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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23921 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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The NYT is currently running articles about ICE picking up people overstaying tourist Visas at airports. I read these articles and think yes that is common sense enforcement of our nations laws. And a lot of the people overstaying tourist’s Visas I personally like. Most went thru some vetting to get approved for a tourist’s visas. And they will fill broke our laws.

There is a very good reason to deport people who overstay tourist’s visas. The reason is you want to issue a lot of tourist Visas because you want people to see America and spend money here. And a lot of people want to visit America that get turned down for Visas. Every short term visa should not be permanent residency. The US turns down a large % of tourist Visas they view as high risks. I want to let those people in and I hope they leave after 3 weeks.

Article

Also isn’t it illegal for a lawyer to advise a client on covering up a crime and helping clients break the way? Lawyers seem to be bragging about doing that in the article.

The alternative to not enforcing tourists Visa restrictions is either (1) not issuing tourist Visas or (2) open borders/end of nation state

A new case that’s popped up on my feed.

"Matías was not attempting to enter or leave the United States. He was simply traveling from one U.S. city to another," the statement read.” ….

“ The player has been living in the United States for seven years and, according to his team's statement, has a PENDING ASYLUM CASE, a Florida state ID, and no criminal record”

  • This guy is Argentinian. Murder rate lower than the US. This is another article of “he did nothing wrong just travel” while acting like saying the magic word asylum is just a legal game smart people play instead of knowingly committing fraud against the US.

The most interesting thing with these articles which someone seems to be pushing right now is the articles are not lying to the reader but 100% telling the truth. But thru the tone of the writing make it sound that this is all normal and okay.

Most notable thing about this story is the lack of anything from ICE or DHS, not even a "DHS refused to comment". Press isn't even trying any more.

Another strange thing: He wouldn't need asylum to stay in the US, he's a literally world-class soccer player and EB-1 visas from Argentina aren't oversubscribed. So why wouldn't he go that route?

I tried looking up the “world class soccer player” and I couldn’t verify. My instincts say it’s a semi-pro league. Still very talented compared to Americans in soccer.

American professional soccer actually plays better than South American pro soccer these days- the Argentine team that made it to the finals was made up mostly of players whose day jobs are playing for big five European league teams, but were originally from Argentina. MLS could go toe to toe with top teams from Brazil and Argentina, never mind the cub league.

This guy seems to play in the National Independent Soccer Association and not MLS. I don’t know soccer for where this ranks.

This site uses an ELO-type system to rank soccer leagues. The MLS is ranked 10th. Considering I’ve never heard of the NISA and that it doesn’t appear in a ranking with over 100 leagues (most of which I’ve never heard of either), I’m going to guess the NISA no es muy bueno.

Why does this article feel like a set-up to me for the left? No American is going to know this soccer league so they can just run articles saying Trump is going crazy deporting even Argentinian professional soccer players. And the casual reader would think it’s a real league and Trumps literally deporting Messi.

MLS and Saudi pro are generally the top non European leagues because they have the ability to make athletes very comfortable playing for them.

Footage of encounters between travelers and ICE officers have flooded social media. In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.

So she was here as an au pair and thought she could stay indefinitely?

Au pairs are age-capped at 26, how long ago did this au pair enter? Oh:

Ms. Morales Rojas, the au pair, entered the United States lawfully in January 2023 as a J-1 exchange visitor, a legal status that allowed her to work for two years, according to her lawyer. Her visa expired Jan. 4, 2025, according to D.H.S. Before the exchange program ended, Ms. Morales Rojas filed an application with immigration authorities to remain in the country, said the lawyer, Laura Lichter.

So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.

