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Trump Administration Approves Tougher Visa Vetting, Including Social Media Checks (reuters.com)
The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years. From a report: The new questions, part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, was approved on May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget despite criticism from a range of education officials and academic groups during a public comment period. Critics argued that the new questions would be overly burdensome, lead to long delays in processing and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States. Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.
Having been to the US a number of times we as a family have made the choice not to go there again, its simply not worth the aggravation.
We can fly to Europe via Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and other transit stops, there is no need to go via the US or even near the US. International flights may end up shifting to Canada/Mexico to attract customers.
This of course also means flying on non-US airlines.
It means we spend our money else where. We, outside the USA, get to vote with our wallets, and we are.
Become isolationist, build your walls, hell even shoot yourself in the other foot, we are no longer worried, the real harm is to the US, not us.
yes an by making that travel overly complex with excessively onerous requirements it has economic knockon effects to tourism, business and diplomatic relations. For a president supposedly focused on jobs this is a very anti jobs approach.
Worse, what impact do you think it will have on business travel?
It's even worse if other countries start imposing reciprocal restrictions on travelers from the USA. What do you think will happen to global businesses that need to be able to send people around the world, if/when it becomes a nightmare to travel to and from the U.S.? All of a sudden it starts to become a lot more attractive to move your headquarters and any international operations to Europe or Asia, and reduce the U.S. to a subsidiary that handles only domestic business.
That's not how visas work. You can still get sent back despite having a perfectly valid visa.
Trump has already imposed travel restrictions that have been estimated to cost more than $7B annually in lost tourism spending. These new restrictions will add to that.
More than 14 million American work in the tourism industry. That is about 200 times more than the number of coal miners.
And what's the economic cost of all the Obama regulations that Trump has promised to eliminate?
If the travel restrictions Trump has imposed cost $7 billion, what's the cost of Obama-imposed regulations like Net Neutrality, CFPB, regulations on oil and gas drilling, regulations on electrical power generation, etc.?
And what about Obamacare regulations? How many people work in the THREE FUCKING TRILLION DOLLAR-A-YEAR healthcare industry? If you're bitching about the cost of some travel regulations on the piddly little travel industry, you must be screaming at the top of your lungs for the repeal of Obamacare because of it's economic impact on the tremendously larger healthcare industry. Right. RIGHT? Or maybe you just cherry-pick bullshit to bash Trump?
If Trump's regulations are so damn economically onerous, what the hell should we make of the huge magnitude of Obama's regulations?
Today, Friday the 30th, is the last federal workday of 2016.
And the printed version of the Federal Register, the daily depository of all things regulatory, has topped off at 97,110 pages, by far an all time record.
Skips and blanks will lower the official count a tad later when the National Archives issues final data, but not by much.
That dwarfs last year's count of 80,260 pages, and it shatters the 2010 all-time record of 81,405 by 15,705 pages.
Indeed, the 2010 level was passed November 17, making each day since a new record-breaker.
It's true that the Federal Register is not a great gauge, since it's full of notices and such. But the sheer magnitude of it signals a new era in the Administrative State as opposed to a representative one, and a challenge to new president Donald Trump to do something about a runaway federal government.
We noted here last week that until Obama, ninety-thousand pages was unheard of. Up until this year, the 80,000 page mark shocked, having been passed just three times (in 2010, 2011 and 2015, all by Obama). In fact of the 10 highest-ever counts, Obama holds seven.
I can still catch an Australian domestic flight without showing ID, without taking my shoes off, and wife a six-pack of beer in my carry-on luggage. I can still travel to/from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Viet Nam, hell the entire region, without this bullshit about entire travel histories and handing over social media details. How much of the world have you actually seen?