I wonder if this is one of those vague "security" problems. It seems like if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little.
But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know.
It was the same way with the no-fly list for the longest time too, but because that wound up impacting a few powerful Americans it was eventually sorted so now you can at least fight it a little or do additional background checks to get off of it.
The worst part is that these security black marks seem fairly easy to get: family member or friend a "terrorist?" Share a name with someone "bad?" You're now on it. And nobody you can actually talk to can either tell you why or has the authority to remove you.
I would blame it on bureaucracy, but that is an easy out for a policy which is partly intentional -- Americans don't want people visiting, working, or studying on their shores. They have made that abundantly clear over the last ten years.
> Americans don't want people visiting, working, or studying on their shores.
This is utterly false and unfair. Please don't lump the entire US population with a few ignorant morons who have not seen the world five miles outside their home town. A quick look at our universities is proof enough that what you are saying is incorrect. The last time I visited MIT it almost felt like I was outside the US.
At the same time, though, foreigners are discouraged from studying certain topics. The security engineering group at my school lost a student a few years ago, because he was Chinese and the US government would not allow him to reenter the country due to his thesis topic (computer security). It took an assurance from the school that he would not be permitted to do any further work with his adviser and that he would switch research topics for him to be permitted entry to this country.
The incredible stupidity here is that there is no classified research done by that group, nor by my own research group (cryptography). Everything is published in publicly available conferences and journals.
Nothing like real data. The US has over three times more immigrants than any other country.
I should also note it is my belief --my belief-- that most people in the US, outside of certain groups, are for LEGAL immigration. Don't come here illegally or with a student visa and then cry foul if not welcomed.
EDIT: the reference to student visas is about using them illegally to get in and then stay. It is NOT about not allowing students with proper visas to come in and study.
A student visa is a completely legal way of entering the US.
PS. Post the Boston bombings the immigration officials at the port of entry are required to verify valid student status before letting students (F1 visa holders) into the US. This means the chances of people entering the country illegally through a student visa are slim to none.
It's fairly common to come in on a "Student" visa to study at a community college or take night courses while also holding a full-time job. It's also common to skip the facade entirely - Use visa to gain entry, take job on forged credentials, stay past expiration. The student visa does allow the holder to work, but it is intended to be secondary to the education, and history has shown that it is not.
This is not as easy you make it sound. First, when entering the US, the immigration officials verify whether student status is valid using the SEVIS database. Second, all changes to student status must be reported to the SEVIS database by the school. If the school finds out that a student is doing unauthorized work, or if they find that the student's academic progress is unsatisfactory (likely if they are working full-time) they are required to terminate student status and report this to SEVIS.
The generic issue of using forged credentials to get an unauthorized job is applicable to any visa. And if I wanted to overstay my visa, it would be dumb of me to choose a visa that was as carefully tracked and monitored as as the F1 visa.
I am talking about using a student visa to get in and then stay and work permanently and not study. In other words, using the visa fraudulently. If you want to stay and work go through the proper legal process and get a resident visa.
The claim is that Americans don't want anyone to come here. That is utterly false and it is fully supported by this data. Your point might have been valid if the topic at hand were different.
10000 Americans love pizza
15000 Americans hate pizza
10 Chileans love pizza
15 Chileans hae pizza
America loves (and hates) pizza 1000 times more than Chile?
Still absolutely irrelevant as it pertains to the issue being discussed.
And, if I chose to play your game, according to the same page approximately 12% of our population are immigrants. And this is very much on par and well above most European countries. And, after eliminating the top layer on that list, all of which are corner cases (i.e. Vatican City) the US and a number of European countries are in the top ten countries in terms of the percentage of immigrants as related to total country population.
So, at this point, I have no clue what your problem might be with this other than to imagine that you are just looking for a way to claim that Americans hate immigrants, which is simply not true any way you care to look at it.
> Nothing like real data. The US has over three times more immigrants than any other country.
That doesn't take into account the population of the US. Relative to other countries, the US does have lots of foreign-born population, but is far from being the one with more immigrants.
People who make this kind of argument are often the same who say "Sweden is much more homogenous; you can't compare apples to oranges like that" whenever some success story about welfare, healthcare, democracy, or something else is used to contrast against the U.S., despite the fact that that very same page shows that Sweden has the same number of immigrants as a percentage of the population that the U.S. does.
Not to dispute your point, but the number should really be normalized by population.
EDIT: If you click on "Immigrants as percentage of national population", you'll realize that the US is one of the lowest in developed countries. So I guess I am disputing your point.
The US is ahead of Germany, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Finland, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, and so on, but you claim it is one of the lowest in developed countries?? Twisting the facts much?
Obviously. The thing about America right now is that there's no one city or even state that is representative of the country. The country is experiencing a cultural and political deadlock which can sort of be generalized to a divide between the coasts and the south. If you live in Cambridge or SV or NYC you get angered by issues presented in the OP, why shouldn't this brilliant student be allowed into the country? That's not my America.
Then immediately someone responds that where we live is not representative of America. Though let me remind you, if you believe the "real" America is the people in Alabama or the bureaucrats creating asinine policies that keep out brilliant foreign students, think about how much worse things would be without those of us in places like Cambridge to actually speak up and vote for candidates like Elizabeth Warren and say we don't like the way the other side is trying to run the country.
You don't get to say that "your America" does not include the rest of the country, not unless you're willing to take up arms and defend Boston as a sovereign entity against foreign invasion.
Except universities don't set immigration policy. The claim by the post I responded to was, to boil it down, that Americans don't want immigration. Universities are just on easy data point to reach for.
