What the frail are you talking about? Why the hell do we have such ridiculous laws to begin with? What the hell kind of country have we become? It's certainly not the land of the FREE! The terrorists won. We lost.
It's not the law - it's the way somone who broke that law was treated like a suspected drug-dealer. Sure, technically they had the right to deport him. But doing so in this case was heavy handed, and adding strip-searches and refusing to let him contact his girlfriend was purely obnoxious.
Although not directly linked to terrorism, this kind of behaviour is condoned now because the fear of immigrants generated by "terroism".
People keep repeating that he broke a law and was planning to work for pay, the pay being a single meal offered by his host at one of the coffee houses he was going to play some songs at.
I have not seen any evidence though that someone giving you one dinner during a trip qualifies as pay in exchange for work.
It seems to me that it is a fairly common occurrence that one is treated to a meal by a friend or associate while traveling.
Does anyone have actual references to law that make clear that being treated to dinner qualifies as being paid for work and thus triggers a visa violation and reasonable cause for deportation?
> I have not seen any evidence that someone giving you one dinner during a trip qualifies as pay in exchange for work
You are approaching this from entirely the wrong direction. Your statement is like saying "I have not seen any evidence that so-and-so is innocent of the crime".
It is the presumption in the United States that someone applying for a "non immigrant" (visitor) visa intends to illegally immigrate to the United States. And so it is the burden of the visa applicant to prove otherwise.
There does not need to be any evidence that one dinner during a trip qualifies as pay for his entry in the United States to be lawfully denied.
You realize how high US salaries are? As a developer I can't get even half of what I'm making there, unless it's some ridiculously expensive country like Switzerland.
If US were to open its borders for anybody who wants to work, it would collapse your labor market instantly. And it won't be the poor mexicans looking for low level jobs. It will be Indians, Chinese, Russians moving in millions to get a piece of that pie.
That's US has an H1B work visa program. It's not perfect, but it lets the government control the influx of highly skilled and cheap labor that will take most skilled Americans out of business.
I don't care what nationality they are. If they're working as hard as I am, then they should get paid as much. That there are salary discrepancies between countries has a number of compounding factors, but often the U.S. has explicitly meddled in those countries in order to keep the "good jobs" to itself. Screw that.
It's not like you get anything if you move to US. You have to work for everything yourself. You don't even get healthcare if you can't afford it. Stop being stupid.
Salaries should be paid by how you perform not by your nationality.