I have very few degrees of separation from Rojas's situation, and more or less gave up on finding out any relevant details (e.g., "You said she's here on a visa; did the visa expire?") from anyone who might know them pretty quickly. This article answers that question and provides a bit more than I knew, while still leaving me suspicious that anything not stated sinks her case. For example:

  1. Rojas would've been under the au pair age cap (which I didn't know about at all; thanks!) when she started in Jan 2023, and according to medium amounts of googling, au pairs can finish out their position if they turn 27 after being hired. However, the article uses the past perfect tense: "for whom she had worked as an au pair", not "for whom she works as an au pair". The article also refers to he people who hired her as "her former employers" without saying how recently the "former" entered into effect.
  2. I cannot seem to get good information on whether or not someone is allowed to stay in the US during processing of their extension. It probably varies by visa. The closest I can find is that it was USCIS policy to allow it, not whether that policy remains current. Given the current administration's general stance on immigration, I wouldn't bet much on it.
  3. DHS doesn't mention her extension application, and I suspect if they had reviewed it and denied it, they would have said so. Then again, I'm reading what the NYT says DHS said and not what DHS said. Maybe DHS did mention the extension, and the NYT left that part out, opting instead for the rote "in violation of our nation’s laws, she overstayed her visa", without technically lying!
  4. The article quotes a different immigration lawyer revising advice she had given regarding domestic travel, and at no point does the article confirm whether the advice refers to the law as-is or to how it has been enforced. I'm pretty sure this depends on the type of visa and whether it's currently active or the situation in #2 applies. It seems possible that Rojas may have been allowed domestic travel as part of her au pair duties under her J-1, but would no longer be covered either because the J-1 had expired or because she was no longer an au pair.

As a result of not being able to discern any of this, I am quite frustrated, mostly because more than a few people I know are very up in arms about it. I have been asked to donate to her legal fund, and even supposing I were inclined to spend my next $100 frustrating immigration enforcement, it's unclear whether or not this particular donation would be setting that $100 on fire.

Au pairs are age-capped at 26

Didn’t know the US actually had an age cap for au pairs. But indeed, dwight_schrute_its_true.gif

Rare based policy of the US government, being a wingman for husbands out there: “Honey, if we get an au pair to live with us and help you around the house, she’ll have to be a young woman between 18 and 26… I know, how awful right… it’d totally be so much better to have an older woman with more experience… but it’s the law, our hands are tied.”

In practice this woman's goal was probably to find an American husband to switch her au pair visa into a greed card, but she got caught before she could seal the deal.

into a greed card

Typo or intentional pun?

Typo.

The idea is that an au pair is not a professional nanny or maid, she's a young woman (college student perhaps) getting to live with a host family and learn/practice the language while being paid pocket money/allowance for some light domestic work or childminding. It's not supposed to be "cheaper than legally hiring a live-in housekeeper" but often that's how it's used.

Yeah, I’m aware that the primary purpose of the au pair system is to serve as a cultural exchange program so young women can Have Their Fun abroad.

It’s just that, due to the US being generally pretty wary of age discrimination (on the upper side), I subconsciously assumed au pairs being composed of young women was due to supply/demand reasons instead of an explicit age cap. Kind of like how there’s no sex restriction but male au pairs are quite rare.

Kind of like how there’s no sex restriction but male au pairs are quite rare.

Part of that is "do you really want a strange guy in your home around your young kids?" which may or may not be unreasonable, but is definitely a factor. Same reason childcare work is outstandingly female by a large margin, there are men who go into it but very few (and many of them then move on up into management or retrain for social work or the likes).

So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.

US doesn't have the concept of implied status? Canada does; so long as an application is in the works you can stay. Imagine being a student working to extend a study permit in the middle of your semester and being deported.

This doesn't seem like a big problem, if the rest of your system is ruthless about clearing the backlog and removing them once they fail (or letting them in in the first place).

It does, it's generally referred to as "period of authorized stay" but it takes a bit more work to get than simply filing an application. And applicants need to carefully make sure that "period of authorized stay" actually starts before the previous visa expires.

So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.

