White Americans are almost exclusively their own most sensitive wordsmiths. If you heard how other people refer to themselves and others, it can be much worse and they think nothing of it. It’s just a silly word that describes the immigrant status and a segment of our demographic. It isn’t bigotry. You’re deciding to be offended more than anyone is trying to offend you. This is political correctness gone too far.

>elevating their class

The middle class is disappearing. They're being impoverished.

>Trump is not about “racism.” He won more racial minorities

"Of course I'm not racist, I have black friends"

...

I have a family member that is a naturalized citizen. They were in the country illegally for 2 decades before that, and they are the first one to yell "kick those lazy illegals out". So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture.

What's really fucking stupid about this guy is the people he loves to vote for are the ones that would strip his rights and kick him out of the country in a heartbeat for.

Remember when America was a melting pot and not a bunch of redhats goose stepping in line?

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> The reason it is a weasel's move is because decisions at the consulate are made by consular officers who are career public workers and won't deny visas for arbitrary reasons.

No? Visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons based on what executive branch of US. there have been multiple cases where it has been clear that visas are a privilige not a right. Visa needs a reason to be granted, by default it is denied.

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> to throttle the pipeline by

Why is there a "pipeline"?

Does the United States owe immigration to the world, somehow? Does it owe it so much that there must be an avenue to immigration so large that you casually refer to that as a "pipeline"?

> That is bad for the political leadership because they just don't want to issue visas

America welcomes the most people in by percentage and by numbers in the world. If they don't want to issue visas, and they do it the most by political design, then no one does.

So maybe you have stated a reason a pause is better than an explicit no. No history of a denial is maybe a better thing.

I get the human component but I can separate that from policy. I have my own risk assessment on it and it’s that I couldn’t imagine ever making any material investment financial or community in a place like this. I’ve thought about doing the digital nomad thing in the past, and I don’t think anyone would be surprised if some random South East Asian country did this same thing and nobody would bat an eye. It to be expected that other countries can have wavering policies, it’s when the US does it that people cry about the humanity of it.

I don’t think it would have hurt much to put some advanced warning out there. Let people plan for it. But I also know that probably has some blow back towards the intended outcome of this.

Also, I don’t think you can challenge a blanket policy. I haven’t really dove into this but it doesn’t sound like they’re making any exceptions.

The current administration loves creating chaos and uncertainty. Exactly why this should be less of a surprise to those that know how things work and that they may actually get locked out. Anyone who reads even just the headline of this and is perplexed by it has been living under a rock. To me, it is 100% on brand.

Yes, obviously. But it was rhetorical - this is not specifically tech related and there’s nothing about it that a ‘hacker’ would find innately interesting. It’s just people bitching about a US executive branch decision they disagree with and everybody’s downvoting the side they disagree with, which is exactly the sort of outcome this site ostensibly tries to avoid.

I'll pause on the response for now since the condescension is not warranted.

Yeah, this is the problem. If you're on an immigrant visa, working a real job, then you have a life in the US: an apartment or a house, a pile of belongings, maybe a spouse and kids. If you need to leave the country to renew your immigrant visa, you may not be allowed back in to pack your apartment, sell your house, or help your US spouse and kids prepare to move to a country that will allow your family to stay together. It's a giant neon sign telling you you're not at all welcome here.

Of course, if you have a spouse and kids, this all gets easier once you have permanent resident status. Which used to be comparatively easy to get once you were married and you had offspring running around. I don't know what that process looks like now.

In practice, this kind of arbitrary screwing with people makes the US far too risky for educated, professional immigrants. So the scientists and the engineers and the company founders will just go elsewhere and build that country's economy. Which is fine, in the long run: If the US doesn't want to build the future or create new industries, then the voters have every right to vote for that. We've already decided we have no hope of competing with China in cars. And we'll need to cede more industries over time. As far as I can tell, the US has benefited heavily from poaching other people's scientists and engineers and professionals for decades now. But maybe the voters don't buy my argument, and they believe that chasing away skilled professionals and imposing 100% tariffs will lead to the future they want. It's a difference in beliefs about about what makes a country prosperous, and people have a right to vote based on their beliefs.

