What I don’t get is if there is an enormous border that is being crossed illegally by crowds of people all the time, then what is the purpose of wasting money and resources on hassling graduate students or visiting professors whose visas will expire in the near future? The visas haven’t expired yet, the people broke no laws. Why seek them out and intimidate them? Especially if they come from a country that entitles them to stay here indefinitely as tourists without any visa?
Both N and I experienced this kind of thing- for no reason since neither he nor I never spent a minute in this country illegally and never got as much as a parking ticket – and now somebody I know is undergoing the same thing.
Clarissa's Blog 
One of my mom’s coworkers ran into this trouble just before she renewed her green card. She’s thinking about applying for US-Canadian dual citizenship to avoid the hassle–even though it’s more expensive than just applying for another green card.
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Exactly. And why do it at all? Why waste resources on hassling such people?
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It’s not just the waste of personnel and staff resources, it’s the waste of economic good will and general good will on top of that.
I could speak from personal experience about this sort of thing, but it’s not an American story, it’s a Canadian story. Suffice it to say that I withdrew my economic good will down to the last 5 cents I could convert back into Sterling, and suffice it further to say that I have no desire to go back.
How much is the United States losing when people of sufficient means decide to say, “Screw you guys, I’m going home”?
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“How much is the United States losing when people of sufficient means decide to say, “Screw you guys, I’m going home”?”
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“Why waste resources on hassling such people?”
Word of mouth. If they hassle 300 low social capital illegal immigrants, who hears about it? Hassle some well-educated legal immigrants and word of mouth will spread among those people’s acquaintances and people will think they must be doing something.
“If they treat Muragan with two Phd’s so harshly can you imagine how they treat central American gang members?”
Also, people like you and N are not very likely to shoot at them. Salvadoran gang members? pretyy likely.
Also, you’re easier to find. They don’t have to sweep low income high crime neighborhoods.
It’s all a shmuck theater meant to fool people in the cheap seats.
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Exactly, that’s what I mean. It’s a pathetic show that only wastes taxpayer resources. It’s better that they did nothing than put on these performances.
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“What I don’t get is if there is an enormous border that is being crossed illegally by crowds of people all the time”
Well the answer is simple: there aren’t crowds of people crossing over illegally and the “illegal immigrant threat” is greatly overblown and largely a figment of fevered racist imaginations.
Still, it is ludicrous and tragic to hassle smart, law abiding immigrants. But I don’t think the two scenarios are truly connected.
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“Well the answer is simple: there aren’t crowds of people crossing over illegally and the “illegal immigrant threat” is greatly overblown and largely a figment of fevered racist imaginations.”
????? We can differ on what to do about the immigrants but their existence is undeniable. Neither can we deny that many of them belong to criminal organizations. There is a great article in the NYTimes today: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/opinion/want-to-make-ethical-purchases-stop-buying-illegal-drugs.html?_r=0
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They exist. But there are hardly crowds of illegal immigrants rushing the border.
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Enormous numbers of people cross the border in both directions every day. Why else would the cartels wage wars for access to the border?
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What I don’t get is if there is an enormous border that is being crossed illegally by crowds of people all the time, then what is the purpose of wasting money and resources on hassling graduate students or visiting professors whose visas will expire in the near future? The visas haven’t expired yet, the people broke no laws. Why seek them out and intimidate them? Especially if they come from a country that entitles them to stay here indefinitely as tourists without any visa?
Most immigration violations are from people overstaying their visas. Tourist visas, AFAIK, exclude people from working. Skilled workers are cool towards people on skilled worker and student visas. Businesses like it because the hassle helps keep the immigrants tractable. The university may make sympathetc noises but they won’t do too much. I know someone who has been on h1b visa for a decade for the same employer.
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“Most immigration violations are from people overstaying their visas. ”
This is a historical phenomenon. These groups of people have been moving there and back, there and back literally for centuries. And they are still doing it because it’s an ancestral way of life.
Almost 80% of the people who cross the southern border of the US do not want to stay in the US. And they don’t. They are moving there and back and there again. Nobody can really count them because it’s a constant movement.
