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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23916 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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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?

Best I can do is https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2024/table10

There's a lot more from the third world, but there's still a significant number from Europe.

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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