries.
Mesa v Hernandez was not decided based on the idea that people outside the US have zero rights in US courts. It was decided based on the insane principle of qualified immunity being applied to law enforcement when they violate somebody's rights in a way that is not absolutely completely identical to some prior case where a court determined that the action violates rights.
It is an insane case, but for different reasons.
This strikes me as a false dichotomy. There is a solar-system-sized gap between "my country should not impose speech restrictions on foreign visitors" and "my country should police every other country to ensure that they do not impose speech restrictions upon their own citizens within their borders". Was anybody seriously proposing that?
I was only asking questions.
this is such a trope at this point that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions
Thanks for the criticism. In this case, what do you see as the "false or distorted claims by framing them as questions" that I was making?
Probably: > a false dichotomy
That's what you said, not me. Are you saying I presented a false dichotomy? A false dichotomy, also known as a false dilemma or either/or fallacy, occurs when only two options are presented as possibilities in a situation where other options exist. What are the two options I presented? I asked two Y/N questions and even if the answer to the first is Y, the answer to the second can still be Y or N, I'm not presupposing an answer.
But aren't some questions productive and others unproductive? And if so, should the US police the entire world to ensure that no unproductive questions are ever asked?
You are mixing two things. Rights in the US jurisdiction and outside of it
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But aren't they applying to be a student in the US? Who is US to decide if a non-citizen can or cannot have freedom of speech? What a tone deaf comment was that!
I think the gray area is that the student is not in the US. They are in another country, and are applying at a consulate/embassy.
Many of the rights US residents have don't apply to visa applicants.
In any case, there are plenty of examples in the past where the US denied people entry based on stuff they've publicly said/written. What's different here is requiring you to disclose all your handles and make them public.
This really shouldn't be a gray area, if we just actually applied the constitution. The first amendment doesn't grant the people the freedom of speech, it restricts Congress from passing any law that infringes upon it.
This ultra-literalist approach leads to the conclusion that nothing in the constitution prevents states from outlawing speech or establishing a religion.
They didn't just stop at 1 amendment. There's a bunch of others that have been interpreted as covering those eventualities and many more.
we don’t get our rights from our government. It can only recognize these rights. Free speech is a human right whether or not a government recognizes it. People under an authoritarian regime still have a human right to free speech even if that regime outlaws it.
International students barely have any power to do any harm in the strongest country in the world. Posting some random criticism doesn't change a thing. Feels like a massive powertrip from the administration to attack the weakest, since they legitimately fall short of addressing anything of real significance in general.
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So you missed out in your history lessons. It were always the students and philosophers/authors who were critical in regime unrest. Nowadays you can add filmmakers, but you can easily control them with budgets.
The part that makes me feel really uneasy about this is that the whole "pose a threat to U.S. national security" schtick is essentially due to anti-Israel/pro-Palestine protests. It's basically running cover for Israel in the most (in my opinion) counter-productive way possible.
What I don't get is, education is one of US's big "exports", and basically easy money; so why try to kneecap that revenue stream?
Because ideology railroads economy. If you take a look at fascist regimes throughout history, you will undoubtedly get a feel for their cruelty. But what most people miss is their incompetence. They're self-destructive by nature. Emotionally-driven by their ideology.
There's a metro station in Bucharest, Romania that's noticeably smaller than the rest. It was built in secret by the workers. The administration didn't want it built at all - it was by the University, and they believed students should be forced to walk, lest they become lazy. Luckily, the workers had the foresight to build the station in secret for some unknown future date. Now, it's one of the most used stations in the Capital.
Conservatives hate academia. They say this repeatedly and publicly. Their goal is to destroy the existing academic system and replace it with an ideological system focused on a particular set of right wing values.
The idea that academia makes money for the US, or brings in highly educated people to contribute to our economy, or produces scientific advancements that improve society is completely immaterial to the goal.
Hardly a new political phenomena, and policies with known predictable outcomes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X14HS4gLk
One must sympathize with the good folks at AMCHAM that will have to clean up the mess.