According to her lawyer it was. Previously I was generally inclined to believe stories of the immigration bureaucracy screwing people, because they're known for it and have been for a long time (even pre-Trump). But having uncovered any number of immigration atrocities which didn't happen (Salvadoran grandpa), were justified (frog-smuggling Russian), or simply could not be substantiated, I'm not willing to give the NYT the benefit of the doubt here. It's certainly possible that the Trump administration is being overzealous and is arresting people who have work authorization and temporary reprieves despite their original visa being expired. But that case has not been made.

It seems like the NYT and its supporters, donors, etc. simply hate any and all immigration law existing or being enforced.

And that’s not a realistic opinion. The average NYT reader would turn very much against immigration if their desired policies were actually done. Not enforcing tourists visas while also issuing more tourists visas would create a huge backlash quickly. It would essentially be the same thing as Abbott sending migrants to NYC. Except orders of magnitude more. This is essentially a luxury belief.

The funny thing about NYC is the actual voters vote against migration to NYC. Rent control and anti-development is essentially a policy that blocks immigration to NYC. The US could also stop immigration by banning home building and restricting most existing housing to heritage Americans.

At least in Japan what happens is that if for some reason you are overstaying your visa (in my case the main overseas moving company was booked up until the day after my visa) you go to the visa office and apply for a two-week extension. It helps if you have clear evidence of intention to leave (like a plane ticket) but also Japan tracks you much more closely (I had an alien ID card and my address was registered). In my case everything got sorted out before the deadline anyway, but it's very routine.

As someone who’s largely ignorant of these matters I learned that overstaying one’s tourist visa and then simply disappearing into the void and finding black market work, presumably with the help of fellow nationals, is apparently the most popular method of Mexican illegal immigration to the US. On the other hand, many such immigrants are also crossing the distant desert regions of the border instead. I’m assuming these people are opting for this due to being so destitute that the former path is unavailable to them. Is this close to the truth?

Lot of illegal Irish do it the same way; come on tourist visa, get job in pubs etc. via the local Irish community, then 'forget' to go home once visa is up.

Yes, if you try to waltz in looking like you're homeless, they'll figure you're probably not planning to pay a hotel in NYC to see the statue of liberty. Another thing to consider is that if you've tried the first method and got deported, you are unlikely to be allowed back ever again on a tourist visa. Or even just a single refusal at the border once makes entry a lot harder.

Searching the article that you link to, the text has eleven instances of "work" and zero instances of "tourist". Also zero instances of "holiday". I've checked all sixteen instances of "visa" and none are "tourist visa" and none of them reveal a synonym for "tourist".

The article says:

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year.

The article's only other use of "visitor" is to describe a person who overstayed a J-1 "exchange visitor" (au pair) visa. This arguably misleadingly implies that most "visitors" are workers. However, in reality, 77 percent of "visitor" visas (those classified as nonimmigration by the federal govt.) are either B-1 business (attending a conference, not working)/B-2 tourism or BCC (equivalent of B-1/B-2 for Mexicans only). So "visitor" is essentially a synonym of "tourist".

As someone who has done a bit of travelling and lived overseas for some time, I can't imagine trying to enter a foreign country on expired papers and getting mad at them for not letting me. When I lived in Russia we had to leave the country every six months and re-up our visas. If our papers weren't current, we couldn't go back, simple as.

All mainstream immigration discourse never brings up other countries, because they have stricter immigration laws than America's, and anyway who wants to immigrate to Russia of all places.

I'm always reminded of some acquaintances from a straight up ethnostate that essentially doesn't naturalize foreigners trying to grill me on Australia very slightly toughening immigration laws. Hysterical

Coincidentally, an American-Russian picocelebrity is being deported from Russia this very moment. Over a technicality as well, he's been living here for at least a decade, if not longer.

If you’re a man with a little bit of coin it’s probably a great place to find a wife right now. That’s probably the only reason I could see to go there now.

As someone whose first sort-of-gf was a Russian broad, I counsel against it. Their cultural norms and expectations are likely to be incompatible. Don't even think about it if you aren't down with committing domestic violence on a regular basis.