> This is utterly false and unfair. Please don't lump the entire US population with a few ignorant morons who have not seen the world five miles outside their home town. A quick look at our universities is proof enough that what you are saying is incorrect. The last time I visited MIT it almost felt like I was outside the US.
If anything I've been surprised at how consistently keen Americans are for high-skill immigration.
it is part of our evil plot. intellectual gravity as it were.
people in the middle (of the country) just don't get that economics are not zero sum. how empowered smart people tend to make more money, even if that means that they have to invent more money to make.
While I agree with you on principle, the number of anti-immigration xenophobes is much greater than "a few ignorant morons". A few ignorant morons would not be able to elect so many congressmen over such a long period of time to support their agenda. Places like MIT hold the true minority opinion.
Many European nations also have extremely loud but -- in comparison to the rest of their population/government -- small groups with extreme anti-immigration/"nationalist" stances. Some of them even get significant media coverage, or have control of a major news outlet or two.
Unfortunately, the "few ignorant morons" are usually in significant position of influence that can have wide spread impacts. It is even worse when these "morons" starts to become paranoid and developed a knee jerking reaction to their paranoia.
The worst one I know of was when they wouldn't let Nelson Mandela into the country because some computer had flagged him as having ties to terrorist groups. Condoleezza Rice personally went to the airport to wave him through security. She was so mad, she might have single-handedly taken the teeth out of that system.
I find the "some computer" comment a bit odd, because Nelson Mandela most certainly did have ties to terrorist groups. He co-founded one.
This is not a swipe against Mandela in any way. It's just an example that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and how rigid systems can end up giving you politically inconvenient results.
If you make a blanket rule that people with ties to terrorism cannot enter the country, then you can end up "correctly" denying entry to Nobel Peace Prize winners.
Mandela didn't found anything. He started out as a militant leader in Umkhonto we Sizwe (translates as "Spear of the Nation"), which was the military wing of the ANC.
Oh that's true, but I think the problem was still an automated one. No person actually looked at Nelson Mandela's file and decided that he should be denied access to the USA.
I imagine a person probably did look at his file and decide (at least implicitly, as part of labeling him as affiliated with a terror group) that he shouldn't be admitted to the USA. Of course, this happened decades beforehand.
The reason Nelson Mandela and the whole ANC party who fought apartheid were on the no fly list is because they were labelled as a terrorist group. Nobody bothered to adjust this until a couple of embarrassing moments like this. It is kind of funny that the apartheid government were never denied entry to any country, yet the people fighting an oppressive government were labelled as terrorist. It is also surprising that the countries that helped the ANC were so called communist countries, the world seems more like the Soprano's than countries guided by principles, love and life.
...the people fighting an oppressive government were labelled as terrorist...
Not surprising at all.
Dig into the history of the ANC a little. Specifically, look for Umkhonto we Sizwe after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
While in no way [edit] trivialising the abhorrent and often vicious apartheid regime of the time, the ANC (and Mandela) haven't exactly been angles, either.
"Umkhonto we Sizwe" Do you understand how this group came about, what principles it was created on? You should read Nelson Mandela's biography. Also read the essays on pbs from people in the struggle which is very truthful and raw interview scripts. To be honest when Mandela's talks about how he planned stuff and the books he read, kind of reminded me in a way of a startup. He was taking a dying organisation revamping it and positioning it for a win. His elder found him reckless and too arrogant.... honestly you should just read the interviews on the pbs link below, very entertaining, especially for history buffs like me.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/
Hey, just an FYI, to denigrate means "to criticize," so although I understood what you meant, you might want to reword that (not to be pedantic, I just know that if I misused a word, I'd want someone to tell me).
I agree, blaming it on "bureaucracy" or "big government" is the least insightful thing someone can add to the conversation.
Of course it's executed by a bureaucracy -- what else would we expect, Batman's going to manage the program? The assumption that it's going to be executed by a bureaucracy should be part of the reasoning when setting policy.
Either this was an expected outcome (in the collateral damage sense or in the "good keep him out" sense), or it should have been and people should have known better.
There are better, more accurate literary and historical analogies than "black marks". Things like yellow stars, scarlet letters, that kind of thing. aka reason number 235135 not to be proud to be an American.
If, by X, you mean "go thru airport security". Luckily our borders are an impermeable wall stronger than the cold war era berlin wall, so there's no alternative method for bad guy to enter the country.
This is the comedy of the whole security theater system. In the old days generals always prepared to refight the last war, in the fatherland security era its about the same concept. The next attack will not come from a properly documented airline passenger, it'll come from "rio grande swimmer number 50 million and one".
May as well just let them fly even if we know they're bad guys, if they're going to get here anyway, one way or another, at least we'll make a profit off the ticket and its easier to track their actions at an airport than some desert out west.
Even worse, they're better off letting all the bad guys thru to boost budgets, and stop only good guys because its safer/less confrontational and makes good theater. If I know that, they probably figured it out a long time earlier, and almost surely implemented it.
Its also a bad tactical move. Lets say he was in fact a bad guy. The obvious standing order for a bad guy would be if you get caught, yet are not drone attacked or sent to the concentration camp in cuba, then being busted should be the immediate signal to enter our completely porous and open borders via non-traditional routes, and "do your thing" since you're obviously of no further use undercover. The mere fact this dude did nothing for over a year using this logic proves his innocence. If he was a bad guy then he would have "sneaked" in, gotten on campus as quickly as possible while his intel is still current, and (done something tragic)
It's actually bad security practice, because terrorists do not exist. I mean, there are so few of them that they are basically irrelevant. Yes, every few years a terrorist event will occur somewhere in a western country, and that is quite unfortunate. However it is very minor and I don't believe it is worth the effort to fight it with a significant part of the nation's budget. Even less so to restrict civil liberties.
