People make two big assumptions about immigration in my experience

1) They think the system should be extremely simple 2) They assume everyone involved is being honest

When the reality is

1) Many people involved are lying to claim immigration benefits they have no right to 2) The system needs to have a level of complexity and difficulty to prevent these people from accessing these benefits

Because there is a statutory requirement that applicants who require an interview appear personally before a consular officer. So far, the State Department has interpreted this to mean "standing physically in front of".

Having done tens of thousands of visa interviews, I do think the requirement of a physical appearance before an officer is important. I could quickly review a person's travel history by looking through their passports, questioning them about prior trips. A person's travel patterns and visas to other countries can tell you a lot. I could quickly use a UV light or magnifier on educational documents to see if they were genuine. Several times, I overhead conversations from other applicants and officers that were relevant to my applicant (same employer/group) and I would consult with them. There are many other details you notice when doing this in person thousands of times.

There are also practical matters - if you're trying to do this via video link, how to you authenticate the person on the other end? At the consulate, we fingerprint them and compare them to previously collected biometrics. If you offload this authentication to a contractor site in the US, but I'm in India, is this site open in the middle of the night?

In cases where the applicant qualifies for a waiver of the interview, the State Department actually does (or at least did when I was there) have a substantial program whereby visa applications are largely processed remotely. An applicant would have no hint as to whether or not that happened, though.

China won the last one though. They aren’t number 1 for no reason .

> We won two world wars and put a man on the moon - and you want to bring the US in line ?

Citation needed /s

Europes permissive immigration policies (basically anarchy from my perspective in the UK) are creating an entirely avoidable crisis. I expect a far more closed border policy in the future. International travel will become more complicated as western countries will increasingly try to control who is allowed in. Trumps administration is just 2 to 5 years ahead of everyone else.

It's common for countries to require you to apply from your country of nationality or residence, and to prove lawful residence if you're not a national of the country you're applying in. I'm in the middle of a French visa application for my daughter right now, and she must apply in the U.S. where she's a citizen.

I have several examples and lots of personal experience. I’ve been asked to go back from Mexico, Brazil, and Chile while traveling there and applying for a visa to Peru. Finally the Peruvian embassy in Chile gave me a visa to visit Peru because I accidentally bumped into the assistant consul.

https://bkpk.me/peru-visa-for-indians/

The San Francisco consulate of India refused to process my spouse’s Indian visa because she was not resident in the US.

https://bkpk.me/how-we-finally-got-zaras-visa-to-india/

Several more examples but in this day and age you can just ask chat gpt to summarize for you. But if you check visa application requirements for many embassies, they will often say: proof of residence if not a national of the country of application. So that’s the requirement often.

I will add though that I’ve always maintained that this is a soft policy and they will make exceptions in some cases. It is mostly consulates wanting to do as little work as humanly possible. So there can be ways to get around it if you can talk to someone in charge. But usually that’s very difficult with consulates.

I’m pretty sure though in the US’ case now it’s a hard no. So there will be no working around it.

Schengen works exactly like this. Also Japan I think.

Why would you apply at the US consulate for a visa to France? That makes no sense no matter how I try to interpret.

The way it works is, if you're applying for a French visa in Mongolia and you're not a Mongolian national, you need to provide your Mongolian residence permit or else your application will be refused outright.

you got that mixed up: you would apply at the french embassy in the US. and, that's the key point for schengen: you would not apply at the eg german embassy in the US, even though both would get you the same visa. the US embassy can't give you a schengen visa, and you could not even get to the one in france since you are not there yet. and if you visit multiple countries, it's either the one where you spend most of the time, or the one where you enter the schengen area (this may be different from the country you visit first because you could have a flight transfer inside schengen). at least as far as i know.

Visa stamp is not needed to stay in the US, it's only to cross the border into the US. Also, coincidentally, a visa stamp can only be issued by a consulate and I don't know of any country that has consulates on its own land.

But then they wouldn't be able to bash Trump!!

