IMHO, I think this is wrong. Canada is our friend, neighbour, and ally. Canadians opened their hearts and homes in our time of need. Canadians have fought and died, and are still fighting and dying, alongside our own soldiers. And how do we repay them? By turning them away.
I hate to put it this way, but I think it’s true: If we turn away our friends, then the terrorists have already won.
I think we need to show those who would harm us that we will not be intimidated by their acts of terror. I think we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends and show the terrorists that we are united, and that they cannot drive a wedge between allies.
Canada is not our enemy. We should not treat them as if they are a danger.
Anyway, that’s my opinion and you’re welcome to it.
For a little perspective: I work for a U.S. immigration law firm, and have spent almost all of my career dealing with INS in some capacity or another. Personally, I don’t think the U.S. Government hates Canadians as a group; they do, however, desperately need to tighten up border enforcement, and are doing it in a fashion which is unfortunately rather haphazard and creates a lot of difficulties for huge numbers of people, the vast majority of whom don’t deserve it.
Please note that the new restrictions don’t apply to students who are already enrolled in a part-time program, only to new students. I’d bet this will be a temporary difficulty, and that INS will find some more workable way for Canadians to attend U.S. schools on a part-time basis; the schools are too dependent on the cash from Canadian students, and schools do have a voice in the democratic process.
Also, it would be wise to keep in mind that while the U.S. isn’t particularly worried about Canadians per se, many people forget that Canada, as much as the U.S., is also a nation of immigrants, and that many Canadians didn’t begin their lives as Canadians. I’ve done cases for Iranian-Canadians, Palestinian-Canadians, Indonesian-Canadians, and Kuwaiti-Canadians, to name a few examples. And since Canada’s asylum and overall immigration policies are somewhat more permissive than the U.S.’, I think concern over the security of the U.S.-Canadian border is quite valid. It does suck, though, for the people who are stuck dealing with the consequences.
It’s pretty damn misguided, if you ask me. A friend of mine was denied entry into the US last week, but will try again next week-- she was heading down to Texas with her U.S. boyfriend.
Every time I hear something like this, the conspiracy theory part of my brain kicks in, and starts thinking 9/11 terrorism was just a planned excuse for certain people to keep their hold on power.
I don’t think it’s a case of holding onto power. I think it’s a case of, “I don’t know what to do. I have to do something. Um… Um… Okay, how about this?” I don’t know how it is in Canada, but here in the U.S. people are so afraid to make a wrong decision that they make a rule and stick to it no matter how stupid it is. (For example, a child may be expelled from school for having a 2" plastic G.I. Joe gun because of the “Zero Tolerance” rules. A 2" toy rifle is not a weapon, but "It’s a GUN! :eek: ")
So people make stupid rules and stupid laws because they’re afraid if they actually think, they might make a mistake. In this case it seems that the INS is saying, “We had foreign students in the country who killed Americans. Canadians are foreginers, therefore let’s keep Canadian students out!”
Eva Luna: I understand the argument you’re making, but I think that “doing something for the sake of doing something” is the wrong approach and a poor way to treat our friends.
It’s not just Canadian students. The new (or rather, newly-implemented) INS rules keep out all part-time foreign students. Meanwhile the INS is changing other rules to keep out as many people as possible-- even if they have a long history of staying in the US for up to 6 months at a time.
You know about snowbirds, right? There are hundreds of thousands of Canucks who head south to sunnier climes for the entire winter. About two weeks ago the INS revised rules banning this-- then made an exemption for Canadians.
It seems to me like the INS is doing everything it can to keep all foreigners out of the US. When you combine this with the stereotypical American reluctance to travel outside the country, and the well-known lack of international news coverage in American media, you get a public that’s very uninformed about the rest of the world and is ready to believe just about anything-- something like modern-day China or the old Soviet Union.
But in addition to the actions of the INS, you’ve got the repositioning of the FBI, and a slew of other laws being passed allowing fewer checks and balances of the US govt spying on and detaining anyone inside its borders. The conspiracy lobe gets pretty active
Aaaargh: with as much as this board has been crashing lately in mid-post, I should know better and compose any response longer than 2 sentences in Word first, and copy & paste!
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, as best as I can reconstruct what I tried to post a few hours ago…as I was saying, I certainly agree that it sucks for INS to “do something for the sake of doing something.” The result so far IMHO has been a completely boneheaded tightening of regulations in a way that is most likely to screw up the lives of the people who least deserve it. Heck, I’m American, and it’s making my job downright miserable.
However, having worked on basically all sides of the immigration system in the U.S., and being cursed with a general ability to see everyone’s point of view, and being basically a pretty opinionated person, here are a couple of thoughts:
I’m 99.9% sure that there will be a regulatory fix for this stupid situation, probably within a month and almost certainly by the time the fall semester starts.
Just as legal background: this law is not new and has been on the books for some time. Basically, to get an F-1 student visa, you have to be a full-time student, but a visitor in B-2 status (aka “visitor for pleasure,” or tourist to most of us) can generally take a class without violating the intent of that status. The problem arises when you have someone who wants to follow a “course of study,” generally interpreted as a degree or certificate program, but not on a full-time basis; there is currently no visa category designed for people in this situation.
Not that I agree with the outlook that we should be paranoid about everybody, or about Canadians in particular, but heck, that’s why I’m not an immigration inspector. It’s an awfully tough job to be polite and reasonable to everyone while basically having a minute or two at most to decide whether someone is a likely criminal or terrorist, with practically no information to go on. Believe me, I’ve been treated just as rudely by Customs and Immigration agents as anyone; frankly, the Soviets were more polite to me that the INS guy at JFK when I came back from Russia the first time.