This whole narrative that there is a prevalent terrorist threat against our western countries is both a product of irrational fear and general government megalomania. I'm not even sure there's malevolence behind it.
Osama Bin Laden really won the very first time the terms "War on terror" were pronounced - I don't think he could ever have dreamed of such a wide and lasting success
It's only a good practice if X is very, very highly correlated with (and only with) being a terrorist.
It's not really that great security practice if you're missing a ton of real terrorists who don't do X, and you're catching a lot of non-terrorists who do do X, and no one can figure out what's going on since no one knows what X is. That's not protecting our methods; at that point, it's really just picking people out randomly.
We must always remember how rare terrorists are, and what that means for any test you apply to a person.
You have a test that flags terrorists 99% of the time, and also flags innocent people 1% of the time. The test flags a person. What are the odds that this person is a terrorist?
Answer: roughly one in a million, depending exactly on the terrorist:non-terrorist ratio in your sample population. Since there are millions of normal people for each terrorist, a small false positive rate still grabs so many people as to make the test nearly useless.
And of course it goes well beyond this. Since actual terrorists are so rare, you can never confidently state that a test will flag terrorists 99% of the time. You can easily measure the false positive rate, but it's basically impossible to measure the true positive rate with any accuracy. You can guess and extrapolate, but when it comes to actually measuring performance in the real world, you'll have a very difficult time distinguishing between a test that flags 99% of terrorists, and a test that flags 1% of terrorists.
The fellow had been in the country for years. If he hadn't crossed the border he would now have his PhD, and would be doing what he had been doing before. No one is safer because they turned him away at the border.
It's either a false positive (that's most likely, considering how few terrorists there actually are), or a subtle hint to discourage his associates from ... doing things.
It also has the unfortunate side effect of leaving innocent people completely confused when they get flagged, because they have no idea what they did wrong nor any way to defend themselves. America is not supposed to be a country where people are punished for mysterious reasons, not even foreigners.
> If the terrorist's find out they got flagged because of X
What terrorists? Good security practice is making a system that is usable, because otherwise the best practice would be to seal the boarder completely.
a bit like a government. If it find that doing X is frown upon by its citizen, it better hide it before the citizens make it stop doing X any more.
edit: this is obviously false, since by taking the monopole of violence, the government also has to drop some barbaric practices. And this is all due process and defense rights are about, limitations of the government power. Call it unfair, but drones are unfair too.
Yes, but this will stop them from doing EASY TO CATCH bad things. It's like anti-bacterial soap. Think about how badass that 0.1% that ISN'T killed is.
"if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little."
I think this is true when the person is in the country but when they're not they can't enter when it's being worked out, even if there are no security issues. (but I'm a US citizen and don't have any direct experience)
I am not US citizen but visa policy is virtually same for any issuing country. Getting visa (any kind) is privilege not right. Government has full discretionary right to refuse entry to anybody whom is not citizen.
Not saying it is fair system but it is what it is. Except full open border policy I don't see how you can fix system.
Every year I meet more expats working or studying here from 6 months to several years in order to build skills to take back home. Since I live close to JHU, most of them are scientists.
But yes, an economic depression causes political pressure on immigrants due to the lack of work/school for native citizens.
I can understand what he's feeling as i'm in a very similar situation.
I was offered a job by a San Francisco-based startup in January. I applied for a visa at the local US embassy, the interview went fine and the consular officer said she was happy to approve it but that I had been flagged for an additional background check which should take about two weeks.
Five months later and i'm still stuck in "Administrative Processing". All enquiries have come back with a blanket "matter of national security, we can't give any more information" cover. It's extremely frustrating. What makes it even worse is just the incompetence of it all. I have been going back and forth to the US for nearly ten years to see family pretty much every summer without a problem, why am I only now subject to an extremely lengthy background check?
My wife quit her job and we gave up our house in anticipation of our move and we've effectively been in limbo since.
If anything, the way we've been treated has made me never want to step foot in the US again.
There's a big difference between work visas and tourist visas, to you should expect it to take significantly more time. The fact that the company is a startup probably doesn't help either, since they may not have been around very long.
I know that doesn't help, but visa issues are always complicated and there is always risk involved.
The one thing I'm taking home from that letter is this:
the embassy called him back to say that they had found
the problem. They said that if he came in, they would fix
it. Instead of fixing it, they stamped CANCELED across
his student visa without explaining what was wrong, and
refused to answer any questions as to why.
In short: The american embassy has no compunctions whatsoever to lie to citizens of other countries.
For me as citizen of another country, this means that i will need to treat anything any representative of the US-american government says, no matter how high, or more importantly, low they are on the totem pole, is highly subject and likely a lie.
Nothing special here -- law enforcement agencies in the USA are allowed to lie to people like this as well. There is a reason defense attorneys here keep telling people that if they are ever arrested they should say nothing until a lawyer is present. Somewhere on Youtube there is a video where a former cop describes how he once told some kid that he should write an apology letter to the family he stole from, and the cop would deliver it; that "apology letter" was presented as evidence in court, as a confession.
Trickery is a matter of course for the US government, at basically every level.
As an immigrant in the US, watching HN lately has been enlightening. Absolutely none of this is new- and it's also almost entirely unrelated to PRISM. Despite the fact that tech companies have been struggling with insane visa rules for years, it's only now that we start posting about individual injustices, now that we can file it under the banner of "government bad"?