Don't even think about it if you aren't down with committing domestic violence on a regular basis.

tfw the demand for woman-beating exceeds its supply.

That's because the supply is artificially restricted.

Feels true to me. I’ve gone out a handful of times with Russian girls or even more broadly Eastern and the personality coldness at first I can’t figure out.

Ah, the hot hot women with the cold cold eyes. I didn't realize that was Russian women in general rather than just the sort who associate with men to get access to their Goldman Sachs expense account.

In Russia, one learns that women are not the romantic sex, and never were. All the frills and the rom-coms are camouflage over an entirely mercenary subconscious. Slavic girls (as a gross generalization) are very honest about shit-testing their men constantly for any weakness, weaponized mood swings, and open requests for material gifts.

A lot of group traits that differ I’ve concluded are mostly genetic and culture is second. But on different dating norms this actually seems like an area of culture and nurture. We have Latins of the same ethnicity as an American (say Italian American and Italian Brazilian or Argentinian) and their relationship games are different.

Definitely. In fact, I'd say variation in romantic norms is one of the strongest cultural signals. The oldest cultures (i.e. the best at reproducing themselves) tend to give the young very little say in the matter. They also seem to have trouble adapting quickly to technological and social change.

The social technology a society uses to reproduce itself is the primary human input on evolution. This is how humans control our genetic destiny. Hinge is more important to the future of humanity than SpaceX.

That’s the bigger thing to me with the NYT article than just the culture war talk on appropriate levels of immigration and pathways. A nation does have to have procedures. And a tourist visa isn’t a residency visa. I’m not even in America right now but will be soon. I’ve come across many in S American who didn’t get a tourists visa. Why don’t they get them? Many do overstay.

We could give away tourist visas like chocolate on Halloween if everyone who got a tourist visa leaves. It hurts the next person applying for a visa when someone overstays.

And a tourist visa isn’t a residency visa.

It kinda is... I was shocked how much stay it allowed. IIRC if you spend less than 50% of your time in USA and don't work you could stay effectively forever jumping between mexico and usa.

Tbh lots of places you can pretty easily infinitely chain tourism visas

I think overstaying a tourist visa by a few days due to unforseen circumstances or something should be treated with leniency. But this isn't that:

Many with expired visas occupy a legal gray area, as they are awaiting visa extensions or green cards and have been issued work permits. Such individuals were not prioritized for deportation in the past

... an engineer awaiting a work-visa extension, several newlyweds married to U.S. citizens, and a former au pair.

Get them all.

CIS is slow to approve applications for visa renewals, and the timetables are sufficiently unpredictable that "it's your problem and you should have applied for a renewal in good time" is Kafkaesque advice.

Legal immigrants who end up temporarily out of status pending a visa renewal are mostly victims of unintentional bureaucratic fuckery. Requiring them to leave the country and wait for an unpredictable length of time for the government to handle paperwork defeats the purpose of whichever law let them into the country in the first place - the historical policy of not deporting people with pending visa renewals exists for a very good reason.

Using bureaucratic fuckery as a deliberate tool to reduce legal immigration is a maximally harmful way of accomplishing something that could be done more effectively by issuing executive orders to CIS to deny more marginal visas, and even more effectively by changing the law to close the legal immigration routes that shouldn't exist. It was a proposal in Project 2025, which even suggested impounding IRS funding to deliberately slow down processing and create this kind of situation.

Get them all.

IS the claim here that every legal immigrant deported is good for America? Would it have been good if Elon Musk and Melania Trump had been deported when they were temporarily out of status?

CIS is slow to approve applications for visa renewals, and the timetables are sufficiently unpredictable that "it's your problem and you should have applied for a renewal in good time" is Kafkaesque advice.

Once upon a time - pre-COVID - Canada basically had a 90 day expected timeline for renewal of status. And even then they still had implied status while your application was processed.

From what I hear about my family's struggles in the US, the system is much more opaque and slow. Insane to be deported because the federal bureaucracy is a mess.