Have a wonderful day =)
Because we voted to destroy our own economy to own libs
why give money to "woke" schools like Harvard?.... /s
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The US is squandering its huge advantage in higher ed - every country has its top schools, but the US academic scene has so many top-tier schools/universities for research. Visa issues for international students have always been a pain - great talent for graduate schools, but with so many added shenanigans that were annoying at best and a major hurdle to next steps (postdoc, jobs, etc.) at worst.
Seems like instead of making it easier for smart and talented people to come to US, we are making it harder... cause terrorism?
Terrorism? You mean being a demographic disproportionately critical of Israel?
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inadvertedly the US might finally put an end to the plague that has been euphemistically called social media (they are actually heavily antisocial). Coupled with AI and fakes, i hope we are done with this pestilence for good.
This won't put an end to social media. It will only amplify posts/thoughts that are uncritical of the administration.
Hopefully. I feel like people actually stopped socialising after the social media breakthrough. It's harder to ask friends out for a coffee or beer because "nah, we can just talk online". We have locked ourselves in virtual communities where we have a false feeling of importance. Boards were the last acceptable form of socialising, but it was different, it was aimed at exchanging knowledge and common interest, not replacing real interactions completely.
Probably not. This mostly just tips the balance towards constraining what foreign students can say, and they are a tiny, tiny sliver of the criticism of the US online.
It's mostly about creating a climate of fear. This administration wants people who are vulnerable to shut up so they don't have to work so hard to shut people up. I don't doubt that they will move on to testing the waters on how to shut up citizens too; the paths for non-citizens are just more obvious (since the US government carved out clear delineations that indicate non-citizens don't enjoy Constitutional protections to allow them to be tortured after September 11).
I've been thinking the same thing with AI. If IG and Tiktok become so flooded with AI slop that people lose interest in "social" media altogether, I think that's a net positive for society and general mental health.
Requiring "public" is wild
Not a smart way to treat "customers" that often pay full-fare for college. Foreign student tuition payments can fund scholarships for a lot of US students. (Though exploding university administrative bloat might be devouring all funds available.)
Thought police, and you're required to make those thoughts available to the police.
While freedom of speech is obviously a right of citizens, I would argue that in order to preserve that right the US should be extending it to those coming into the country - outside of currently excepted threat settings of course.
Saying you don’t like the President should not deny you entry to the United States. This is, straight up, horse shit and I do not approve of it nor do I believe it should be permitted by the executive.
Argue? It's not at all ambiguous in the Bill of Rights that it does apply to non-citizens.
Seems like this will further incentive young people to avoid social media and/or only use anonymous burners.
Personal opinion: if people who live in China (a country with a much longer and clearer history of overt censorship) still talk about Winnie-the-Pooh, I doubt this change will really have the impact the administration hopes for.
What they hope to do is limit free speech and political criticism in the United States. They're starting with the groups the law gives them easiest access to, and they're hoping to expand that group to include native citizens in the near future (see the actions on birthright citizenship.)
It's hard to argue that political speech has been a success in China, and we're going to end up a lot like China if we don't fight this with everything we have.
Oh, no doubt. The only observation I'm making is that while the old adage was speaking specifically of USENET, it is often true of online comms in general: the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
If a government with nearly no backstops against public message-shaping has as much trouble as China does keeping criticism out, imagine the trouble one where many pieces of the system, structural and individual, will actively oppose erosion of the First Amendment (the real "criticism of the government" kind, not the hand-wavey "It should be a crime to ban me from Facebook" kind) will experience.
Hasn't America required visa applicants to tell them their social media account names for years? Seems like this change is just making those public, which is invasive, sure, but so was the original way which somehow nobody seems to mind anymore. This will just become the new normal too.
Sure, and shipping those same folks to Alligator Alcatraz will become the “new normal”. And eventually we’ll just start killing them for sport as the new normal. I don’t mean to be that guy, but Hitler also was just a “new normal” guy trying to remove some WWI debt and make Germany great again.