Why would this be unrelated to PRISM? As this guy doesn't know what he's accused of, and we have no idea what PRISM is looking for, assuming they're unrelated is as fallacious as assuming they are related.
My cable internet got cut off 48 hours ago. I'm still doing a merry jig with Time Warner to work out why. So it was probably PRISM, right? The NSA saw that I was posing about PRISM online and immediately moved to sever my connection to the outside world.
There is zero evidence to link Omar's case with PRISM- especially as the events described started over a year and a half ago. I am not "assuming" that it is unrelated, I am making a decision based on the fact that there is no evidence linking the two. When such evidence arises, I'll re-examine my opinion. But assuming that everything is related to PRISM because it involves computers and/or the government is a slippery slope into tin foil hatted-ness.
This sort of stuff has been happening forever. I'm sure if you found some people who were international students in the 80s or 90s they would have similar stories about capriciousness with regards to student visas.
The rules basically say that embassy official should only give out student visas if they are confident that the student meets the terms of the visa, particularly that they have no intent to overstay or permanently immigrate to the U.S. I.e. the default is not granting the visa, rather than granting the visa.
The rules are bizarre: while you're on a non-immigrant visa you have to prove that you have no intent to immigrate or seek immigrant status, yet ultimately many people will seek green cards. Indeed, there is plenty of talk that the U.S. should actively seek to encourage international students to stay permanently, while at the same time the rules say that visas shouldn't be granted to international students who might possibly be considering staying permanently.
Are we going to trawl up and link every single case of someone being denied re-entry to the US? It's just getting rather tedious.
Though as the constant karma farming off similarly tedious and usually poorly researched and written blog posts of the last week continues unabated perhaps I am in a minority of readers who gets their news from decent sources and likes to come to HN for interesting technical articles.
I think HN is seriously at risk of having jumped the shark for good. This NSA thing blew the lid off - the front page is completely full of articles about politics, with more each day about all kinds of different things.
I suppose things may settle down again - they have after other big events, but... I worry, I worry.
(And for the record, for those who conflate not wanting to see every article about this with not caring about it - I care about it deeply)
These are political problems that will be fixed by "politics" in its various forms: people making their voices heard, politicians doing their thing, donating money to organizations, lawsuits, stuff like that. Lots of hard work.
They will not be fixed because you clicked the 'upvote' arrow on a bunch of stories on a niche site, thinking that "some smart entrepreneur types" will go fix the problem for you.
You might be right, but I have the feeling that something other is at play here too. The PRISM scandal has raised awareness and interest about these things and we are now seeing a suddenly released glut of stuff like this working its way through the system. These things are happening all the time, but I get the feeling that up until now only US-foreigners were aware of the extent of it.
The PRISM scandal remains a threat to US tech businesses. Long after it fades from HN, it will be a drag on growth. Since government credibility will be hard to repair, a big part of the solution is likely going to be stronger technical measures against any kind of snooping.
I do think it's relevant, and not some completely off-topic political thing. However, it's given way to a bunch more politics - people denied entry to the US, "there are nukes in the netherlands", and so on, and filled the front page, crowding out pretty much everything else.
I just get a feeling that this is a turning point for the site, but only time will tell.
> I think HN is seriously at risk of having jumped the shark for good. This NSA thing blew the lid off - the front page is completely full of articles about politics, with more each day about all kinds of different things.
I share your caution, because I remember that for better or worse this is how reddit started changing back in the day (late 2007 - 2008), by focusing on politics (and then there came the memes and all that). But, one can sort of feel that all this is way more technology- and consequently HN-related than what Obama or Hillary Clinton had to say back in the day.
My worry is that HN on PRISM is turning into the 24-hour news cycle on CNN. There's little new information lately, but upvotes are being given for contemporary relevance (arguably at the expense of quality of submission) and comments are turning into the same speculative circles of discussion.
Hmmm, I think HN is pretty great for interesting news from decent sources (usually Atlantic, NYT, New Yorker, etc). I also think people getting questionably denied entrance to the US is pretty newsworthy given the bomb that has been dropped in the last few days. Maybe don't click if it doesn't interest you?
That US immigration is f'cked up is not exactly new or interesting in any case - and certainly not "intellectually gratifying". Do you remember when Linus Torvalds had bureaucratic problems with his green card?
They can deny you for any reason. Very literally any reason. It's not newsworthy, they've been able to do this since the US started to control immigration and it is not related to what the NSA has been doing since basically the NSA has been in existence.
People are trying so hard to find tangible evidence of someone doing something with info the NSA has collected that they are latching on to anything that could be construed as such if you look at it believing you found that evidence.
It's almost like that example Doctorow gave about false positives when you're searching for very rare events... now HN is "flagging" every government screw-up involving non-Americans as being due to PRISM.
While I agree about missing the technical articles; I appreciate seeing these, as I actually had no idea about the seriousness of some of these re-entry issues.
Maybe the solution is a dedicated HN technology page, and a separate, dedicated "Of interest" page.
Their decision was probably based in some way (assuming it's based on available information, which is admittedly risky) in his marriage to a foreign national while expressing interest in moving to the states, and the embassy's reluctance to chance him violating his visa permissions and in some way moving here with his wife in a permanent resident-alien w/o a visa type manner.
Not claiming to know anything special, but if that really is the only perturbed variable, it most likely hinged on that. Or familial ties that are somehow inscrutable. All conjecture, but I find these single cases to be ridiculous, because there are competent individuals in government who oft do what they're supposed to, even if the whole government mechanism appears corrupt and broken. Most likely there was a legitimate reason, and of course we only have one side of the story here, by an associate professor and his PhD student.