Well, not to defend the practice, but I think a reason for demanding application from abroad, is that if you decide to deny renewal, now they don't get back in. Whereas if you can apply from within the country, then people who are denied renewal can refuse to leave, go underground etc.

Even with this pretext though, it's a good example of a rule which punishes the law-obedient. People who intend to stay in the country illegally won't go abroad to reapply in the first place.

The US also does not require you to renew immigration visa. It's actually impossible to renew in the US inside or outside the country. A US immigration visa gives you a resident status on admission and thus makes you ineligible for any US visa.

Ireland, Nigeria

It's a little more than scapegoating, though. It's also absolutely about social dumping. Yes, the UK would be in serious trouble without immigrants, but richer people would be disproportionately in trouble, especially non-working ones (i.e. retirees). Working poorer people, well they wouldn't be better off maybe, but they'd have some compensation in that their labour would be in much higher demand.

Yes that's kind of what I mean - the powers that be are already quietly moving in the direction of cracking down on immigration, because they can see it's now causing them real political problems.

Not because they care about doing the right thing, but purely for self preservation reasons

If the government refuses a visa renewal while the person is in the country and they don’t comply you have to deport them, which is often problematic.

If you make it standard procedure that everyone has to leave the country temporarily to renew their visa, the person is already outside your country when you refuse the renewal.

Instead of having a deportation challenged in court and mired in paperwork, you simply don’t let them back in. That’s what the parent comment was getting at.

Not saying this is right or wrong or it will necessarily happen in the UK, but it’s the kind of change you can make if you want to quietly reduce immigration without fuss about deportations.

And that does seem to be the direction that UK policy is going, albeit currently only with baby steps

People absolutely do have a problem with legal immigration, especially post-Boriswave.

If legal immigration means millions of new people every year and rapid demographic change, of course that will cause a political issue.

It would be very strange (basically unheard of in human history) if it didn't.

People I know who are non-white all report increased racism (mostly not aggressive but noticeable) since Covid, despite having English accents so clearly not being illegal immigrants.

That is caused by reckless immigration policy stoking resentment

> illegal immigration is the type of immigration people are upset about here in the UK. most people have no problem with legal migration.

People claim that, but you can't read someone's immigration status from their face.

Reform take peoples concerns about the massive increase in population numbers and the knock on effects of housing and infrastructure, and cultural clash since we swapped eu immigration for sub Saharan and South Asian, and point it to the small boats.

I have no problem with refugees. I do have problem with a million people a year arriving through Heathrow. Farage and co want that though as it’s good for business (more workers, higher asset prices) so they blame it on the tiny numbers of small boats.

Brexit meant we swapped immigration of mostly like minded Europeans and temporary workers for permanent immigration from poorer countries with more medieval views.

I’m fairly left on the spectrum, I was door stepping for remain, and for Lib Dems in 2017,2019 and a by-election, I’m very much on the tax wealth not work side, and I have no problem in paying tax despite earning more than 90% of the people in the county, including the old folk who just keep taking and never paying.

But it seems I’m not left enough because I have a problem with the massive amounts of legal immigration under a populist right wing government and I should be sent to a gulag.

"anyone claiming the UK’s legal migration is any sort of problem right now, or in the past, should probably not be listened to in any way shape or form for anything they have to say on the matter."

This sort of position is, IMO, disgusting and immoral. I cannot express how appalled I am that someone would state something like this. Anyone who's a citizen of the UK most certainly has a right to express their opinion on legal immigration, either in favor or against.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5941765/trump-immigrati...

https://apnews.com/article/trump-asylum-appeals-court-ed8f8f...

