[shtopointo]

What am I missing here?

Isn't it a good idea to vet people before you let them enter your country? Why would you let in someone that is hostile to your country? Especially these days with so many individuals being driven by nefarious ideologies?

[salamanderss]

My objection is the criteria is likely arbitrary and capricious and have more to do with ideologies of the sorts of people designing and executing this than public safety.

Maybe the AI is better, maybe it is worse. On some occasions CBP just takes a good look at you for whiteness or whatever and just waives you through without even opening the passport; other days you end up with your car in 1500 pieces. It's mostly voodoo.

[anonporridge]

I see it more as an effort to discriminate more based on ideology and less on phenotype, and that's a great thing assuming it can be implemented well (dubious).

We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable. But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain, because not only is that changeable, but certain software is incompatible with the social order that gives us the privilege to rise above our baser nature.

[dragonwriter]

> We want to live in a world with no discrimination of people's rights based on their hardware, because that's generally not changeable.

Why is not changeable relevant?

> But we will absolutely still continue to discriminate on the software running in your brain.

The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.

[anonporridge]

> Why is not changeable relevant?

Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. No individual gets to choose the genes they inherit, but they do have some level of agency over how they choose to operate in the world.

> The First Amendment is rather exactly about not doing that.

True, but the system in place that enforces the first amendment and the entire Constitution ultimately depends on the vast majority of people to agree and comply with that base ideology. The system of governance isn't omnipotent or omnipresent enough to defend against a large enough minority of the population becoming hostile to these ideals.

This is the big reason why Trump's violation of the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is so horrific, because it threatened the foundation of consensus that lets our system operate as a democracy that non destructively lets the best ideas and leaders rise to the top.

[dragonwriter]

> Because I at least hold the ideal that we should judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

Sure, we shouldn't judge people by their skin color. That isn’t what I asked.

Lots of important elements of character are pretty immutable, too.

[salamanderss]

There are various cultural traits that are effectively as solidified as phenotype by the time you're old enough to be considered acting independently of your parent/guardian. Lots of these traits are also used as backdoor phenotype profiling.

[anonporridge]

I don't agree with this at all.

There is massive variety of culture and ideology between people that share the same phenotypes. And some of that culture and ideology is incompatible with the preservation of our democratic norm of peaceful competition of ideas and peaceful transfer of power.

This is also why racial profiling is not only morally wrong, but practically problematic. It's lazy and sloppy guardianship that's targeting a perceived proxy for the threat rather than the actual threat.

The threat is not the genes, it's the memes. And if our societal defense system is targeting genes, then the memes will eventually figure out how to find different hosts that can bypass those defenses.

[salamanderss]

Genes can definitely be a threat factor. For instance it is nearly certain males are genetically more prone to violence than females.

> There is massive variety of culture and ideology between people that share the same phenotypes

The missing note here is that some phenotype cluster near areas with proximate similar culture. If I ban anyone speaking Mandarin or with Chinese accent I'm not really banning a phenotype but everyone knows what this actually does. I think you very much understand how solidified cultural traits are used as backdoor to profile phenotype.

[local_crmdgeon]

These people drive me fucking insane. The number of wealthy immigrants who full-time complain while being from like, Singapore or Ireland is bizarre to me.

Why live somewhere you have no connections to and dislike when you prefer your arguably-nicer home country?

Can someone enlighten me? I’ve worked with dozens of those people

It’s especially wild when you talk to Indians who INSIST America is the greatest nation in history and that we have no idea how lucky we are.

[d3w4s9]

Go to India/China/UK/France etc and live & work for half a year and you'll see why.

Look at opportunities/salary/living condition/infrastructure and it's clear. Of course USA is not perfect and has lots of problems, and many people go back to their country after getting a degree from a US institution, for very good reasons. But still a lot of people stay for the benefits.

[salamanderss]

Money. For the same reason I prefer rich immigrants who hate me and buy my shit over nice ones that end up on stamps after they get their papers.