You missed the part about nobody seeming to mind anymore. We also don't mind having to apply for a visa in the first place instead of just buying a ticket on a ship and turning up at the port. Are visas Hitler too?
Why is this only for student visas? Why is it done by the same admin that tried to deport students for doing lawful student activities like writing articles for the school newspaper? You are not seeing the forest for the trees.
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how would they know if it’s public or not?
They would check. And if it turns out you have another email you didn't report, which is somehow linked to some other digital asset of yours, and therefore traceable, then you'd have a bigger problem.
They will not spend that much money looking at a Visa applicant. Shit, we barely spend that much time granting high security clearances.
> They will not spend that much money looking at a Visa applicant
Heard of software?
The requirement forces you to keep the profile public when appearing for the interview at least.
Presumably if they find out that you have an account you didn't share, you're out.
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They make applicants list the accounts and then check them.
And what if you don't list your social media accounts?
Then the applicant has defrauded the US. Lying on an immigration form is a criminal offense.
Yes. People don't take this seriously enough. I personally have known people who have been arrested and tried because of innocent things they did not disclose in their application. The charge is essentially "Lying to officials".
Of course, the US wanted them out for other reasons, but this is the simplest charge to bring against them.
Wouldn't be surprised if there was an announcement of a Trump branded social media scrubbing service soon.
And DOGE will have access to the client list so they can share it with ICE.
News from June.
Lots of discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44314054
Why do we shoot our own selves in the knees for Israel?
MAGA hates higher education, so they will kneecap higher education. Israel is just a convenient excuse.
It's not for Israel, that's just a proxy - a shibboleth - if you are against Israel you are either a communist, libtard or muslim, so not welcome. It's Trump shooting some knees to stay in power.
Edit: I know. It's just a convenient foil!
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I think if you actually talked to Trump supporters you'd find we're not particular fans of Israel either.
Certainly this is not reflected in any of your policies or behavior. But, then again, Trump supporters appear to have a sort of Stockholm relationship with him.
He's a liar, but he's our liar. We're hoping most of the shit he talks about never passes into law, but those are our laws. Wait, what are we voting for again? Why are we even voting for this dumb-ass is we don't like his policies and don't want them to pass?
When Trump coin was released, my Mom had a talk with me. She said "I just don't get it. He's already rich, why would he need to run a scam on American people? This makes no sense. Why would he stoop to that level?" I didn't have the heart to tell her he didn't stoop anywhere, that's just the level he's at.
Most Americans aren't. But almost every single American politician is a die-hard for them...
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Nowadays there are "paid" protestors and social media personalities who seem to spread misinformation for money. Information warfare being a thing now, I think this was a quite expected move from US immigration. I'm only surprised they told this out loud.
> Nowadays there are "paid" protestors and social media personalities who seem to spread misinformation for money.
Most of whom are Chinese.[1] Somehow I don't think they plan to go after them.
[1] Very obvious during the Hong Kong protests.
I never thought screening visa applicants for threats to national security would be so controversial.
This isn't about national security threats. It's about any excuse for racism and xenophobia.
Posting social media comments protesting the actions of Israel is not a national security threat but is something we've seen this administration invoke penalties for.
The hatred, bigotry, and raw short sightedness are horrifying. To the degree that America is "great" it is great because it was a place where great people from around the world wanted to come to and wanted to live in. Turning away students - the most likely source of new scientific and artistic greatness in the future - is throwing away any leadership we had and actively harming the country.
It is in fact harming national security if these brilliant minds study, live, and work in other countries.
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From the article:
“(…) officers have been instructed to look for any indication of 'hostility' toward the U.S. or its people, although it did not provide further details of what exactly that could mean.”
When the search is open-ended and under the officer's criteria, anything can be an excuse to revoke a visa. Recently, there was news about a visitor rejected because of a JD Vance meme, so this is not hypothetical. It is also the perfect excuse for racism: If I don’t like your face, then let me do a deep search of any comment or meme that you liked in your social media history.