It's not beneath them per se. It's just that this trade only makes sense for a certain slice of the population at a certain time in their life. The immigrant is willing to work in that job because what is offered is not just the salary but something more (chance to immigrate, stability, arbitrage, etc.). It's similar to research assistants or grad students in universities. They are doing cutting edge research for peanuts because what they are getting is something more (degree, skills, future earning potential). It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

I’d only say change the system to provide a pathway to residency. If you’re willing to work 12 hour days to ensure my fat American born self keeps eating , you deserve a spot here.

One of my former partners was making around 200k. Her grandparents cleaned homes.

The idea is that you come here and your life is crappy low paid work, but your kids and their kids have amazing careers.

Yet here we are. They even recognized officially (Labor Department, October '25) that Americans are not willing to pick up these jobs.

Immigrants aren’t the only ones who can do low skill labor, machines can do it too.

But doing any kind of labor that a machine can do, is beneath your capacity as a human, so you shouldn’t do that job, you should do other jobs that require human effort or where the quality of human output is valued.

The way it works in some countries in Europe is that you have to pay the foreign worker a minimum wage that is x% above industry standard for that role. No need to check if they have special skills. This will obviously not fly among corporate donors.

> I think what he's saying is if a corporation has a genuine need of some high specialist in a skill, and no American has that skill - then okay, such is life - bring in a foreign worker.

I don't think so, as that would be a silly point to make. I mean, it's absurd to assume a hiring round should't extend offers to other candidates if current applicants can just barely meet the hiring bar. This is a contrived scenario intended to rationalize excluding better candidates on technicalities that only serve the interest of low-skilled, low-competence applicants that can't compete.

And by the way, I've worked with my fair share of US emigrants, both veterans and juniors fresh out of college, and I would hardly describe them as raising the hiring bar. Nevertheless it would be colossally stupid to argue they should have not been considered for the position just because they were foreigners.

If true, that interpretation hardly seems relevant given that all immigrant visa applications are paused, with the goal of determining whether immigrants are likely to become dependent on public benefits in the US.

It's not simply a pause on immigration by people applying for a category which requires special expertise.

> But corporations have abused the system to unnecessarily employ immigrant labor in lieu of American

I'm not going to say this has never happened, but in general I don't think it's common or widespread. Generally, businesses going to the trouble of bringing in foreign labor through the various programs are trying to fulfill labor shortages.

You should be able to see evidence of it happening in jobs and unemployment numbers. You'd see it higher unemployment among American citizens than the workforce as a whole

Towards the end of the Biden admin, there was a great jobs report, but right-wing media and MAGA pundits spun it by saying the vast majority of all the new jobs were taken by immigrants.

That wasn't a lie, but it wasn't because immigrants were taking jobs that would have otherwise been filled with Americans as they tried to portray. If you looked at the employment numbers by citizenship status, citizens were sitting about as close to full employment as we could ever be. The only way to fill those jobs was to expand the labor pool.

Is an un-rigged and meritocratic system possible if there are border controls?

If not, then using words like "rigged" and "meritocratic" as a complaint about the current system can only mean that you want no border controls.

If so, how? Every system I can think of can be rigged, and exclude people who have merit, resulting in a system which favors the rich and powerful.

> the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy

I mean... "leave to renew" is a horrible policy, it's just one that we've normalized since 9/11. It's incredibly wasteful and disruptive, and serves no purpose. There's no legitimate reason why a long-term residential visa like an H1-B can't be renewed by mail or electronically. I can renew my driver's license by mail, and I'm a hell of a lot more likely to cause serious damage with a car than my foreign coworkers are by continuing to do their jobs well.

The reason the State Department hides behind, by the way, is that domestic offices don't have the ability to take biometric data (fingerprints), which is self-evidently pretextual.

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They come with renewal expectations, assuming the situation hasn't changed. Reserving the right to change the rules unilaterally doesn't make you not an asshole if you actually exercise that right. And government only functions if it's predictable - if it's a random-number generator (outside of processes that are explicitly lotteries), what is anyone supposed to do? Why would anyone engage with it?

