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.
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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