For example, this comment in a public thread can be read as “hostile,” as I’m implying a critique of the current government. Even if that happens in exceptional cases when the officer has a bad day, it has a chilling effect because you’ll be extremely careful of what you say on Internet forums if your goal is to apply for a visa.
> Recently, there was news about a visitor rejected because of a JD Vance meme, so this is not hypothetical.
Everything I've seen indicates the administration and the right love those JD Vance memes. Why would they reject "one of their own"?
Related news coverage:
https://time.com/7297472/jd-vance-meme-mads-mikkelsen-touris...
A tourist got his entry denied after a search on his phone.
According to the tourist, it was because of that meme. According to the CBP, it was because of his past drug use, and a photo related to that was on his phone. Which one is right? I don’t know. The situation wasn’t clear, so it made the news. Those phone searches are the perfect excuse to deny your entry. The reason for the denial wasn’t apparent, which is why it got to the news (by the way, I read the news a week ago, before the CBP response, which I read while finding you the link to the news).
As a foreigner who travels to the US from time to time, that makes me uneasy. It only takes a friend to send a photo or meme through WhatsApp to get you in trouble.
> It only takes a friend to send a photo or meme through WhatsApp to get you in trouble.
Does it? The particular meme which was claimed to be the issue is something the administration and people on the right enjoy. I can't see anyone on the side of the administration being vindictive for having that meme.
https://x.com/JDVance/status/1898372454235451694
None of that is unique to the present adminstration (not that you said it was), it's been that way at the border for a long time and people have brought up your - valid - concerns before. That said is there any direct evidence of racism in this latest news cycle?
It's been in the news for months.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-administrations-cr...
Interesting, thanks for that. After reading a bit more, it seems, rather than "threat to national security" as claimed by NPR, Trump is more likely using "threat to U.S. foreign policy interests" as defined in Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which became law as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) signed by Bill Clinton. Perhaps that law needs to go.
>Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)
>An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.[0]
What one deems reasonable ground can speak very clearly about their intended application of that law.
[0]https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
My understanding from my law training is that, perhaps surprisingly, "reasonable" is an objective, not subjective standard. The "reasonable" standard asks whether a hypothetical, ordinary and rational person, acting reasonably, would reach the same conclusion based on the same information. And this can be decided by a judge or jury if/when necessary.
He's a disingenuous troll, not even worth engaging. Let him bask in the glory of his Greater North Korea alone.
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> Turning away students...
Turning away troublemakers is a smart thing to do. There are more than enough talented people waiting in line. People who will not shout down professors, occupy university buildings and protest against the government of the country that received them as guests.
Yes, being anti-protest... surely this will go over well to a largely American audience on an American website. Surely this doesn't go against the core and fundamental beliefs that founded our country.
You'll find there's a high correlation between intelligence and being regarded as a troublemaker. Also a correlation with strongly held beliefs of many types, including moral beliefs.
Challenging authority is a requirement of progress - if you can't criticize the system how can you dream of improving it?
Yeah, we should never host foreigners who protest what they view as fascism, such people aren't worth having. Remember the dumb Albert Einstein! What horrible political views he had.
"To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”"
It leaves me with a lot of questions.
What even constitutes a social media profile? For how long do you have to mark it public? What if marking all your social media profiles public exposes you to harm? Is it acceptable to delete all your posts (that were previously _private_) before making a profile public, or to delete whole profiles, or would that desire for privacy be seen as concealing some threat? How is it known if there are non-public profiles? Would govt believe somebody who has no social media presence at all?
"screening visa applicants for threats" is a very simplistic summary of the situation. I think visa applicants are just gonna go eleswhere.
It isn't. The problem is that everyone thinks they'll be screened for political views, because of prior statements by the white house.
This is not a hypothetical. Folks have already been deported just for having contrarian views to the administration that are well within bounds of a polite bar argument about politics.
They will be. They tried to deport a foreign student for writing an article critical of Israel.
