I am now officially eligible for deportation! Yay!!

The BBQ Pit
41

Are we at war? With whom?

Oh yes, you must mean the well-defined and internationally recognized “War on Terror”. So how goes the hunt for Osama bin Laden anyway? Oh yes, we can’t find him, can we? So who’s next?

Well, North Korea has a nuclear capability, but we might get beaten by the Koreans (it more or less happened before), and our American forces aren’t real happy at fighting people who might shoot back, which must be why they’re so good at shooting friendly forces and wedding parties.

So who’s got an army we’re reasonably sure we can beat? Oh yes, Iraq. And it’s a long way away, and we can control media coverage to ensure the correct view is propagated. And shit, there’s oil there. And everyone knows they’re the bad guys and are clearly an immediate threat to the United States, since a SCUD missile fired from Bagdad could hit Washington DC any minute.

I’m sorry, but using the “we’re at war” comment to excuse any action by the current President and administartion is so fundamentally wrong as to be stupid. I can understand how for many people (rednecks and the military primarily), this is the logical extension of “America, love it or leave it”. But historically, this is not America’s finest hour. People will look back on the legacy of the Bush family as they do on King John of England.

42

[btw, I’m a woman]
I’ll take a crack at it.

There is a sort of twisted logic at work here. Students are one of the few visa categories, other than temporary worker categories such as H-1B and L-1, who are tied to a specific institution that doesn’t tend to move around much. Other people, such as tourists, or even green card holders, tend to change addresses much more frequently than corporate entities or educational institutions. So there may be hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the U.S., but they are each tied to an institution which also keeps tabs on them to a certain extent (and with the new regulations that are in the process of being implemented, will now be required to keep tabs on them to a much greater extent, notifying INS every time a student drops below full-time course load, etc.)

So my take on it is that students are both way fewer in number and much less of a moving target for surveillance than toursist or business trsavelers, and as far as I know nobody on a work visa has been accused of terrorism. So INS probably sees them as a way to get some quick bang for the enforcement buck, and look to the public like they are tightening up on a category that DID produce some of the 9/11 terrorists (although visas for vocational school students, like flight school students, are a different category altogether than the ones for traditional academic institutions).

And FWIW, INS is also tightening up signnificantly on entries and exits of ALL nonimigrants, which is what they should have been doing all along. Congress actually ordered INS to develop an entry/exit tracking system a number of years ago, but they kept stalling, ostensibly for lack of funds, and so it never happened. That single failure is probably INS’ biggest law enforcement issue, byy far; right now, they have absolutely no systematic way to track people who have overstayed visas.

More pontificating on request…

(And good luck **Gozu, ** although I strongly recommend talking to a professional BEFORE you go to register.)

43

Oh, they just went and declared him dead, with no proof, except he “Hasn’t made a video tape recently”. Such great proof.

44

So you acknowledge that we are still at war and have unfinished business to take care of?

Not that I intend to lend any credibility to this infantile “nyah nyah, you haven’t gathered up the bits of bin Laden’s body that the crows haven’t carried off” line of “argument”.

45

i think declaring someone dead without any evidence is stupid. especially when he is hiding out in a country that doesn’t have a radio shack to buy a video camera at, nevermind he may have stopped so he won’t give away his position. if he started howling again, the US would swarm over norther Pakistan. Is better to be quiet now and let the fools think he is dead, then hit them when they are playing Nintendo while bombing Iraq. It is what i would do.

46

So you relish the prospect of bin Laden killing American servicemen, or “fools” in your parlance.

47

Here’s what bothers me.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/inv.ins.hijackers/

That link lists the legal status of 13 of the 19 hijackers. The status on the remaining six could not be identified. Out of the 13, 9 entered as visitors, 2 as students (both for vocational training?) and 2 of them are only listed as non-immigrants. And, we have this media and government brouhaha over student visas (F-1)!

I just don’t get it. Fine, I can see how they are the easiest target for monitoring, but assuming we want to do what’s best for safety, what is the purpose in monitoring their course load or address? Especially, when you concur with me that INS doesn’t have a clue about entry/exits for any general non-immigrant, particularly those who come as visitors.

I remember articles written after 9/11 that showed that 15 of the 19 hijackers’ applications were incomplete and sloppily filled up replete with incomplete addresses, occupations, fantastic names of US hotels and cities and yet they all got their visas. Do you know what the US (the same Senate that ran exhaustive hearings on student visas) is doing about visa processing?