Trump looooves h1b so there's something sus going on there. Millions of temp workers get their docs extendedbon time every year.

The rest of the cases are obvious cases of blatant fraud and overstays. They should be deported and never come back.

Melania Trump is eminently fungible. I'm sure Trump would now be married to an essentially identical woman.

'What if any given immigrant turns out to be superduper good' thinking is what created the current situation.

I think overstaying a tourist visa by a few days due to unforseen circumstances or something should be treated with leniency.

Speedy deportation with minimal hassle seems like the best way to handle this. They're no worse off than they would be if they had just left when they were supposed to.

They're no worse off than they would be if they had just left when they were supposed to.

This is incorrect, being deported gets you hit with a reentry bar automatically, 5 years is the minimum, 10 or 20 are not uncommon. Also, getting the next visa will be significantly more complex, almost certainly requiring visiting a consulate and applying for waivers, ect., which might get denied arbitrarily. You'll probably never get a ESTA ever again.

If you are a normal tourist or business traveller from a visa waiver country, getting deported from the US is a catastrophe, and you might as well make peace with never seeing the country again.

If it's a few days I say fine them per day. And if they can't pay throw them out forever.

Agree. And honestly many are probably not bad people who abuse the system so play the “empathy” card. The Twitter algo has been shoving down my throat a 30 year old white Argentinian girl with a bf. Yes as a MAGA person I don’t have a big problem with her staying.

But it’s the NYT labeling enforcing Tourist Visas as not permanent Visas that rubs me the wrong way. It’s mostly their tone we it’s assumed the reader knows this is “obviously a bad thing”.

We have procedures for doing things for a reason. And she only applied for a 6 month tourist Visa not residency. And we did a shorter review of her background for a Visa because it was a contract that she would come visit and leave. It wasn’t an offer of citizenship which if we are offering citizenship we should do a very long review process of her application.

Society does need to have processes that it follows for everything it does. This is just normal process following governance. And NYT tone is basically “Mr. Reader you should clearly understand that enforcing tourist visas to a short visit is clearly proof that Trump is literally Hitler”.

I think marriage / spousal visas are such a scam in most cases. Just because an 85 IQ citizen decides they want to invite another random person from anywhere in the world into my country, their descendants get to be citizens forever and they can leech off the state for the rest of their lives consequence free (any thresholds for sponsorship are laughably low)? Seems dumb.

I would favor a blanket $200,000 cash charge for sponsoring a fiancée or spouse. Either you have the money or can borrow it, or they’re not coming.

In order to sponsor a spousal visa you have to convince the government you won't use welfare and can support yourself above the poverty line. Those rules seem reasonable to me.

Also spousal visas are the last visa we should plug. Even incredibly restrictive country that allow essentially zero immigration still allow spouse visas. It also creates a huge wedge issue there's gonna be some attractive Mormon missionary who wants to bring his attractive Argentine wife and people are going to say "why aren't we allowing this?" It's just the last thing you'd ever want to focus on in terms of a reward/gains for reducing immigration. And a huge own goal in the sense that you are restricting the freedom of citizens in a way almost no countries do. Seriously the only country with rules this harsh is going to be North Korea, most immigration restrictions are not restricting the rights of your own citizens this is.

We should get rid of spousal visas. Perhaps this is the last thing we should fix but we should fix everything.

“ rights of your own citizens this is.”

  • The problem with your analysis is a lot of us don’t believe the legal definition of American Citizen is the real definition of American Citizen. I don’t view Ilhan Omar as a citizen. And I would gladly restrict my own ability to get a spousal visa (actually have a white foreign gf) if it meant Ilhan Omar can’t get spousal visas.

The proposal of a 200K spousal Visa fee sounds expensive but it’s the price of civilization.

Dysgenics works far more by suppressing high IQ female fertility. Perhaps we should send the girlbosses home so they have to get married, instead.

Dysgenics works far more by suppressing high IQ female fertility. Perhaps we should send the girlbosses home so they have to get married, instead.