Could you say what that case was? I'm curious what the article actually said. Simply "critical of Israel" is surely not accurate because even Trump himself has recently been critical of Israel. It's completely normal to criticize countries.
Rumeysa Öztürk: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/tufts-student-from-tur...
here's the article: https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj.
Trump is king, he can do what he wants. Foreign students trying to do that, he'll kick them out. The rules are very clear
The famously dangerous threats that are thoroughly documented college level students. Americans have commited the majority of terrorist attacks in their own country, especially if you count school shootings
Not sure how we pivoted to "terror" from "national security," which is much broader, but since we are here:
School shootings are not typically classified as "terrorism" unless they are explicitly motivated by political, ideological or religious agendas.
Foreign-sponsored terrorist attacks, such as 9/11, San Bernardino shooting, Pulse nightclub shooting, etc result in significantly higher casualties, widespread fear and greater economic impact (in the $trillions). Foreign actors are typically more sophisticated, thus calling for enhanced screening. And their actions have further-reaching consequences such as the cost of wars and homeland security measures.
School shootings are not typically classified as "terrorism" because they're overwhelmingly done by white males. The same reason the current administration refuses to react to white nationalist terrorism.
It's the equivalent of:
"To apply for a visa, applicants need to give us (and the rest of the world) access to all email correspondence."
No one is complaining about screening for threats. It's how that's a problem.
This already exists...border agents can require you to unlock your phone and other electronic devices, without a warrant or probable cause. Refusing means facing denial of entry
I know that - it's not the same. Border agents will not say "Hey, we think you have 2 phones, and you brought only one. We'll deny entry and next time bring both."
They also don't say "Hey, this phone you gave me doesn't have any photos. You must have backed them up elsewhere and are hiding them from me. I'm denying entry."
In other words, they don't say "Hey, bring all the photos you ever took."
Yes, and that's bad. "This isn't a problem because it's always been a problem" isn't a defense.
And, we must acknowledge the obvious: such authoritarian rules and requirements rely on benevolence. Meaning, if your leader and border agents are good people, then this isn't a problem.
Well... are they? I say no, so now this is a problem that didn't exist previously.
This is not about national security. We were already scanning social media profiles for that kind of stuff when folks applied for visas. This is arbitrary.
Would only international students pose the risk to national security? Do you then agree that government should keep every profile under surveillance so no private profile exists for anybody? Also, who posts threats on social media?
Don't they already? At least for foreign people.
There's screening for terrorist ties and then there's screening for wrongthink, no?
It's just that "national security" apparently now is the same as "threatens the Presidents ego".
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Welcome to America, where having a thought police is absolutely not against freedom of speech, while having the right to attend a literal Nazi march is a beautiful expression of Freedom of speech.
You know exactly how dumb this policy is, how threatening to freedom of speech it is, and why we are doing it only specifically for college students.
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As terrible as the current US policy system is, a really good sanity check for any policies like this is "would you be able do this in Japan":
If you drove a car drunk and it turned into a police chase, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If you snuck across the Japanese border with intention to live there undocumented, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
Literally anything involving a gun and a crime, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
If the answer is "no", you're probably feeding too heavily from ideology. The reality is that most countries, including far more stable and peaceful countries than the US will ever be, are far less tolerant of crossing borders illegally, drunk driving, gun offenses, etc. With their own citizens, to say nothing of foreigners on visas.
> If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
You're cherry picking and assuming they only look for obvious criminal offences like "government overthrow" and not dissenting views, criticism of the people in power, views against the economic order, etc. For some of those I can imagine the answer being "no" in Japan and "Yes" in the US.
Look at the guy's profile, they might actually be on a marketing team for Trump. Literally everything is talking points and tailor-made to shift perception.
I voted for Harris, she was a far more competent candidate. Not everybody that thinks crime should be illegal and that you shouldn't be able to just walk randomly across country borders to live in another country without their knowledge is a Trump voter. It's actually a pretty normal stance that most people take in most countries, including most left leaning people in the US.