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Adding hoops just makes them even more indentured. The harder it is to get market value for their skills the more it pushes American wages down.

I imagine it's more of a comment about the underlying trend.

I can't say I have any loyalty to the government or the constitution, but i will say that our willingness to accept immigrants is far and away the best thing about this place.

Keep deluding yourself into thinking a silent majority want the country to be flooded by afghans and syrians.

I also agree that this comment is likely AI generated (i.e., "why this matters" gave it away for me. I think I've seen this phrase a lot with ChatGPT). I think it is the last part of the last sentence and the toeing of the party line that bugs me, "likely aimed at improving security screening and preventing abuse of the system". It's "Manufacturing Consent"[0] à la 21st Century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

Yeah kind of like how people put "IANAL but ..." before offering legal advice. Maybe we need a new acronym: "AIG but ..." (AI generated but ...) or maybe "NEWAI but ..." (Non-expert wielding AI but...)

Can you point out what part of the summary is wrong? You’re welcome to write your own summary that’s as detailed as the one I posted with any necessary corrections and I’ll delete my post.

> isn’t really a social consensus

I feel the consensus is clear. Reposting blurbs from robots is anathematic to our discourse.

I bet it's a minuscule amount. For a start, all they're shopping for is a shorter delay for the visa interview - maybe that is 1 month instead of 3 - and most people from countries that require visas will already be factoring that duration into their plans.

> how hard is it going to be for a motivated applicant to establish "proof of residence" in an arbitrary country

By residence they mean your legal status is a permanent resident, this is proven with a formal ID like green cards.

For us in the third world it is! As an example, in my country of residence, a non-national needs to wait more than a year to even get to an interview with a US consul.

If you want a real answer, a big part of it has to do with consular non-reviewability. Basically, there is far less ability for an applicant to make legal challenges to visa decisions made by a US visa officer outside the US.

Another reason is, what happens if you apply for a renewal or different visa type while you're in the US, and your visa is denied? Now we're relying on you to leave the country, whereas if you already had to leave the country to apply and you're denied, you're not still in the US.

There actually was a pilot program for domestic revalidation of H-1Bs. Applicants liked it (no need for a trip outside the US), and those of us working in India liked it (less workload for us). However I doubt this administration will support expansion.

In my experience most renewing H-1Bs planned their visa interviews (or often "dropbox" cases where they didn't even need to come in person) to coincide during a few weeks trip home. They were not generally coming to India, then applying and waiting several months.

The cases that take months are those with some problem - missing some documentation, evidence of petitioner fraud, national security concerns with the applicant, etc. And yes, in those cases people (and sometimes their families) end up getting "stuck" outside the US, kids miss the start of the school year, people can't get back to their apartments and houses and pets. It sucks, but we have vetting for good reasons.

Now do the comparison if one endpoint is realtime user facing traffic and the other is batch processing which can easily eat up all available capacity and drive up latency.

If visa shoppers are overwhelming the normal processing of applicants who actually live in a particular country, it seems entirely appropriate to say "no, sorry, this location isn't for you" to the people who don't live there.

This _is_ them closing the loophole.

Well duh, you already have to be wealthy to get a US visa in the first place.

What part of the bill mentions anything about skin color? As far as I can tell, the rules are the same for everyone.

it looks AI generated

Security screening, not border control at airports etc.

I hate this “brown people” line that people keep bringing up to shame anyone who is against easy immigration as some kind of racist.

Unchecked immigration has wrecked countries, it’s a big problem in Canada for instance. We have definitely passed the era in the world where immigration was automatically a good thing. The game has changed.

Not defending the US here, but are you saying that overstaying your visa does not exist?

(Note: Georgia as in Atlanta, not Tbilisi.)

Please refer me to the part of the Constitution that enumerates the responsibility of the US government to preserve the business model of the modern university system?

Yes, what America needs now is more students working in the grey economy after their student visa expires.

Got it. Thanks for clarifying

Got it. Thanks. That’s a lot better than first impression.