In short, is the US mal-utilizing its resources?

48

IMO, in a word, yes. (And not to diminish the suffering and inconvenience to hunreds of thousands of innocent people, but it’s also making my job a living hell.)

49

Maybe I’m being dense here, but why exactly are they requiring these people to register at the INS office? Don’t you have to register with them in order to GET a visa in the first place? What purpose is this supposed to serve (in INS-logic, not the obvious end result of getting foreign nationals to herd themselves into detention for you).

What sucks is that they actually COULD use this to clean up some of their mess. By actually looking at each case individually as the person comes in, they could review (presumably) what’s been going on with their visa status. Visa expired? Let’s look and find out why. Well, the guy filed his paperwork in a timely fashion, we at INS must have let it slip through the cracks, so let’s fix that now and put his papers in order.

But arresting people is just SO much easier. :rolleyes:

50

You can’t read at all, can you? Fools as in the morons who trumpet around this board saying Osama is dead, and therefore will not pay any attention to him. I don’t appreciate your insinuations that i want americans dead, go twist my words some more and shove them up your ass.
Idiot.

51

What, pray tell, do you mean by “hit them”? What do you mean, “it is what i (sic) would do”? The last time bin Laden “hit” the US, over 3,000 Americans died. If you think bin Laden “hitting” the US doesn’t involve Americans dying, then you are the fool.

52

hit them is what Osama will do, and is what i would do if i was Osama. which should be obvious from the paragraph. Don’t tell me you never consider what the other guy might do?

53

Well, I’m glad that’s cleared up. Apparently, bin Laden is going to scamper out of his cave wielding a big old Nerf bat, run up to the nearest American soldier, tap him lightly on the noggin, and then scamper away singing “neener neener neener”. :rolleyes:

Sure, it’s useful to consider what bin Laden might do if he weren’t so much rotting worm chow under a pile of cave rubble. But if I were to make such speculations, I would make a straightforward statement and not conflate my own sneering contempt for the “fools” in the American armed forces with what I think bin Laden might do.

54

since that is only what i did in your own mind, eat me. The fools were the “Osama is dead” decryers. underestimating your foe is stupid. Looks like you are infected with stupidity as well. what a shame i won’t be arguing with you anymore.

55

And that’s a weak excuse when INS comes knocking at your door or the door of someone you know. I do sympathize with Gozu’s situation and I hope things work out for him and many others in his situation, but when you don’t pay attention to what’s going on the world you are asking for trouble. For pete’s sake, glance at the front page at least once a day and read anything that might have even the remotest effect on you.

You can also make a pretty good argument that you have the duty to be well informed: in whatever country you live in you have the duty to make sure that your rights and the rights of others are upheld, or that the standards are raised, not lowered like the INS is doing with their fuckups.

For the record I’m not opposed to the registrations in and of themselves, but INS does need to be far more lenient then they have been in this situation. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread INS has screwed up and been inefficient in the past and it’d be a safe bet to say their screw ups have caused headaches and deportations for those who didn’t deserve them.

And unless I missed something they are targeting all males from certain countries, not just students. SEVIS is the computerization of foreign students’ information that was mandated by congress in 1996, well before 9/11, so the motivation for its implementation and the increased scrutiny of foreign students is at least partially separate from the motivation for having the students and everyone else show up at the local INS station for finger-printing and stool samples.

From this article:

Doesn’t seem too horrible to me. This is just making sure that the students are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

More complete list of what will be reported on SEVIS for F-1 students:
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/international_education/sevp/SEVP_info_collection_table1.htm
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/other/international_education/sevp/SEVP_info_collection_table2.htm

J-1

It is fair to mention that SEVIS, and the increased scrutiny of foreign students, was mandated by Congress at least in part because of the belief that the first bombing of the WTC was done by someone here on a student visa and also because INS’s paperwork was a mess. But keeping that close of a tab on all foreign nationals, even those here from countries that are not suspected of producing terrorists isn’t a bad idea at all. What’s the point of having INS and immigration laws if we don’t enforce them?

And where would you have them register? Over the phone? At a strip bar? They register at INS because that is the department with the best people (comparatively) to process the information. They do it face to face to prevent fraud.

56

The question is not whether the US has the right to harass and jail and deport foreigners. The question is whether it is an incredibly stupid and counterproductive thing to do.

The US gets a lot of money from foreign visitors and students as well as a lot of goodwill. Harassing these people for no productive purpose is just plain stupid and very counterproductive. That energy would be better spent elsewhere.

