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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   34831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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The British reaction to the Becky Burke story is driven by some misconceptions about US immigration law and policy which are widely shared among PMC Brits (and, I expect, PMC citizens of other 1st-world countries which are traditional US allies) because they reflect the way the US has actually handled travellers from rich, friendly countries over several decades.

In particular,

  1. PMC Brits think that they have a right to travel to any friendly country as long as they have the correct paperwork. (PMC Americans are the same, except that we are somewhat more likely than you to grok that we do in fact need to meet local paperwork requirements and obey local laws while travelling).
  2. "Working" in America is completely normal for young PMC Brits. Either engaging in legal work-like activities in WB (business visitor) status, or working legally on a F (student) or J (cultural exchange) visa. BUNAC is a long-standing scheme allowing (among other things - it is broadly reciprocal among several Anglosphere countries) British students to spend a summer working in the US on a J visa while only nominally complying with the rules for J visas. When my parents were students, they basically used BUNAC to travel across the US for a summer in a beater car picking up odd work like hoboes - and this was legal. (And in those days it was dead easy to get pick-up work if you were an experienced waitress with a posh British accent). The rules have been tightened up since then, but there is still an expectation that if you want to spend a summer working in the US, making it happen is just a matter of paperwork.
  3. There is no clarity about what work-like activity is legal in WB status and what requires a working visa. I worked, for pay, at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer in WB status - it was legal because academic visitors can receive per diem even in WB status, and the allowed per diem worked out to more than a British grad student stipend. A friend was refused admission for trying to do the same thing interning at a think tank - what he was doing didn't qualify as "academic", and therefore he couldn't receive per diem.
  4. Accordingly, we see working illegally as a paperwork screwup similar to trying to travel on an expired passport, not as a crime of moral turpitude. We expect that if we get caught it will be laughed off as we get the next plane home. And a lot of people have stories that confirm this - I know two people who were refused admission (the aforementioned intern, and someone who failed to declare a minor drug conviction), and in both cases they were on the next plane home after a few hours in the secondary inspection area, and never saw anything that looked like a prison cell. As far as I am aware, both had the event paperworked as a voluntary departure so they didn't become inadmissable for future trips as deportees.

So from this perspective, it looks like

  • Becky didn't know precisely what was legal in terms of chores-for-lodging, and didn't feel the need to check
  • She thought the worst that could happen when she got caught was being put on the next plane home
  • Throwing her in the general population of an ICE detention centre for 11 days is an insult to both her personal dignity and our sense of our rights as a US ally because it is treating a Brit like a random third world peasant.

And of course the story has legs because it fits into the (accurate) narrative that the Trump administration is no longer treating the UK as an important ally.

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