Isn't Japan somewhat famously hard to immigrate too? This kinda smuggles in the premise that their state of affairs is desirable and normal.
Sure, replace Japan with New Zealand then
Or Switzerland.
>Isn't Japan somewhat famously hard to immigrate too?
Isn't Japan famously safe and clean?
Yes and it will just need a light dusting in a few decades and then a new people will be able to move in.
Is living in fear of crime from unrestricted illegal immigration a better fate? Like sure, your daughter was raped by some illegal third worlder and your city and public places are now unsafe and dirty, your society has low trust and no more social cohesion, but at least your ruling business elite have access to unlimited cheap labor in indentured servitude to keep the line going up. Heaven.
Man, Japan is really missing out here. They should listen to the wealthy western champagne liberals on HN who are outspokenly pro mass migration and yet spend most of their income to live in homes as far as possible from cities impacted by mass immigration, usually in majority-white suburbs with good safe schools and manicured lawns.
Edit: answering here to your comment below. Which statistics are you referring to? And why is resorting to the Hitler card on people who disagree with you your only argument? Let's address your vile accusations with facts from experts:
[1] https://archive.is/IrbAC#selection-445.127-445.686"Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."[1]> Is living in fear of crime from unrestricted illegal immigration a better fate?
It's certainly a purely theoretical fate. I have zero reason to believe undocumented people are more dangerous than citizens. I mean, intuitively, they risk so much more - namely deportation and torture. If I followed a Republican philosophy of tough on crime, I would then say they must be committing less crime.
Do we have any reason to believe they're more dangerous? And I mean real reasons, like statistics. No Patrick, "they're vaguely brown" is not a real reason. No Patrick, "homogeneous population" isn't a real reason either.
Immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than naturalized Americans, and are far more likely to start companies and be entrepreneurs. Legal immigration is great and we should allow more people to come to the county, via expanded programs like H1-B visas.
That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out. Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?
> That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out.
Sure, but this isn't my point. Nobody has given me any reason to believe it won't work out, included our undocumented immigrants. I live in Texas, I should be seeing the worst of it. But uh... no... everything is pretty chill here. Not really seeing any of these doomerist complaints about those darn illegals.
> Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?
I sure can, it would probably be piss-poor. Because Japan has a strong ethnic identity and community-oriented culture. We don't.
We're not Japan, nor do we really want to be Japan.
>I live in Texas, I should be seeing the worst of it. But uh... no... everything is pretty chill here.
Nation wide policies and society don't work on how your own chill vibe feels where you live, but on research, statistics and most importantly on the opinions of the democratic majority.
>That's a really different thing than one million people illegally entering the country and expecting that to just work out. Can you imagine the response Japan would have if a million Americans crossed into Japan illegally and expected to live and work there?
Bingo. So why are some western countries supposed to tolerate this?
>It's certainly a purely theoretical fate.
Then why do American feel safer in Tokyo than in SF/LA?
>I have zero reason to believe undocumented people are more dangerous than citizens.
Because you're ignoring all the facts and creating strawmen.
>No Patrick, "homogeneous population" isn't a real reason either.
It literally is a documented fact by researchers. Stay ignorant, keep quoting SpongeBob.
> Then why do American feel safer in Tokyo than in SF/LA?
You... won't like my answers. It's because Americans commit far more crime by our culture. America has an extremely individualistic culture combined with little to no social services. Which, unfortunately, leads to our crime rates and incarceration rates.
If you've ever been to Japan, you'd understand they have a much more community-oriented culture. But, something tells me you don't like that either...
> Because you're ignoring all the facts and creating strawmen. > It literally is a documented fact by researchers. Stay ignorant, keep quoting SpongeBob.
You haven't laid out any facts. You can't just say "uh, facts" and pretend that does something. I don't know you. I don't know what you believe or why.
If you want to win based on logic or "facts", you have to actually, you know, try.
>You haven't laid out any facts.
