Right, the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy. Such bad-fucking-faith on display everywhere.
The point is maybe signal to people that we will soon be pausing all visa renewals so people who trivially have good jobs and good records know they ought to literally just plan on moving out of their apartment rather than have to deal with paying thousands of dollars to have someone else move their shit overseas, just to maybe get their visa renewed right when their shit arrives and they have to do the same thing all over again.
This would literally just helping law-abiding folks follow the law. But no, the cruelty is the point.
> 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.
> The terms were clear, visas are a privilege and not a right or automatic entitlement.
They are. Yet can you tell me why you would need to pause all processing in order to retrain your people? Surely they do training all the time without pausing processing.
Your passport is a right too, you wouldn't mind if they paused that request with no indication of when they might resume? And that's including when you're abroad and lost yours. If that happens to you, you'll happily hold the same position?
United States Code plainly disagrees with you, as do the laws of basically every developed nation in the world. Visas are not a right, by definition.
> Your passport is a right too,
I am a citizen, so this isn't a good faith comparison. Citizens naturally have higher priority than visitors, otherwise what's the purpose of citizenship as a concept at all?
> I am a citizen, so this isn't a good faith comparison.
Oh, you still are. You'll get your passport, we just can't tell you when. That's what's happening here. These people aren't being denied, they're told to wait for an indefinite amount of time.
But basically you're saying that you think this is outrageous if it were you, got it.
I've explicitly stated that visas are not a right - which is the legally-consistent opinion and basic English interpretation of the concept. (If visas were a right, why would denial be a possibility? If denial isn't a possibility, what function do they serve?)
> That's what's happening here. These people aren't being denied, they're told to wait for an indefinite amount of time.
What part of "these people" somehow makes them equivalent in entitlement to a nation's citizens - how is this even a question? Not agreeing that borders, citizenship are concepts generally doesn't make them magically cease to exist.
This isn't hard: Just give a notice period if you're going to stop processing visas, so people can sell and ship their shit and break their leases before they go.
Just because temporary isn't indefinite doesn't mean we have to be absolute ghouls about how they leave the country
First, that's not what this is talking about. "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, and you will not be renewed" on a whim is insane, self-destructive cruelty.
But also, it's only been "the policy" since 2004. That's technically "decades", but only just, and it was also introduced for idiotic pretextual reasons. The ostensible reason is that domestic State Department offices don't have the equipment to capture biometric data. Seriously. That's the argument. The law doesn't say "you have to leave to renew", it says "you have to get fingerprinted to renew", and conveniently there's nowhere in the United States that can do that, despite every police station in the country having that equipment at this point.
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.
> They come with renewal expectations, assuming the situation hasn't changed
What? Where is this expectation enumerated? An expiration date is in fact defined. I'm not sure where some legal expectation of guaranteed renewal could arise from.
> unilaterally doesn't make you not an asshole if you actually exercise that right.
"Asshole" is a matter of opinion, and rights aren't actually rights if you aren't ever able to exercise them.
> if you defended that manager I would similarly consider you unfit to participate in civil society.
Why have laws, borders at all by these standards? What's the point?
> isn't even trying to have a conversation in good faith.
What about the sweeping halt of all legal immigrant visa processing?
Right, the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy. Such bad-fucking-faith on display everywhere.
The point is maybe signal to people that we will soon be pausing all visa renewals so people who trivially have good jobs and good records know they ought to literally just plan on moving out of their apartment rather than have to deal with paying thousands of dollars to have someone else move their shit overseas, just to maybe get their visa renewed right when their shit arrives and they have to do the same thing all over again.
This would literally just helping law-abiding folks follow the law. But no, the cruelty is the point.
> 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.
[flagged]
Do you have anything constructive to say about the merits of the leave to renew policy itself? Or the zero notice halt of visa processing?
Or just vague gesturing about how immigrants aren’t entitled to anything? (but you presumably are!)
You know the answer to this. It’s only going to be anti immigrant dog whistles
They've found their thought-terminating cliche for a particular topic and apply it liberally.
> The terms were clear, visas are a privilege and not a right or automatic entitlement.
They are. Yet can you tell me why you would need to pause all processing in order to retrain your people? Surely they do training all the time without pausing processing.
Your passport is a right too, you wouldn't mind if they paused that request with no indication of when they might resume? And that's including when you're abroad and lost yours. If that happens to you, you'll happily hold the same position?
> They are.
United States Code plainly disagrees with you, as do the laws of basically every developed nation in the world. Visas are not a right, by definition.
> Your passport is a right too,
I am a citizen, so this isn't a good faith comparison. Citizens naturally have higher priority than visitors, otherwise what's the purpose of citizenship as a concept at all?
I meant that I agreed that visas are a right.
> I am a citizen, so this isn't a good faith comparison.
Oh, you still are. You'll get your passport, we just can't tell you when. That's what's happening here. These people aren't being denied, they're told to wait for an indefinite amount of time.
But basically you're saying that you think this is outrageous if it were you, got it.
> I meant that I agreed that visas are a right.
I've explicitly stated that visas are not a right - which is the legally-consistent opinion and basic English interpretation of the concept. (If visas were a right, why would denial be a possibility? If denial isn't a possibility, what function do they serve?)
> That's what's happening here. These people aren't being denied, they're told to wait for an indefinite amount of time.
What part of "these people" somehow makes them equivalent in entitlement to a nation's citizens - how is this even a question? Not agreeing that borders, citizenship are concepts generally doesn't make them magically cease to exist.
This isn't hard: Just give a notice period if you're going to stop processing visas, so people can sell and ship their shit and break their leases before they go.
Just because temporary isn't indefinite doesn't mean we have to be absolute ghouls about how they leave the country
First, that's not what this is talking about. "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, and you will not be renewed" on a whim is insane, self-destructive cruelty.
But also, it's only been "the policy" since 2004. That's technically "decades", but only just, and it was also introduced for idiotic pretextual reasons. The ostensible reason is that domestic State Department offices don't have the equipment to capture biometric data. Seriously. That's the argument. The law doesn't say "you have to leave to renew", it says "you have to get fingerprinted to renew", and conveniently there's nowhere in the United States that can do that, despite every police station in the country having that equipment at this point.
> "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, permanently" is insane, self-destructive cruelty.
Which visas legally come with renewal guarantees? Isn't that called permanent residency?
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.
> They come with renewal expectations, assuming the situation hasn't changed
What? Where is this expectation enumerated? An expiration date is in fact defined. I'm not sure where some legal expectation of guaranteed renewal could arise from.
> unilaterally doesn't make you not an asshole if you actually exercise that right.
"Asshole" is a matter of opinion, and rights aren't actually rights if you aren't ever able to exercise them.
> if you defended that manager I would similarly consider you unfit to participate in civil society.
Why have laws, borders at all by these standards? What's the point?
> Where is this expectation enumerated?
Literally in the phrase "immigrant visa". An immigrant visa is definitionally a visa intended for someone to immigrate with.