The problem is that there is no due process for these things.
You're always playing a bit of a lottery whenever you interact with, well, just about anything. But when domestic police screw up (or not!) and you get in trouble, there's at least a process in place that tries to smooth things out. It's still not a guarantee, but if you didn't actually do anything wrong, the process makes a decent stab at ensuring that fact comes to light.
But start crossing a border and everything changes. A single wage slave having a bad day can ruin you. Low-level consulate worker decided you screwed something up, even though you think you didn't? Well, too bad. Go find another country to live in.
For whatever reason, we completely throw out all these principles the moment we look at people crossing a border. And worse, everyone thinks this is fine. Foreigners have to rights, and people seem to think that's how it should be.
The problem with foreigners having rights is that it goes against very deep principles in the western tradition. If sovereignty means anything, it means the inherent power to create and enforce borders. Its like one of the defining charecteristics of a biological cell: the establishment of an "inside" and an "outside." Subjecting the inherent power of a sovereign entity to control access through its borders to judicial review upsets that dynamic.
Should the US treat visitors with respect and make the process of entering and leaving predictable and transparent? Yes. But saying foreigners have due process rights goes beyond should into must. And that is incompatible with our traditional views of sovereignty.
I don't really understand this. Judges are part of the government, so how is allowing judges to actually judge things at the border a violation of sovereignty?
I'm talking about rights, not laws. Congress could, for example, pass a law requiring immigration officials to give certain process to people denied visas. Judges could enforce those laws, and nothing about such a scheme would violate sovereignty.[1] But saying that foreigners have a right to such process is different. Where does this right come from? Foreigners are not parties to the Constitution so it can't come from that. It has to come from something "bigger," some higher law that encompasses both the foreigner and the U.S. But unless you believe in some sort of God and divine law, there is no such thing. The sovereign entity is the end of the line--nothing binds its actions other than its own conscience.
[1] Though many people would say it's a separation of powers violation.
See in particular his quote from Scalia's dissent in Boumediene:
“The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society . . . .
“But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien’s presence within its territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act.” Id., at 770–771.
Not even Glen Greenwald claims that the U.S. Constitution applies to non-citizens trying to board a plane in Cairo.
I have been told by other foreign graduate students that getting married in another country (possibly even married at all) violates that student visa agreements. One girl is French and marrying an American, she was told that if she goes to France to have a wedding ceremony that she would not be allowed back in to America. This sounds exactly like what happened to this student. It's shameful and bizarre, but it appears like these are the rules however poorly they are communicated (my friend had NO idea as the university filled out her visa application and did so incorrectly 4 years ago).
Student visas (F1 and J1) are valid only so long as you do not have 'immigrant intent' (as compared to, say, an H-1B, which doesn't have this requirement). Marrying an American (even in another country) can suggest to the DHS that you may actually intend to immigrate to the US after all. At that point, though, you have other options (can apply to be sponsored for a green card by your spouse).
I've never heard of student visa problems caused by getting married to a non-American, which seems to be what happened in the case discussed in the OP.
> marrying an American, she was told that if she goes to France to have a wedding ceremony that she would not be allowed back in to America.
My cursory reading of the USCIS website tells me her fiance would need to apply for a K1,K3 visa. Being married she is entitled to rights the typical J visa holder does not have.
This is where the immigrant/nonimmigrant visa process breaks down. USCIS makes it painfully expensive to change a nonimmigrant visa into an immigrant visa. I guess what they want to avoid is having people jump the greencard queue, and marriage moves you right to the top, by flying in on a tourist visa, find a willing US citizen to marry.
A 'marriage of convenience'[1] in that sort of situation is typically treated as fraud, with potentially high penalties (deportation for the incoming, jail for the citizen). I've heard from more than one recently married couple that they've been separated and intensively interviewed about their personal lives, marriage, and backgrounds. IIRC one was returning to the US, and another was entering Canada. In both cases one of the couple was a native citizen.
If that were the actual reason, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a standard form letter or actual reason for denial. I suppose 'Go Away, We Can't Talk About It' might get used in marginal cases or when the appropriate authority can't be bothered doing the actual research.
Or they just lost at Top100 Terrorist Names Bingo.
No it doesn't. It only matters if a student's spouse is an US Citizen. F1 is a non immigrant visa and student is not allowed to have an immigrant intent.A student can no longer prove non immigrant intent if you are married to USC (Note: H1B is a dual intent visa and it is perfectly legal to have an immigrant intent). Therefore a student on F1 can be denied entry at POE if his/her spouse is USC.
Simply because the vast majority of cases regarding visas/entry into the United States are determined by strict procedure and in accordance with the law. So most likely, as in the majority of cases, there is a reason we're not able to see here, for national security or one-sidedness.
I worked at a school with a high percentage of foreign students on F-1 visas. The visa-granting process is much more arbitrary than you imagine. The supposed "strict procedure" is actually filtered through many layers of several partially-communicating bureaucracies. An embassy in particular can approve or reject visa applications without recourse or oversight but Homeland Security can also erect inscrutable obstructions.
> but I find these single cases to be ridiculous, because there are competent individuals in government who oft do what they're supposed to, even if the whole government mechanism appears corrupt and broken. Most likely there was a legitimate reason, and of course we only have one side of the story here, by an associate professor and his PhD student.
You'll understand only when you face it. What legitimate reasons are you applying to justify treatment of any or every person on the planet as potential threat? Without a means for recourse. And then if you're agreeable to the logic of scrutiny and transparency from others then why not apply the same logic to the individuals in the Government?