College-educated women have the same (high) marriage rates they had in the 1980s. The decline in marriage has happened mostly to less-educated women. Certainly not the 'girlbosses'. And within rich countries (like the US) countries with higher female workforce participation have higher fertility, not lower fertility.

The model of 'marriage and babies vs degrees and work' doesn't hold any more.

Just because an 85 IQ citizen decides they want to invite another random person from anywhere in the world into my country, their descendants get to be citizens forever and they can leech off the state for the rest of their lives consequence free (any thresholds for sponsorship are laughably low)? Seems dumb.

A rounding error compared to the 55 million Americans with IQs 85 or below who pump out babies year after year. Any policy that wants to restrict immigration due to IQ concerns without first sterilizing those individuals is pointless. Hell, in most states literal retards are allowed to have as many children as they want.

In parallel, a lack of policies that force high IQ women such as yourself to have at least four children with a high IQ partner is far more detrimental than immigration. IQmaxxers focused on immigration rather than pre-existing low human capital are either misguided or deficient emotional decouplers.

A rounding error compared to the 55 million Americans with IQs 85

I don't know why I've never thought of this in absolute numbers before but 55 million people at 85 IQ (or lower!) is frightening.

Thanks!

The thing that I hated most about the Silicon Valley scene, and one of the things that ultimately drove me to leave, was the pervading assumption that a high score on the verbal portion of the SAT or an online IQ test somehow proves that one is a good and moral person.

I have learned through experience that I would rather share my neighborhood with a dozen people with room-temperature IQs who are genuinely happy to be here than I would with one genius misanthrope.

I am a reasonably decent person/worker. I would like to think that I am an asset to my company and my country. Had they required that price to sponsor my wife, I would certainly not have been able to afford it. I would have just figured out a way to get hired/get a visa in a different country, such as hers.

How many instances do you think are actually IQ 85 citizens inviting "another random person", as opposed to the probably far from random person that they chose to make pivotal to their self-actualisation and life plans? A $200k cash charge would filter out not just 85 IQ citizens with mail-order brides, but the vast majority of native/foreign couples. Do you think your candidate wants to explain to his electorate why they should be denied a freedom that almost everyone in the developed world enjoys?

Plenty of countries don't allow massive runaway chain migration. A wife is probably fine, but when it's 20 years later and a swarm of everybody who she's even tangentially related to are trying to get into the West then it's clearly massively destructive of limited resources.

I've never understood why anyone other than the spouse themselves, and maybe their children if still under 18, would be allowed in via chain migration.

Originally in the US, chain migration was seen as a backdoor way to privilege the relatives of already existing Americans and minimize ethnic change. More right wing Americans backed it while more left wing ones preferred a more skills based system. The hope was that you would have a few, high quality, people come in from the third world but most immigrants would be relatives of then Americans. That was the theory behind Hart Cellar.

That didn’t happen. It turns out once a country gets rich enough, and it doesn’t have to be equally rich, it just stops sending many immigrants. Few immigrants have come from Europe, but tons of people come from the third world.

Immigration from Europe -- including Western Europe -- never stopped. It's limited by visa availability, not desire to immigrate. However, it's generally not worth it for a European to become an illegal alien in the US.

Immigration from Europe -- including Western Europe -- never stopped. It's limited by visa availability, not desire to immigrate.

This surprises me; do you have a source?

More comments

They shouldn't be. I'm considerably more pro-immigration than the median Mottizen, and I think that family reunification immigration for extended family members (including for extended family members who are also spouses!) is bad policy.

The legislative history of the Hart-Cellar act suggests that the idiots who wrote the legislation thought that allocating most of a capped quota of green cards to family reunification was a backdoor way of preserving the pre-existing ethnic mix in America without national-origin quotas.

I feel like a lot of migration policy was set and ideated during the days were there was a Destiny to Manifest, social spending was negligible and Western countries had industrial jobs that needed bulk labor. Being a lot looser made more sense on those terms. Also the transition of University from something that only elite people did, to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.