[justrealist]

Yeah like, there is a broad class of immigrant that endlessly complains about how awful the US is an awful force in the world, and then immigrates here for a high-paying job (and continues complaining).

I don't want them! Why should we be required to ignore their personal feelings?

There's a long list of people who want into the US. We should prioritize the people who actually like the US, this doesn't feel controversial.

[haswell]

Delegating these kinds of decisions to a faceless AI is the thing that is controversial.

The ability to systematically analyze a person's life and communications and then derive a "desirability" score is the thing that's controversial.

Similar to the subject of client-side scanning for abusive material, the issue is not that anyone supports the abuse. The issues all stem from the implications of the underlying technology and embracing "the ends justify the means".

[shtopointo]

Would you be in favor of vetting some or all publicly available information before letting someone into a country?

If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts. If the answer is yes, then you have to delegate to something / someone. Maybe an AI might be better than a human at spotting warning signs.

[haswell]

I’m not saying that there should be no vetting whatsoever.

But there’s a vast possibility space between no vetting and the systematic analysis of all public information about a person. Especially when social media - a place where people are rarely their authentic selves - is a primary source. There is far more stupid stuff being said on social media than dangerous stuff. But the two can be nearly indistinguishable without appropriate context. People will be denied entry for being spicy far more than for legitimate reasons I’d imagine.

Not to mention that there is a significant amount of public information that should not be public in the first place. Its availability is not a justification for its use in this way. By > If the answer is no, then you might be missing a lot of people that have nefarious intent, where you could have prevented that by looking at their social media posts.

I can’t get on board with this framing. It feels similar to the arguments for more cameras in public places. Put a camera on every corner. They’re public after all. But once you start feeding those cameras into a central AI that can track your every move, they’re no longer just cameras, and the very idea of what it means to be in public no longer means the same thing that it did for most of human civilization.

Again, I’m not saying they should look at anything. But I think it’s also necessary to raise red flags when emerging tech will be used in increasingly invasive ways by governments.

[gorbachev]

There are good things about the US and bad things about the US.

Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?

[unethical_ban]

I'm torn on the whole subject.

On one hand, techno-surveillance is scary and it rarely marches backward, so letting this happen for citizenship applications will have a chilling effect on foreign intellectuals, and train people who may consider entering this country some day not to speak their mind.

I understand the theory that we don't want people coming here who rant all day saying "US is a terrorist state and something should be done about it" on social media. But I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

[RHSeeger]

> Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?

This seems fairly disingenuous. Nobody said foreigners shouldn't be allowed to criticize anything. Rather, the "for" argument is that their criticism should be analyzed to see if it would be detrimental to let them into the country.

"My house" isn't exactly a good analogy for "the country", but to be overly simplistic

1. Your house is an ugly color

2. Your house is a blight on the land; you should be tossed to the street and it burned to the ground

Those are both criticisms of the the house. They are entirely different things to consider when deciding whether that person should be allowed in the house.

[shtopointo]

They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism?

Maybe closer to the intended end goal here – is a country allowed to deny a visa to a person entering that country, if the level of criticism is on the extreme end?

[TMWNN]

>They are allowed. Is a country allowed to deny a visa based on criticism?

A country is allowed to deny a visa for any reason.

To put another way, there is no fundamental human right for a non-American to enter the United States.

[salamanderss]

But there is hilariously due process that probably protects those opinions once you've already snuck in.

It's a wonder why people put themselves through the hassle of legal immigration where they have basically no rights, when they could just sneak in and be covered by most civil rights and entitled due process in the unlikely event they do something dumb or unlucky enough to get caught.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Are foreigners not allowed to criticize anything?

I think this is where we get into the nuance of standards. Calling us out on our foreign policy? Fair game. Calling us fundamentally immoral or heretical? No thanks.

[oh_sigh]

Of course they are. But at a certain point, if you complain enough about how evil your neighbor Mary is, it becomes weird to go over to her house and have her serve you dinner.

