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

It’s weird that you think my point is about the superficial optics of having immigrants in Trump’s coalition, rather than about the motivations of the immigrant voters themselves.

> So just because someone is the same race/culture as you doesn't mean they aren't racist against that culture

You can’t be “racist” against a culture. Racism is wrong because race is superficial—how much sunscreen someone does or does not need is as irrelevant as hair color or eye color. But culture isn’t superficial. Culture has major impacts on the types of societies people create.

Your family member is no different from someone from rural Alabama who moves to NYC and dislikes his culture of origin. There’s nothing wrong with that. His viewpoint is totally rational, and frankly, more rational than the opposite. If you come from a country that’s dysfunctional and unsuccessful, why wouldn’t you dislike that place’s culture? It’s like someone who left some failing dinosaur company to go to a high performance startup saying that the culture at the new company is better.

Laws should not be executed on the whim of the executive branch.

No, you are confusing discretion with whims of the executive branch. Consular officers have discretion to adjudicate the applications and they can deny them for reasons prescribed in the INA. Those decisions are not reviewable. They are still supposed to follow their training, the FAM, and the INA in making the decisions. If Rubio sends an email to the consulates that says, "deny all visas", that would be illegal as a matter of policy and will be overturned by the courts under the APA. Note that 212(f) (aka Muslim ban from Trump v. Hawaii) gives discretion to the president to bar entry into the country, not visa adjudications. Visa adjudications require individualized determination by the consular officer.

Some of us have friends overseas who we think are deserving of residency and citizenship. You used to be able to just show up on a ship and they would make you a citizen if you were healthy. That's how my ancestors got here.

Citation needed

> I don’t think it would have hurt much to put some advanced warning out there. Let people plan for it.

As with a lot of things this administration does, this is where the cruel part comes in. That would be the sensible thing to do, it's just a choice not to.

> 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.

Because those countries would typically do it with a warning period of some sort, the fallout won't be as much.

In general these countries typically don't do this because the legal immigration system is how they pick and choose who to allow in, as the US does. So typically this would be to their advantage.

Also, the US is the country that used to call themselves "leader of the free world and all that". So maybe they should hold themselves to high standards?

> Also, I don’t think you can challenge a blanket policy.

There isn't a policy here that has been changed. It's the executive branch stopping some function it was tasked with. We've seen in the past that they've tried such things many times for the courts to then come in and say that the law says they should do XYZ and so they're forced to resume their work. DOGE stopped a bunch of things that the courts later reinstated, including rehiring the people they fired. Thankfully the executive branch isn't completely unchecked, yet.

> Exactly why this should be less of a surprise to those that know how things work and that they may actually get locked out

So you would suggest that people cancel their lease, pack up their stuff, don't sign their kids up for school and all? Just on the off chance that this hits right when they're abroad? I think that's just arguing around the issue created here.

Only if your definition of "hacker" is limited to "begging for VC money for your b2b SAAS".

Through the entire history of the phrase "hacker", there have been hackers concerned about human rights, political causes, anti-corporate measures, etc.

Personally I consider myself a hacker and will not abide by the narrow definition you set forth. I'm a hacker because I'm pissed off that money controls our lives and I seek out to regain control wherever I can.

It's important news for the members of this community independent of the politics.

A pause is different from a refusal which is different from a denial. They have different legal ramifications. It's a Kafkaesque hellscape.

Ironic.

Ireland? Where'd you get that from? They have a perfectly typical European system where you are expected to apply from inside the country for renewals [1]. You can still do it from abroad, but then you're not eligible for the simpler online procedure:

> You must currently be present in Ireland to be eligible to renew your permission to remain online. Applications submitted from outside Ireland will not be accepted.

Nigeria I'm less sure about. From what I can quickly google, they have a few classes of temporary work visas that aren't extendable (which isn't particularly unusual), although they do list at least some as "renewable upon regularization", and I'm unfortunately not well-versed enough in Nigerian immigration law to know what that means. For actual long-term immigration they have a document called a CERPAC, and the respective website [2] doesn't seem to mention whether you have to leave Nigeria to renew it, only that it's done online. Common sense suggests, however, that if you did have to leave, it would be mentioned somewhere on there, likely in big bold letters.

[1] https://www.irishimmigration.ie/registering-your-immigration...

[2] https://cerpac.immigration.gov.ng/

Is that true? Immigrants into Ireland hold an Irish Residence Permit, which is renewed in Ireland, at the office in Ireland. No need to leave Ireland.

And lots of expat-friendly countries that are tolerant of working on repeated tourist visas rather than a full immigrant visa, but still require visa runs every month or three.

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

Call me crazy, but this is something I want in a democracy. Less ideology and more pragmatism.

I find this quite confusing, but then I am far from being an expert on the matter:

* Do we expect a high number of people applying for visa renewals and getting rejected? How come? Otherwise, when it comes to people illegally overstaying their visas, how does this policy idea address intentional non-compliance?

* Don't legal challenges to deportation of criminals have to do with the deportation rather than visas. It would be convenient if hardened criminals complied with the law and removed the need to deport them, but what would motivate them to do so?

The idea seems to be to inconvenience law-abiding visa holders without addressing major concerns, but then I probably misunderstand the concerns. For instance, maybe there is a way of creating legal busy-work when one's visa renewal application gets rejected in a way that is cheap to the individual, but costly for the state, and that this happens on a scale that makes the problem significant. Sounds surprising, and surprising that there'd be no other way to avoid that too!

This would be true if visa and status were the same thing. In the US, they are not. Whether you are legally present in the US is governed by status. So what happens is that your status is valid and even renewed or extended in the US. But your visa expires. And you need to renew the visa just to bring the date on the visa to the same date as your status. You literally go to the consulate and show them your other status document, and they stamp your passport with the date from the other status document. It's all quite silly. A bit like the movie Brazil.

There are no millions of people every year, stop spreading lies. Net immigration to the UK in 2025 where 170000 people. Decidedly not millions!

> should probably not be listened to

> a right to express their opinion

...

> 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.

Sure, but we don’t have to heed their opinion.

> research assistants or grad students in universities

These are not fully trained scientists, but rather trainees. As such, they don't get paid the same as a fully trained scientist. Like how a journeyman is paid more than an apprentice electrician.

Of course, they are also underpaid, too. Ask any grad student union.

> 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.

Yes, it's very hard to pay your workers a liveable wage if everyone else is exploiting their workers by underpaying them.

All you're saying is that we've built exploiting labor (foreigners, interns, trainees) into our economy.

While I understand that you think this is romantic and ethical, it also guarantees a status quo where the economy and indeed everyone's quality of life is kept afloat by a permanent imported labor underclass. As we are finding out, we end up with colossal amounts of undertrained, entitled citizens and artificially deflated prices for critical civilizational services.

I agree with the spirit of your comment. But what often gets overlooked is that we do have a pathway to permanent residency and naturalization. It involves demonstrating that you are willing and able to be a citizen, not just do labor. The fact that a large number of actual citizens probably aren’t equipped to perform their civic duties doesn’t excuse it. We can change the laws on what it takes to be a citizen but if it were easy to redefine citizenship I’d imagine we’d have already done it.

The laws of supply and demand apply to labour as well.

Even if machines could do it, it doesn’t mean they could do it at or below the equivalent cost.

I also disagree with the automation point regarding what humans should do. As we see with current AI, many creative tasks can be automated but it doesn’t make them unfulfilling human endeavors.