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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.
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.
Your post-9/11 bullshit is already keeping people out of the US. How about you do something about it? Land of the free, home of the brave my arse. Home of the scared shitless. Do you even remember the '80s? US used to carry on about how the USSR was oppressive because you needed papers to travel. Travelling in the US is worse than that now. You need to present papers, and take your shoes off, and not lock your bag, and not take any liquids with you, and so on. If your name is similar to a name on a secret list, you're denied the right to fly and there's jack shit you can do about it. US used to carry on about DDR's mass surveillance where they were paying everyone to spy on everyone else as though it was some great evil as well. Yet you now wiretap all domestic communications. You've got your secret prisons where you disappear people, you've got your leaked torture incidents (although you seem to be getting better at covering that up), you punish people for embarrassing the government rather than actually addressing the issues that make the leaks embarrassing. It's just not worth visiting the US. You get treated like a criminal at the border, and you know you're visiting the most hypocritical country on earth.