You could demand that tourists first submit an itinerary with every hotel they will stay in and make them report to police in every town they arrive in. Yes, the US could do that and it would be within its rights. It would also mean a huge loss of cash from tourists because people do not like that kind of stuff.

You could demand every hotel check people’s papers and if they are not US citizens then register their passport and make sure they have a valid visa. After all China does it.

But every check and control means a waste of productive energy. When the net effect of that check and control is negative, then it is better to not do it. This is the equivalent of owning a store and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent the shoplifting of athousand dollars worth of merchandise. . . maybe, if you are lucky.

Government bureaucracy is a huge drag on the productivity of a country. One of the things which makes the USA a more productive country is that, contrary to what many Americans may think, is has less bureaucracy than most other countries.

Asking foreign students to re-register with the INS is just a stupid and counterproductive waste of government resources. Jailing and deporting people for minor bureaucratic infractions is incredibly unfair, incredibly counterproductive and incredibly stupid. But I guess legislators never heard the concept “unintended consequences”.

One further consequence of bureacratic uber-control is that it necessarily leads to corruption. When you need paper X and failed to meet the criteria, and when everybody, including those in authority, know paper X is really a worthless formality, then you will get paper X for love of for money. China is a very good example of a nightmare of a control bureaucracy which really controls very little. They just harass everyone. Chinese hotels are required to check your passport and visa. Seeing how the people there cannot understand western script what it leads to is either (a) they spend 30 minutes or more wrestling with your passport and just maybe getting the information right or (b) just filling the form out any quick way, probably wrong. I guess law and order types would see it natural and reasonable if they heard an American tourist in China was jailed for some time and then expelled when he (or a hotel clerk) made a mistake in filling out the registration form. I, OTOH, believe governments are made to serve the people, and not the other way around. What the INS is doing does not serve humanity as a whole nor does it serve the US people. It is just a stupid waste.

57

While I have to go to an immigration services office to renew my visa to stay in Japan, all of my registering (change of job, address, marital status, etc.) is done at the local town hall, and the clerks there handle all the updates to my registration card. I realize, of course, that Japan has a much more centralized system of goverment than America, so this is probably not possible in the U.S., but I just wanted to mention that other systems do exist.

Gozu, I hope this works out for you, but seriously, it’s your responsibility to stay informed about your visa requirements. This is doubly true when you’re living in a country where many in government are paranoid and many more just want to be seen to be “doing something about it”.

58

And when I say “counterproductive” I am referring to things like this: Pakistan protests U.S. anti-terror policy

59

Gozu:

Gosh, I don’t know what is more amusing:

  1. The notion that the INS should waste its feeble resources tracking you down:

“Hello, University. This is Betty from the INS. We sent a few “IMPORTANT!” letters out to Gozu from Morocco and they came back as undeliverable. It’s pretty important that he gets these letters or he’ll risk his scholarship. I already called the phone company and his MasterCard company but they won’t release any information. Even after I told them that he might get deported. So, can you check your records and see if he left a new address with you? He’s a good kid and I know he’d appreciate it. I’ll hold.”

  1. That the INS would somehow KNOW that you were a harmless, law-abiding student and they didn’t have to worry about you.

  2. That you didn’t realize that the INS would want to be notified of your current address, if for no other reason than to let you know of changes in the law so you could avoid the fiasco you find yourself in. I mean, really, you don’t listen to the news and you didn’t notify the INS when you moved. Were you expecting a smoke signal?

You know, I’m not all that thrilled about the new fingerprinting policy. I’m even less thrilled about the scare tactics the INS is using get compliance. But at least the scare tactic is getting the message out so that harmless, law abiding people like Gozu will hear it.

60

Y’know, guys, as I’ve stated in several other threads, until very recently, many INS offices simply had no idea what to do with a change of address request and would simply throw it in the trash. The address change requirement has been on the books for decades, but hasn’t been consistently enforced since the WWII era.

I’d wager it will take INS several months to catch up on data entry for the hundreds of thousands of address changes they’ve received in the past couple of months. Right now, they’re probably sitting in boxes in various mailrooms. (Side note: I’m not even sure whether my grandmother is required to register; she is 88 years old and has been here since 1930, but due to a long and convoluted series of circumstances, we have no idea whether she ever naturalized.)

And again, INS has done NO individual notification of people who are required to register. They have relied on the news media and their Website.