"What legitimate reasons are you applying to justify treatment of any or every person on the planet as potential threat"
Because they are? Approximately zero risk, true, but slightly over zero. Its a pretty simple straightforward game theory problem. Whats the total aggregate sum of the trouble you'll get into by letting 1 out of 100 million terrorist thru, vs simply stamping "denied national security" on any random visa and stonewalling? In fact the guy who dared complain about it is probably now on some secret NSA list, and perhaps also now on the no-fly list. That'll show people what happens to complainers, hopefully that prof never has to fly anywhere again for the rest of his life... and probably his families lives, too.
Note, I'm not supporting an unjust system, just explaining how it works from a game theory perspective. I don't see why any individual inspector would ever permit a visa unless there's some kind of piecework payment system or a really good non-retribution system (anonymity?). If a terrorist ever got past them, there would be demands for punishment. Therefore "the system" is going to select for inspectors who are either reckless, careless, actively working against the interests of the USA... None of which will probably have ideal outcomes.
You are completely ignoring the negative effects of these decisions to exclude. Those decisions do not happen in a vacuum. Every one of them has an associated "negative" effect that also accumulates.
OK, then explain the Tsarnajevs (the Boston bombers) getting past even with multiple terrorist flags? If the system is stonewalling and so tight, then why were they successful in going to terrorist camps and then coming back?
The current process acknowledges the fact that there will be a number of false positives, probably an order of magnitude higher than true positives - a class of people which the system aims to filter impeccably.
However, we should not forget about the sentiment this process brings about. It leaves a very poor taste and even hurts and insults a lot of people and the cost of losing those talent and taxes thereof could be manifold.
Well, this "problem" with sort out itself, eventually. Taking the ridiculous border controls, the economic situation, disregard of human rights (specially for foreigners), it means that the US is rapidly becoming an unattractive place to work, study and even go on vacation. Before long, you won't have many people trying to get in.
Guess where the entrepreneurs, scientists and highly skilled workers will go? Hint: not the US. What that means for the future of the country is left as an exercise to the reader.
I can't believe that in 2013 we are still worried about which piece of land someone were when he got out of the womb.
That's why I left US for the UK back in 2006. (Even though UK now is not better than US, at the time they were able to recognise the benefits of letting highly skilled people in).
Unless you walked through Alaska on a land bridge, you too are an immigrant. We can either embrace the strength of a democracy to turn the huddled masses into a productive force for good or we can choose to turn inward. Guided by fear, we are making the wrong choice.
Even "origin" is a misnomer here. It's not clear if the neanderthals were wiped out, or simply assimilated. Many were already living in modern-day Europe.
"Immigrant" does not mean "descended from someone who came here". Some people were actually born here. Yes, we are all descended from immigrants (some of us from those who walked from Asia), but that doesn't make us and our children's children "immigrants" as well.
...not sure what sort of "moral debt" (second bullet point) Omar had to the country - is there some reason he should have had to contribute anything to the US economy? Its not like the military where you commit to extra years of service for the financial inducements attached to further study. He's probably already contributed more than most Americans just in his research during the years of his PhD. As an American doing a PhD in the UK, I don't feel I owe a "moral debt" to contribute to the economy here when I am done.
Where do you live, where the government either isn't cooperating with the US or its allies or else doing its own spying and censorship, and isn't a corrupt, money-hungry beast? I might just pack my own bags and go myself. Assuming there are jobs for foreigners.
IMO the US is with China a step ahead everybody else Russia included. They also have the resources for this and control over the main companies spearheading these developments. Couple with a shadow federal government with absolute power, and the most sedated, naive, "cooperative" and docile population in existence.
It's really a scary place to live. Surely IT jobs do pay well there though.
Just because the United States happens to be better at it at the moment, doesn't mean other governments aren't complicit or wouldn't jump at the chance for total information awareness themselves.
Research universities are phenomenally expensive and heavily subsidized creatures. This guy received $250k in government grants that paid his tuition and stipend.
I'm mildly biased (or more precisely, I was more close to the subject), since I was in research until 2 years ago, when my grant ran out. I did have a grant, but in my case it was basically my salary while I was researching and giving occasional teaching. The research group I was in was also given money "for me" to cover my travel expenses and such, but after all, the money for the grant is used in exchange for someone researching (be it as salary, equipment, workshops,) not just flushed down the toilet. But I'm sure you know, also ;)
Perhaps because recent events have me grasping for sources of positive news from Americans, I am touched by the sincerity and tone of this letter. I would much rather believe that the attitude expressed in this letter is that of most Americans.
Is this most Americans? Yes it is. Americans paid $250 grand for this "Omar, PhD" but their purchase was lost in shipping. It's time to start yelling at a few parcel carriers.
He sounds like a brilliant student. However does anyone find it the least bit noteworthy that the US government is paying for foreign citizens' tuition and stipends while many of its own citizens are forced to go deeply in debt?
Grad school applications are generally treated with little attention to citizenship. Then PhD students work on research projects that largely are funded by government research grants. The US government really is paying to get some research done, and the universities are accomplishing this in the best way they can, by attracting the best talent they can, worldwide.
Your taxes also pay--though usually not completely--for the aimless four year party that constitutes many college students' experience in higher education. Given the ratio of undergraduates to science & engineering PhD students, I'd wager that the former consumes a much larger portion of your taxes than the latter, and for less return on the investment.
Not to mention the fact that many foreign PhD students have strong desires to live and work here...but Uncle Sam apparently thinks it's better to shove them out.
I shouldn't be concerned about wastage in one area because there's wastage in another area? Doesn't compute.