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Slight off-topic, but did you notice in the news that Obama has nominated the first U.S. ambassador to Cuba in almost 60 years?
This is typical (incompetent, amateurish) Obama-style foreign policy — trying to “encourage” our adversaries to act more civilized and friendly towards us, without getting any kind of quid-pro-quo in return. 😦
Hillary, assuming she’s elected, will definitely be a better President than Obama!
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As I already explained only 30 times, nobody gives a damn about how civilized Cubans get. The point of the current rapprochement with Cuba is to hurt Putin. And it works.
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I don’t think cuddling up to the Castro brothers is going to hurt Putin all that much — we’ll see, but I doubt it.
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Putin gave Cubans an enormous handout. It was widely advertised in Russia as a huge victory for Russian interests abroad. Three minutes later, Cubans turned around and fell into the arms of the US. It’s an enormous embarrassment for Putin. As a result, he’s been out of Latin America since then. And the regimes in Latin America he used to sponsor started to collapse. Ex. Argentina.
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“..trying to “encourage” our adversaries to act more civilized and friendly towards us, without getting any kind of quid-pro-quo in return.”
He definitely made this mistake with Republicans.
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How about the simple explanation — good old fashioned bigotry. The guys doing the hassling are low income, low education, so an educated immigrant with an obvious accent is an easy target on several counts.
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Excuse me, but which “low income, low education guys” are hassling legal educated immigrants with an obvious accent in academia??? I thought they were worried about illegal alien dope pushers raping their daughters and cheating their family out of welfare benefits.
Yes, the bigotry of uneducated white people explains it all. That simple answer always does, for certain morally superior “progressives” who just can’t understand how their smug contempt has enabled a man like Donald Trump to come chillingly close to the White House.
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Didn’t you see my story on how a border control guard ripped apart my visa when he saw I was entering the country to work at Cornell? He got upset when he saw that I was going to be paid $50,000 per year. It sounds funny now but I ended up having to get a new visa and explain what happened to this one. And people were very sarcastic about the whole thing.
I have many stories about the way border control guys reacted to me whenever I entered the US as a student at Yale.
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“..how their smug contempt has enabled a man like Donald Trump to come chillingly close to the White House.”
Hell no, you’re not pinning this on us.
‘Libruls hurt my feelings so I joined the Klan.’
Lol no. There’s no difference between Trump and the rest of the Republican party. Your party has nurtured bigotry of all kinds for the past three decades and this is the result. Don’t whine about mean liberals, take some responsibility for your party’s actions.
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Maybe they need a safe space and a trigger warning to prevent their feelings from being hurt too badly. Because today it’s Trump and tomorrow they are victimized all the way into brownshirt marches.
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“Maybe they need a safe space and a trigger warning to prevent their feelings from being hurt too badly. ”
😀
They really do. Trigger warning: “Racism being discussed by people who read”
Seriously, Dreidel’s post above shows such a deep denial of reality. The idea that Trump is some sort of an outlier is just, wow.
Look at Limbaugh. A supposed kingmaker, powerful media personality, reaching millions of people in his prime.
“You just gotta be who you are, and I think it’s time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ’em gangs.”
“Holocaust?” Ninety million Indians? Only four million left? They all have casinos — what’s to complain about?”
“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We’re not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that’s right. Pimp’s not the right word. Okay, so she’s not a slut. She’s “round heeled”.”
That is literally his entire body of work. I must’ve missed all the press statements by GOP politicians condemning him. In fact quite the opposite, they all kiss his ring. Hmm, I wonder why. Why is he a welcome voice in the republican-leaning media, Dreidel? Why does he get to come on Fox news to provide his ‘analysis’?
The reason why people are flocking to Trump is not just because he’s racist. I mean, as a GOP candidate that’s a given. It’s because for the first time in decades they see a racist and they have faith he’d do something about it. He’s not a Paul Ryan or Newt Gingrich who just dogwhistle about Obama being the foodstamp president and stop there. That’s too dignified for their tastes.
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