Well, I don’t know how to fix that problem. But frankly, if I had a criminal conviction, etc., I might have an inkling that I might have problems visiting other countries.
(And for that matter, a few years ago I had to talk a friend of my mom’s through how to fix this issue for himself in Europe - he’d been refused entry to, I think, Germany because of an old hash possession conviction. I have no idea whether he ever managed to straighten it out - I ought to check one of these days, but IIRC there was a very similar process to applying for a U.S. immigration waiver. Canada has the same - in fact, my boss may be doing a waiver very shortly for a U.S. citizen with an old drug possession conviction, who needs to travel to Ccanada frequently on business.)
Well, yeah, there are morons in every job, and I’m personally not crazy about the idea of relatively low-level Homeland Security employees having that kind of power over people either. But what can I do about it?
That was only recently decided by the courts. Back in the '90s, the Bush I and Clinton administrations used Gitmo as a detention camp for Haitian refugees, in large part because Gitmo was considered to be outside US legal jurisdiction. That way, the Government could take the position that the refugees had not made an “entry” into the US for purposes of immigration law, which would have triggered the availability of certain rights.
Not much, of course, and I definitely don’t expect you to!
But it’s good to have people be conscious of this kind of things, I think… I’ve been trying to educate myself on Spanish immigration law as well. I’ve met too many people who were, for example, HR folks and didn’t know things from the most basic labor laws for their jurisdiction (one of them was that Spanish Basic Labor Law states that if you have to be at work but don’t have work to do, you’re automatically entitled to study something; another was how having a job is, d’uh, required in order to stay in Spain with a Worker’s Visa) - as you say there’s morons in every job but I did my best to edumacate those.
