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scoofy | on: U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
I mean, anyone who is still defending this administration isn't even trying to have a conversation in good faith.

I have a Republican friend who appreciates the Supreme Court Justices, and then suddenly has zero clue about any news story involving the administration, and shrugs off the war. This despite meticulously following Benghazi hearings when it was someone he wanted to dislike. He would rather Trump be Romney, but he's not going to do anything about it whatsoever.

I blame myself for teasing my Italian friend in college over Silvio Berlusconi, and now I've found myself in the same position :(

cozzyd | parent | next
yes, I remember making fun of my british friends for brexit, and then ...
15155 | parent | next
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foltik | root | parent | next
> isn't even trying to have a conversation in good faith.

What about the sweeping halt of all legal immigrant visa processing?

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GeneralMayhem | root | parent | next
First, that's not what this is talking about. "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, and you will not be renewed" on a whim is insane, self-destructive cruelty.

But also, it's only been "the policy" since 2004. That's technically "decades", but only just, and it was also introduced for idiotic pretextual reasons. The ostensible reason is that domestic State Department offices don't have the equipment to capture biometric data. Seriously. That's the argument. The law doesn't say "you have to leave to renew", it says "you have to get fingerprinted to renew", and conveniently there's nowhere in the United States that can do that, despite every police station in the country having that equipment at this point.

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{"deleted":true,"id":49459395,"parent":49459087,"time":1787802194,"type":"comment"}
dcow | parent
I have good friends on an H1B. I've got plenty of amazing coworkers and teammates on it as well. At the same time, the program has been wildly abused. We don't need to go into the details I'll assume if you are trying to have a conversation in good faith here then you are well aware that companies abuse the H1B program to import literal indentured servants (to the point of there being covert rings that traffic H1B workers with fake credentials into the country) that ultimately aren't serving even the most remote interests of working class America and really just allowing companies to lower costs while increasing profits so boomers can get rich. We can have nice things until people abuse the system en masse. This isn't a new failure mode.

So what do we do? I don't want good people disrupted. But I also morally disagree with everything the abuse of the H1B program represents. What's the solution? It doesn't seem that crazy to me that "tax the companies so they can't undercut local labor so easily" is a reasonable first pass. But we know how that went.

I can't help but think if instead of shouting across the isle there were some amount of bipartisan accountability and shared understanding on the topic then the previous attempts by this administration to curtail the problem would have been more effective and we wouldn't be at a point where people have to take the gloves off.