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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
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:
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.
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?
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.
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