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Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us
The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.
I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.
Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?
I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!
On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?
A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.
My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.
Speaking as a somewhat lefty, artist-adjacent type, who could not be described as an activist but has lots of Trump-critical words published under my real name, I am much more reluctant to come to the states under a Trump administration and probably won't visit my extended family members there during this administration (I normally come every year, and normally turn up for remote work duties at least a bit while visiting). Whether most Motte readers would see that as constituting evidence of damage to international relations, or a welcome impact of the new anti-foreigner vibes, I don't know.
To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.
The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?
Couldn't you just go in June 2023 or September 2021?
Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.
What about June 2023 to November 2024?
Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.
That might be true for you, although I'm unsure about the vagueness of "a lot of people." Obviously we're talking about larger trends for the general public - if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.
Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.
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I was also banned from going to the US but no one would wrote up my sob story, but I also didn't break the law by entering the US so no real story to write up.
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