[saagarjha]

This country can be full of itself sometimes. Having people who are willing to push for change in areas they care about sounds very desirable :)

[justrealist]

I do not want someone to come to the US just to push for dramatic changes. Sorry, but you can do that where you already are.

Obviously someone who is 80% positive and 20% "here are some improvements" is one thing, but if they spend all their time whining about US imperialism, I do not want them.

[saagarjha]

How do you feel about citizens who do that all the time?

[salamanderss]

Not great myself. Sometimes you move someplace specifically to assimilate with the culture because you feel it's a leg up from where you left. When it is infuriating is when someone comes from someplace that has been torched by failed ideas, or at least failed in the sense it drove them to leave, and they set up shop and do the same damn thing. It ought not be illegal, but for instance you see that with home owners that flee and then vote for the same dumbass stuff that made their origin unaffordable.

You have the right to just show up with newly printed residency and demand change, but no right to be liked for it.

[kmeisthax]

This is censorship. You are advocating for censorship of the majority of humanity through legal reprisals to prospective immigrants for having a negative opinion of the country they want to move to.

[justrealist]

I mean. Ok.

The majority of human beings are not people who hold values I want in this country. Do I want someone who thinks that heretics should be killed? Women should be circumcised? China should be sterilizing minorities in Xinjiang?

Liberal democracy works when the population has a common baseline of enlightened values and mutual respect for the system they work within, I am not apologizing for attempting to maintain that.

[kmeisthax]

Liberal democracy is already under threat by American citizens, and you don't need to immigrate to America to attack American values. You just go online, register a few hundred troll and bot accounts[0], and push your narrative about how we need to persecute a specific group of people in blatant violation of the 1st Amendment.

The thing about America is that it's very good[1] at passing on its politics to immigrants and their children. This is why you get lots of immigrants who want to pull the ladder up behind themselves and ban immigrants, which is a hilariously illiberal policy that would actually harm themselves. The far-right Islamofascist nutters who want to kill heretics and forcibly mutilate women's vaginas will, given enough time, absolutely break bread with the far-right Christofascist nutters who want to ban books they don't like from schools and ban trans people from public spaces[2]. Given enough time, even tankies[3] could get in on this and form a pan-authoritarian cult of illiberality and oppression.

Insamuch as this necessitates any compromise of liberal values for the sake of the continued existence of liberalism in the United States, such a compromise should be limited to the least invasive change necessary to preserve human rights. Banning immigrants for having grumbles about the US smells like collective punishment, and we don't actually need that. Illiberal and far-right thinking is spread by very small numbers of influential and socially connected grifters, and targeting just them would be less invasive.

Furthermore, we don't actually know what speech US ICE is using to deny visas, just that they're using machine learning to scan for some kind of speech. They might be solely targeting foreign liberals because that's what they consider a security threat to themselves.

[0] Aided by Elon Musk selling bluechecks and algorithmic boosts on Xitter for $8/mo

[1] Relative to other countries, of course, who basically don't even try

[2] We don't have to get into why they would do this - or how they'd excuse it given their mutual hatred for one another. Crank magnetism is a powerful force.

[3] Far-left authoritarians.

[gustavus]

Although I agree it is a tragedy that not everyone has the opportunity to be born an American, and I am a staunch advocate for trying to remedy that (no more illegal immigration problems from SA if we just annex the whole damn thing, manifest destiny my friend).

That doesn't mean that every person has the right to be in America simply because they want to.

[ed_balls]

It's a waste of money at best. People that mean harm would bypass it like 9/11 hijacker which were drunk.

e.g. someone is sharing a post about killing children in Gaza or any other highly controversial topic. Gov employee wastes resources try to check this person, he gets a stressful afternoon. System is prone to abuse and would have a lot of false positives.

[tamimio]

Because just like most of these laws, on the surface it sounds nice and good like “protecting the kids!!”, but in reality it will be used and abused against you, even if you are a citizen.

[shtopointo]

This is not a law

[BobaFloutist]

Do you have any idea how many natural-born US citizens are hostile to our country? It's practically a requirement.