But I do have the utmost respect for the difficulty of the job these guys have to do, with the most minimal of resources. Yep, we shouldn’t treat our friends this way, but the problem so far has been finding efficient and reasonable ways to figure out who our friends are. It’s nearly impossible to judge someone at a glance; in my line of work, you’d be amazed at what I find out about the most innocent-looking people; I’ve seen mild-mannered corporate executives who had pasts that included assaulting a consular officer, drug convictions of all kinds, multiple DUI’s in 2 countries over the course of many years (do you really want this guy driving down the highway in front of you?)…the list goes on and on. And when I worked for the Office of the Immigration Judge, it was much worse: people ordered deported for every imaginable crime: murder, assault, repeated rape of an eleven-year-old stepdaughter, torture of noncombatants in a civil war…is it possible to have post-traumatic stress disorder just from hearing someone else’s testimony?
That said, keep in mind that the Federal Government’s personnel practices aren’t exactly likely to net them the best applicants. Having been a federal bureaucrat, I would say that about 70% of my colleagues were primarily concerned with doing the minimum required to remain employed (this was more true at the bottom levels), which is what happens when you pay so far below the prevailing salary for the position (would you believe that the feds think that being an entry-level court interpreter requires the same skill level as being a receptionist, so the salary should be the same? $17k in 1990!) and take so long to hire people (5 months in my case, plus another 8-10 for the security clearance which you can’t start working without) that almost anyone with half a brain takes another job in the meantime. Basically, the only reason an outstanding applicant would put up with federal BS is to do work that he/she believes is valuable and important, because it sure as hell ain’t for the money or the wonderful working conditions. However, if the good people, on top of everything else, have to put up with the crap generated by the slacker majority, their idealism tends to wear thin pretty quickly. Personally, I got nothing but outstanding evaluations, but got tired of working with slackers; not that I minded picking up the slack in terms of covering the extra work (heck, I like being busy and enjoyed the challenges the boss would give me when I went to him and said I needed something new to do!), but I got mighty sick of some of my co-workers trying to find new ways to stab me in the back for it so they wouldn’t look bad.
Anyway, sorry for the hijack; maybe I should start a Pit thread on how screwed up INS is? I did try a GD one a few weeks ago (haven’t yet figured out how to create links, but it’s titled “How to fix the U.S. immigration system? A create-your-own recipe thread.”) Maybe it’s time for more of a rant?
Yeah, I’m going to need a cite for that. Not that I don’t believe you, but I know a lot of international students at my university and they had no problem renewing their visas. And as far as I know, there hasn’t been a serious reduction in the number of tourist visas allowed or a serious reduction in the number of green cards and immigration visas permitted. But I could definitely be wrong.
Again, I fail to see how keeping out part-time students helps the government do things. Like Americans historically give a rat’s ass about the opinions of foreigners on our public policy.
Ooops, I meant to say that it’s much more likely that Canada has been rightly or wrongly identified as a major port of entrance for terrorists to get into this country and the INS is trying to get a better handle on who comes down.
I can provide more specific cites when I have access to my work databases tomorrow, but:
There is a proposal currently in Congress to reduce the standard period of admission granted to tourists and visitors from 6 months down to 30 days. The inspectors are supposed to grant more if the person arriving can articulate an acceptable reason why more should be granted, but I cna’t for the life of me figure out how that’s supposed to work in real life. Say you’re the non-English-speaking mom of a permanent resident from, say, India, and you’re schlepping across 14 time zones to help your daughter care for her newborn baby for a few months. This is currently an acceptable activity on a B-2 visitor visa, but how is this lady supposed to convince the inspector she needs more time? Likely result: she will get 30 days, and will have to file for an extension to stay longer, which will just clog up the adjudications system, which already takes anywhere from several months to more than a year process extension requests. So what’s the point?
I haven’t seen any stats come out yet on visa/green card refusal rates, but there HAS been a new security check procedure implemented for men between 16 and 45 who are nationals of certain countries, primarily Arab or Muslim ones, which the U.S. considers to pose an elevated security risk. This security check can delay visa issuance 20 days or more, and consular officers have discretion to subject women, men outside the above age ranges, or pretty much anyone else they want to these additional checks. Anecdotally, I can tell you that there has been much higher scrutiny of my office’s clients, who are generally very low-risk folks (Canadian and European execs and professionals, for the most part), and we’ve had quite a number of applications held up for additional documents that never would have been requested before, or for submission of original docs where INS only wanted photocopies before. One divorced Canadian client’s green card application was held up for submission of the original of his divorce decree from Michigan, of which we had already submitted a photocopy. And may I add that the fact that he was divorced had absolutely no relationship to the basis of his case, which hinges on a job offer from a U.S. company?
Anyway, gotta go to sleep now so I’m conscious enough to counsel the huddled masses in the morning…
Dunno; the most reliable info will probably be in my e-mail from our NY office tomorrow. In the meantime, I bet CNN or traditional news sources will have something (although traditional news sources usually do somewhat incomplete or inaccurate reporting on immigraiton issues). If I get something specific, I’ll post it.
“Ontario colleges and professional programs in law and medicine are already strained by Canada’s growing population, the newspaper said, forcing many students to seek higher education across the border. Students travel to take classes in the Buffalo area from as far away as Toronto.”
This is misleading. They are not taking classes in law or medicine leading to professional standing in Canada. They simply are not up to snuff academically to gain admission into Canadian universities, so they go across the border to schools with lower admission standards. The American isolationism is unfortunate, but is not anything worth getting upset over, particularly from a Canadian perspective.
Unfortunately I already tossed the news release into my email trash, but it’s a very new rule-- only came down the pipe in the past two weeks. Full-time students will continue to renew visas as they do now, but part-timers, they’re gonna have problems.
I’m sure there’s something on the INS website somewhere. http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/