> Not to mention the fact that many foreign PhD students have strong desires to live and work here...but Uncle Sam apparently thinks it's better to shove them out.
Yes, I believe this. As long as Uncle Sam is cutting off its nose to spite its face, maybe we shouldn't be educating these foreign students. Maybe wait until Uncle Sam is smart enough to first give the students a green card.
In this case, a PhD education in science or engineering is only "wasted" because our existing laws don't allow the student to make use of it domestically. Thus it is all cost and no benefit (at least not to the U.S. -- other countries will be happy to accept them, especially since they are already educated). Failing to make use of their skills is what doesn't compute.
They may have an intention. But few means, since there is no easy way from graduation to the citizenship.
A positive side effect may be more foreigners having good will towards Americans, having studied and lived here for several years. However, incidents like this one (denying visa) are not working towards developing the good will but very much in the other direction.
a) Educating foreign students and sending them back to their home countries is a great example of how to do "soft power". This is actually the explicit intent of many programs, particularly Fulbright awards, where recipients are required to return to their home countries.
b) The terms of the student visa require that visa-holders provide evidences that they have no intent to stay permanently in the country.
So we educate them at large expense and then end up living in tents when we're unemployable? Sub-optimal I say.
I'm fine with (b) as long as US taxpayers aren't footing the students' bills. Otherwise I see money wasted. If they are so worthy we'll pay their bills then we should want them to stay. The ones that leave regardless of our welcome mat can provide us with "soft power" back in their home countries.
I don't have a problem with educating foreign students, only those who have no intention of staying here, or those who won't be allowed to stay here. Top universities can stay top when we educate only those foreign students who can both be allowed to stay and have stated their intention of staying.
Students are not a drain, even if tax payers fund them.
They spend money in the local economy. They help with competition and keeping standards up. They (as others have said) take back useful soft-power propaganda to their home countries.
The ones who leave are a drain compared to students who spend money in the local economy and pay US taxes the rest of their lives. We shouldn't push them away or educate the ones who have no stated intention of staying here. There will still be plenty who leave anyway to propagate propaganda.
Those two things have nothing to do with one another.
First of all, there aren't enough American students qualified to do the research your taxes are paying for. They have to use foreign students or it would never get done.
Second, you're angry that they're not working here, but if they were working here, you'd be angry they're taking our jobs.
You're angry at the wrong people. You should be angry at American students and teachers for being too stupid to do the research jobs your taxes are paying for, and for being too stupid to get "work" in the field.
I'm not angry, I'm concerned that taxpayer money is being wasted. If a foreign student is so worthy that we'll pay for their education then we should get some indication that they intend to stay here, plus roll out the welcome mat for their citizenship, all in advance of that education.
If you don't want them, other countries will be more than happy to take those unwanted Ph.D. students off your hands.
Ph.D. students don't pay tuition because the remuneration they get for their work is part tuition waivers, part money. If they do not work for the university and are not eligible for tuition waivers, they have to pay tuition instead (both foreigners and US Americans).
In practice, they are basically inexpensive (for their qualifications) temporary employees in teaching and research; what they get out of it is a degree.
If they are a net benefit to US taxpayers even when they plan to leave the US, that's a good point. We should give them a green card in advance though, plus ask their intention. There's got to be plenty of supply of worthy foreign students who intend to stay here. Taxpayer money is surely being left on the table if we are educating foreign students regardless of their intention of staying.
This article strikes home for me.
I came to the US to go to college, while here I got great grades, a job and eventually married a US Citizen and obtained citizenship myself.
Due to the fact that I followed the rules My sister (Medical Doctor in our country of origin) would get harassed and accused of wanting to stay ("like your brother" they would say) every time she came to visit me (For the record she has never overstayed her visas).
Eventually when it was time to renew her tourist visa she was denied and told to never set a foot at the US embassy again.
Quite sad really but there is no winning against USCIS.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
Wow! This really saddens me. But I experienced something similar. When I got married a couple of years ago (in India) I really wanted my one cousins (who I was really close to) to come to my wedding. Unfortunately, his lawyers advised him no to come stating that given the current state of affairs, his reentry to US might be jeopardized. This is in spite of the fact that he had lived in US for over a decade and paid huge taxes during that time.
The bit about the flight staff tearing up his ticket is a real problem. Flight staff act like they're Border Control. I'm a Jordanian with an O1 and they usually give me hard time when I try to board a plane to the states. I once almost missed my flight because they made me buy a ticket back in the same year, even-though my visa was valid for three years.
According to my understanding, for passport control flights, the airlines are heavily fined and have to bear the cost of return flight if a passenger is denied entry.
When the US has access to approx 10 billion 'metadata' from Jordanian citicens (probably more, I am quoting from memory), it means it has access to ALL their communications.
So if this poor man just happened to have the wrong social graph...
"We found the problem with your visa [silence]".
The [silence] means: there should be a 'CANCELLED' stamp on it. Why bother?
Having been through the system I can probably guess what he did wrong. F1 status requires that you show no intent to stay. If he had declared that Microsoft was sponsoring an H1B prior to re-entry and we as attempting to enter with a F1, then he broke the F1 rules.
I interpreted his rage as being directed toward the "without any guarantee they can stay?" part of the statement.
It IS quite wasteful that he was given this opportunity, and then thrown out before he even had the chance to complete his education. Absent any real reasoning (which we're likely to never see) it's tremendously irresponsible.
It's not like you're footing the bill for all foreign students single-handedly. There's this thing called society. You're part of it.
If you think your taxes are being "wasted" on foreign students, as if those freeloaders are being forced on institutions like MIT by the government, take it up with your representative or senator.