In most states, employers have broad rights to fire employees at will, including no reason or "he wore the wrong color shirt". That doesn't mean that if you have a dickhead manager who fires you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt isn't a dickhead, and if you defended that manager I would similarly consider you unfit to participate in civil society.

>You could better refute this by starting with a policy you would consider cruel, and the in turn demonstrating how this one doesn't fit it.

I actually don't think it is that common for policy to be cruel just for the sake of being cruel ("the cruelty is the point")

>For a while they were deporting people to the equivalent of a Gulag, and literally suggested that if people were afraid of that outcome they should self deport. I think that would be a pretty fair example of a policy where the cruelty was the literal point: The hope was it would be viewed with sufficient fear as to dissuade people from staying in the country illegally.

The point of law enforcement is to deter and prevent lawbreaking, not be cruel for its own sake. Suppose you observe that meals in prison aren't very tasty. Would you criticize this policy on the grounds that "the cruelty is the point"?

You can argue that the punishment is too harsh, but that still doesn't prove that cruelty was the point.

Yes, all men are created equal. They have the equal right to live in their country. A Russian has just as much a right to live in Russia as an American does in America. And I have just as much a right to move to Russia as a Russian has to move to America—i.e. none at all, it's a privilege than the government of each country may or may not grant.

Btw, I am a naturalized US citizen. I'm talking about myself here. I'm very grateful for what this country has given me, because I know it had no obligation whatsoever to do so.

If "all men are created equal" applies to foreign citizens, why not just go all the way and let them vote in US elections? We can elect the US president on the basis of the entire world population. Is that the American tradition?

Leftists tell me the US is an irredeemable and illegitimate settler colonial project founded on slavery, white supremacy, and genocide.

When the US has an active foreign policy, I'm told we are "destabilizing foreign nations", or engaging in "neo-imperialism".

When we have a passive foreign policy, I'm told we are "complicit", or "abandoning allies".

There's nothing the US can do, or not do, which doesn't get demonized to the Moon and back. Right here in this thread, someone is trashing us for our WW2 involvement.

HN has been basically silent on the Swiss referendum to put a hard stop to immigration to Switzerland. But all the US has to is pause immigration for a bit, and I'm told we are "vile".

And now, I'm told about an "American tradition" that we are supposedly "twisting". You sure that isn't a good thing? Look where those "American traditions" got us. Our nation is a DISASTER, right? Shouldn't we be keeping out brown people for their own safety?

OK but that's a much different argument from "the cruelty is the point".

> This language was struck and the visas became, and still are, the most common defacto "seeking green card" status for workers seeking to move the US.

Incorrect. H1B still requires non-immigrant intent. The only thing that was struck was requiring the government to presume non-immigrant intent automatically upon some filing for permanent residency. That was not intended to change the system into a de facto permanent residency pipeline.

They are being denied. That's the default state when your visa expires and you have not been granted a new one. What the government is doing is telling people to not bother asking right now because everyone will be denied.

The moral issue is defined by the nature of the rule, not the stakes for someone who has transgressed. Enforcing the rule doesn’t become less legitimate just because someone has invested more in breaking it.

The principle is the same; the magnitude is different. I don't see why adjusting the magnitude should affect the principle.

Thank the pseudo intellectual billionaire patron club masquerading as serious thinkers.

American immigration laws are designed to have a small stream of permanent immigration, both to protect american jobs and to protect american culture from foreign influence. That’s what people voted for over decades. The New York Times did a good podcast on the issue. https://youtu.be/xgDdTV7A57w. If you want to define “xenophobic” to encompass that then that’s your choice. I don't think that's a sensible or useful definition. The concept of "xenophobia" only applies to individuals. It's wrong to assume that somebody will be a certain way because of their nationality. That obviously doesn't translate to immigration, which involves the mass movement of people who do have a distinct culture in the aggregate, and do transplant their culture into the U.S.: https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...