These days it's pretty clear any common-sense program that's established will be eroded by the courts and politicians till even the tightest Genius-only Immigration policy inevitably gets used to import Deliveroo Enthusiasts 50 years later.

to being widely available, means that a lot of educational Visas are just not really doing what they originally were intended to do.

They're being used to prop up schools via higher fees (at least going by Canada's example). They seem to be working quite well in that regard.

Yeah they've transitioned into a University wealth in exchange for Visas program, but the initial idea behind gating immigration behind degrees was fomented when a degree was a top 10% thing to have.

Yeah, considering my wife is foreign and I had to sponsor her to come to Canada, I am obviously in favor of that remaining an option, but I don't see why not pick the obvious low hanging fruit that would dramatically slow down or stop chain migration: increase the delay between sponsorships, increase the delay between citizenship and first sponsorship. Sponsoring a family member or spouse for immigration is not a right, it's a privilege, even for natives-born citizens, let alone naturalized ones, and it's perfectly proper for a country that feels that this privilege is being abused to change the parameters of it.

The sponsorship process took, for us, about a year and a half. Here it takes 3-5 years from residence to citizenship, that means that within 5 years of securing their way here, someone could be sponsoring another migrant (and their dependants). If there were a 10 year delay period from citizenship to being able to sponsor a family member, the whole process would be 15 years; I think that would discourage a lot of it. It would probably redirect a lot of chain migration towards countries that allow it faster. Even if they still plan to do it, you've reduced by a factor of three the speed at which it happens. Of course, if I could trust the bureaucrats doing the filtering, exceptions on humanitarian grounds could be allowed, but as of now I don't trust them, so I would rather not allow it.

He’s almost certainly right that chain migration vastly trumps that now. It’s some Colombian family slow immigrating their entire family to the US versus an American bringing a girl home now. Sometimes they even just do it for money and the marriage is fake. There is an active market for that in Miami.

Trump importing a foreign eastern mail order bride is a very small part of the market.

We’ve already imported the 15% of non-Americans who can now bring in their local ties. It’s not foreign brides being brought in any more. It’s Ilhan Omar bringing in her brother.

In which case money isn’t even the right metric but it would filter out a lot.

The parent post was only talking about spousal visas, not whatever process there is for other relatives. I don't see why bringing in parents/siblings shouldn't be restricted.

(Quick Google search, on that matter, suggests that annual number of spousal visas issued is about 15% the number of annual naturalisations in the US, so it can't be that big a factor.)

(Quick Google search, on that matter, suggests that annual number of spousal visas issued is about 15% the number of annual naturalisations in the US, so it can't be that big a factor.)

I'd also imagine it'd fall even further when you filtered for people of Multi-generational US ancestry bringing in partners, versus recent immigrants bring in diaspora spouses.

You only feel this way because you don’t like a lot of the current immigration to this country and chain migration. If it was a Heritage American bringing back even the occasional slightly brown girl you wouldn’t feel this way. Which I agree with.

In practice your probably fine with the Family Guy immigration (system)[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/family-guy-skin-color-chart]

There is some talk that with increasing migration that country of origin easy visas won’t exists anymore and everyone will have to be screened.

We probably should get rid of spousal citizenship at this point. And its because it brings in people I don’t want and not some Southern Boy in the military bringing back a German wife.

I'm on a Spousal PR at the moment in a country that essentially offers me zero path to citizenship. I wouldn't mind a Passport if it fell into my lap (though I'd have to trade my stack of other passports for it, which is probably a bad deal) but I'm also prettymuch fine with the deal as it is.

We probably should get rid of spousal citizenship at this point. And its because it brings in people I don’t want and not some Southern Boy in the military bringing back a German wife.

There're lots of far-looser things to get rid of first. But even if you insist on looking at spousal citizenship specifically, how about compromising and limiting it to people who've lived here since their childhood? Or maybe even to natural-born citizens?

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