The academic world is bigger than the US. It might shock you but there are some very capable students outside those borders and MIT would very much like to have them doing research at MIT rather than somewhere else.
Then let MIT pay for that, not me, when there's no likelihood the student will be paying me back in the form of US taxes. The research leads to patents that MIT gets compensated for, not me. My taxes are likely being wasted here, working against the society I support. It doesn't matter if it's only a dime of mine since all waste is bad and adds up to a lot. No I'm not going to take it up with my representative, falling on deaf ears. I'm going to make my point here on HN instead, where it belongs.
So should we be writing checks to Germany when a German-educated person comes over to the US and starts a business? After all, Germany should be compensated for their loss, right?
If an American chooses to move to Singapore to work for an international bank, then maybe they should be forced to pay back the subsidy on their education, right?
Here's the thing: Education is not a waste of money. It costs almost nothing to host a Ph.D. student, there just aren't that many of them. It would take tens of thousands of Ph.D. students to add up to the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet.
Investments aren't about a guaranteed return, they're all about probabilities. I'm pretty sure that MIT's investment in graduate students, including the small number of guest foreign students, pays enormous dividends in terms of research and prestige.
Also if you can name one Ph.D. student that's been given a signing bonus that's anywhere near the kind of money thrown at football players, please do. If you want to know where money's being wasted, it's on lavish stadiums, enormous scholarships, and all the associated pageantry.
Don't think you're the only "taxpayer". Virtually everyone who's ever set foot in the United States is a taxpayer in some form. I know I've paid my fair share of sales taxes just visiting.
If you want to cut funding to MIT so that it becomes a shell of what it is today, you're entitled to that opinion. Just don't complain if that happens and over time the US becomes completely uncompetitive, full of people with obsolete or inadequate education, reduced to having to import talent wholesale like Dubai.
Can you knock off the straw man arguments? Not wanting my taxes to be wasted isn't a valueless point just because I'm one of many taxpayers, or because the US doesn't compensate Germany when a German-educated person moves to the US, or because education is worth money to someone, or because money is wasted elsewhere, etc.
If the US taxpayers' investment in foreign students who may not end up staying here is a net benefit to US society and that benefit has been reasonably maximized, then I'm all for it. Otherwise I'm not. When a foreign student is given a nice education at taxpayer expense without so much as granting them a green card on arrival to increase the odds they'll stay here, I suspect that taxpayer money is being wasted, even if the return of educating foreign students is positive on net.
Yes, just like not all startups are successful for VCs. The revenue generated by some of the research can pay for all the research, and patents are just one of many revenue sources for them. Johns Hopkins has an endowment of $2.5 billion. MIT has $10 billion. They can afford to pay for foreigners' educations without getting taxpayers involved. Taxpayers are involved so they can have even more money in the bank.
> Yes, just like not all startups are successful for VCs.
A dangerous analogy, because the sole criterion of success for a startup is to be financially successful, whereas there are lots of research ideas that cannot be translated into a profitable business, yet are still worthwhile to pursue. Think fundamental results in maths and physics.
I am all for universities to have sources of revenue other than taxpayer money. But I fear that making those the only sources of revenue (you did defend that in your original post) will instill a climate where researchers are prevented from pursuing research topics that cannot possibly bring in any money for their universities.
And this is not just about "knowledge for knowledge's sake", either. Think about, say, quantum mechanics or complex analysis. Would anyone have paid for the early research in these areas with the expectation of financial returns? And yet, here they are today at the basis of a number of highly profitable industries.
I'm fine with spending public money for research done by domestic students or those foreign students who have stated their intention to stay in the US and have their path to citizenship approved in advance. For other students the university should pay for it out of their endowment. In other words the public's money should be spent judiciously, not frivolously.
I think you misunderstand what a PhD student is. A PhD candidate is supposed to generate real science, not just train to become someone who does. By that same logic, a senior researcher (American citizen or not) should not be paid by taxpayer money unless she were to promise not to leave the US in the future.
Not by that logic. It's a safe bet that American citizens who haven't made such a promise are less likely to leave the US than are foreign PhD students who've stated their intention to stay in the US and have been cleared for a path to citizenship before they arrive, but of course are free to leave. I support public funding for both cases.
All I want is better odds they'll stay, based on the assumption that there is more supply of worthy foreign students who'd stay if they could, than demand for them. There's no good reason we shouldn't maximize the benefit to the US taxpayer, by cherry-picking the supply and paving the way to their citizenship in advance. That the PhD students do real science (i.e. a job) isn't a good enough reason to leave taxpayer money on the table.
If some foreign student is so much a wunderkind that they'll do a $million in work for their $250K outlay, but plans to leave the US, that could be an exception.
Yes there's value in that, but it's surely a net loss to pay more for a single foreigner's education than 5 average Americans have in assets put together.
This sort of event is shameful and near-indefensible but not new. If you're a foreign grad student in the US, be aware that this sort of thing happens all the time, and even trivial visa issues take a long time to resolve.
But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know.
It was the same way with the no-fly list for the longest time too, but because that wound up impacting a few powerful Americans it was eventually sorted so now you can at least fight it a little or do additional background checks to get off of it.
The worst part is that these security black marks seem fairly easy to get: family member or friend a "terrorist?" Share a name with someone "bad?" You're now on it. And nobody you can actually talk to can either tell you why or has the authority to remove you.
I would blame it on bureaucracy, but that is an easy out for a policy which is partly intentional -- Americans don't want people visiting, working, or studying on their shores. They have made that abundantly clear over the last ten years.