See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

[lederhosen]

Ganked from dwenius: Journalists hit by new US visa rules.

20,000-odd foreign reporters and news crews stationed in the US will now have to leave the country to renew their visas, facing delays of between four weeks and six months (and the associated travel costs) before re-entering the country. (Homework exercise: how long is it until the presidential election?) The official explanation for all this is that new visas require biometric information, and it's not feasible to collect this within the USA, even though we can manage to do so at Number 22, Boulevard E. Servais, Luxembourg, and 31 Prešernova, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, and hundreds of other places all over the world.

I'm not buying into conspiracy theories here. So far this smells more of roughshod officiousness than deliberate malice, particularly since the same sort of bullshit has recently been applied to other foreign nationals (overseas students, in particular, face a hard time studying in the US when they may have to spend six months away from campus waiting for a visa approval).

What concerns me more is the attitude expressed: the insularity that has long been one of the USA's biggest liabilities and has become increasingly strong in recent years. This is a cross-connected world, where communication channels between nations are vitally important; this sort of pettifogging bureaucracy would be more suited to the Tokugawa Shogunate than a 21st-century nation.

(Making us more secure? Don't make me laugh. The people affected by this are foreign nationals who have *already* been granted entry to the USA, and who *already* have to renew their visas on a regular basis. All we're doing here is making the existing process more cumbersome and expensive, while making it harder for potential friends abroad to see the human face of the USA.)

Comments

How long?

[malloc1024.livejournal.com]

It all depends

Doesn't it?

[unsworn-nomore.livejournal.com]

Moreover, it is a cross-connected world that the United States, more than any other nation, has deliberately sought to create.

This is the 21st century. If you want to seriously follow an isolationist policy, you're on the wrong fucking planet.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure the Administration's supporters can come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, since they're able to justify everything else just fine.