Here are my previously written facts again[1] for your convenience. You're either intentionally ignoring my previous facts to comment in bad faith or you have reading comprehension issues if you miss so many lines of text.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44525317>> "Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings."[1]If you think that correlative study means exactly what you say then you should read that researchers work in whole.
There is obviously less trust in a community with multiple races and racists.
You can also avoid a lot of the battle of the sexes if you castrate yourself.
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You are ignoring that you live in a feceshole because of conservative scum like Ronald Reagan. The problems you have with feces and violence are partly your own OCD and partly (doubly?) the fact that the US canceled its mental health in the 80s as not important.
Please explain to me how making sure every foreign student expresses only Republican talking points about US foreign politics will spare you being killed by one of your relatives who went off the rocker in the US with no safety net.
Statistically, that's the violence that can actually happen in the US instead of the extreme anomaly you dust off to feel good about your sick "conservative" neighbours.
In the country I live there are plenty of illegals who don't bother me at all because I don't have 51% of my neighbours being irredeemable scum who try to make society worse to feel better about behaving like Satan worshippers while talking about Christian values.
These are clearly the only possible outcomes in life, assuming of course that we put aside all the statistically likely things and ask what Hitler would think of it..
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There have been cases of speed-tickets turned into deportation notices for international students. Would Japan do that too for a speed limit violation?
Great question: Going over 30KM/h over the speed limit in a non-highway zone (red ticket) in Japan is a criminal offense: it goes to court, there is a criminal record filed, they can suspend or revoke your driver’s license, and it can absolutely cause a VISA to be revoked or not renewed.
And unlike in the US they actually do enforce the laws there.
Why would I desire a regression to the mean as a citizen? Freedom of expression is critical, and there is no guidance at ALL about what constitutes offending speech vs. what does not. Arbitrary denial of entry is not something that should be celebrated.
Wow this shows some really nice propagandist accumen, I wonder if it's literally a paid employee or something, judging by the comment history. You first rope in drunk drivers and illegal immigrants with the point being discussed (legal students) and then you exaggerate, saying people might be threatening domestic terrorism on social media. How cool!
You fail to address, though, that 1- the US is requiring social media accounts to be set to public, forcing people's hand into being labled as aggitators. 2- stuff that might be of academic interest is notoriously targeted by this admin, like any research being done on Israel/Palestine, any research being done on ESG, not to mention the more overt leftist themes (pro-LGBT, abortion, etc academics). This change is an easy way for the admin to target this type of research
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This is the second time in this thread you have accused me of being a paid Trump employee for having a different opinion than you.
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None of these things apply to the average exchange student coming to the country legally to study at our universities.
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I would bet you anything you want that posting that you don't like the Israeli government's genocide in Gaza (a major topic for this type of scrutiny) will get you neither deported nor even turned back at the border in Japan.
It probably won't in America either though. You're making up a strawman.
Yes it will, they are already trying it like with Rumeysa Ozturk.
Those are the wrong questions.
The US was built on immigration; Japan never was -- it has always been anti-immigration. There's no Statue of Liberty with "give me your huddled masses" inscription.
These harsh actions go against the principles on which the US was founded and built. Similar actions in Japan do not go against the principles on which Japan was founded.
A separate conversation, but immigration -- legal or illegal -- greatly benefits the US economically. While conversely, Japan's immigration policies are greatly hurting its economy as its population declines.
I'm not pro- illegal immigration. I'm for making legal immigration much more accessible so that you don't end up with millions of illegal immigrants.
> If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?
This administration already considers protesting genocide a “threat to national security”. It has a well documented history of retaliating against protected speech. This latest policy is authoritarian retaliation against of free speech, plain and simple. Comparing the policy of a liberal democracy like Japan to contemporary US authoritarianism is truly disingenuous.
Why? The United States is not Japan. The United States has built its national identity on exceptionalism; regression-to-the-mean reasoning is flawed in that context.
When the United States was founded, the average nation was some flavor of monarchy.
Sounds like we're regressing-to-the-mean, then.
There are certainly quite a few people trying to make that happen. They are opposed by, well, Americans.