
Google Recalls Staff to U.S. After Trump Immigration Order - ENOTTY
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-28/google-recalls-some-staff-to-u-s-after-trump-immigration-order
======
sasanrose
I seriously doubt the intention of people behind this order has anything to do
with security and safety of US citizens. In fact from my point of view,
looking at the list of the countries which are banned you can see they could
not care less about US citizens. For instance, for crying out load, 15 out of
19 hijackers involved in 9/11 were Saudi citizens. But why Saudi Arabia is not
in the list? This is just a game of politics.

~~~
gotchange
I am not a Trump fan. On the contrary, I'm more one of his biggest opponents
of him and ALL what he stands for but the list of countries banned from
entering the US and referenced in the text in his EO -- 8 U.S.C.
1187(a)(12)--[0] is compiled by the SoS before him coming in office.

He's just riding on the coattails of former admins to expand the scope of the
restrictions and sanctions imposed by them.

[0]
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1187](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1187)

~~~
jbooth
No, it isn't normal or some continuation of normal to ban people WITH GREEN
CARDS from getting on planes to the US based on their being muslim. Jesus
Christ.

~~~
gotchange
This is your DHS acting or overreacting in reaction to this EO. I didn't say
that it's normal or non-normal, I just said that the list of those designated
countries is compiled by the Secretary of State prior to Trump taking office
and not arbitrary like some people think.

~~~
denzil_correa
Just because it was compiled by the Secretary of State, does not make it any
less (or more) arbitrary.

------
ploggingdev
It's surprising that countries such as Canada, Australia and EU nations are
not making any attempt to lure tech companies and students from countries
affected by the executive orders. The US is literally leaving some of the best
students, researchers and highly qualified employees out in the cold.

~~~
grey-area
In the long term, if this madness persists, of course they will. Companies and
skilled individuals are transnational now, and if you try to shut them in or
make travel impossible, they'll just leave and set up somewhere else, or never
come and found new companies in the first place.

I think Trump and his supporters are playing by an outdated rule book and
think they can turn the clock back on globalisation and force companies and
people to stay within their borders however uncomfortable he makes it. There
is a very similar dynamic going on with Brexit in the UK, but this will take
years or decades to play out.

~~~
blibble
> There is a very similar dynamic going on with Brexit in the UK

the situation in the UK is very different, the political class are still
entrenched and not going anywhere, whereas the US seems to be having a clean
sweep

Theresa May's position that the UK is still open to globalism and wants to
sign as many free trade agreements, and reduce barriers to trade as far as
possible as the UK leaves the EU.

~~~
grey-area
On the contrary, I think the situation in the UK is very similar - nationalism
and patriotism are being exploited to sell people a story of immigrants taking
their jobs, lowering wages and causing crime. It's an old story but entirely
false. Almost all the tech leaders in the US today are immigrants - e.g. Musk,
Ellison, Brin, Yang, Bell, Omidyar. Even Jobs was the son of a Syrian
immigrant.

As to Trump being a clean sweep, there's nothing clean about his cabinet or
advisors - he has one of the most traditional, male, rich, white cabinets in
recent history and even includes family in his inner circle and in meetings. I
don't think it's clean in any sense, neither new nor free of corruption.

~~~
blibble
> I think the situation in the UK is very similar - nationalism and patriotism
> are being exploited to sell people a false story of immigrants taking their
> jobs, lowering wages and causing crime.

I haven't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids (which would be
business as usual)

> As to Trump being a clean sweep, there's nothing clean about his cabinet or
> advisors - he has one of the most traditional, male, rich, white cabinets in
> recent history and even includes family in his inner circle and in meetings.

clean sweep as in the old guard and their policies are gone (not the case in
the UK)

~~~
grey-area
_I haven 't seen any evidence of this, outside of the tabloids_

Recent examples from the conservative conference:

Exhibit 1: Amber Rudd vows to stop migrants 'taking jobs British people could
do' and force companies to reveal number of foreigners they employ
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/jeremy-hunt-
nhs-d...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/jeremy-hunt-nhs-doctors-
theresa-may-conservative-conference-live/)

Exhibit 2: On immigration and jobs, Theresa May employs the post-truth
politics of Donald Trump [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/on-
immigration-an...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/on-immigration-
and-jobs-theresa-may-employs-the-post-truth-polit/)

Exhibit 3: Official policy is to cut migration to tens of thousands (that
order of magnitude cut would leave many industries short of staff with an
ageing population)

~~~
blibble
yep, I knew the Amber Rudd speech would be in your reply to my comment.

1) has been thoroughly debunked: she never said what the press accused her of
saying. try and find the speech where she's talking about employers making
lists of foreigners... you won't be able to because it doesn't exist.

I looked quite extensively at the time for it, as I was horrified by what
press were reporting her as saying... shame it's fake news.

(in actual fact it was one of many potential ideas in a briefing note before
the speech)

2) is an opinion piece, not evidence

~~~
grey-area
1) She proposed the idea, on briefing notes or in the speech, it doesn't
really matter.

2) You missed the direct quote from May in the article? Her opinions are
_very_ clear on this and neatly mirror Trump's populist nationalism. To quote
directly, she claims that British people are:

 _out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration_

Given that employment is close to an all time low and most products bought are
imported and thus nothing to do with low skilled immigrants this is clearly
untrue. They may be out of work or on low wages due to globalisation,
robotics, austerity, the markets, the dominance of china, the decline of
British industry etc, but tying this to immigration is mendacious, dangerous,
and entirely without basis in fact.

As robotics continues to take over, and most manual jobs disappear in the
coming decades, this explanation of foreigners taking our jobs will become
more and more appealing and more and more dangerous.

~~~
blibble
it does matter if it's an idea under consideration or a plan in action.

their job is to consider options, and they binned this one (thankfully).

normally this sort of transparency would be seen as a good thing,
unfortunately with the vehement overreaction of the press to an immature
proposal as if it was policy, I suspect in future we won't find out until the
ideas are beyond the proposal stage.

if you take a single quote, and ignore everything else they've been saying and
doing for the past 6 months, you could indeed say that the UK Government is
similar to Trump's administration, but it's simply not an objective
assessment.

------
dcip6s
For any Americans reading this, how does it feel right now to have Trump as
your leader give what he's enacted in the last week?

~~~
timwis
I can't believe all the other responses to this question were either positive
or from someone abroad! Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there
is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Awful. It
feels like a bad dream that we're expecting to wake up from. And people are
_afraid_ of what's to come from the administration, and of the attitude that
the election has seemed to condone. The feeling is so strong here that it
reminds me of riding public transit on a snow day -- you can generally make
any remark to any random stranger about the snow and instantly relate to one
another. That's how it is about Trump. His rhetoric does _not_ reflect the
views of the majority of Americans (as the popular vote shows).

~~~
CalRobert
Note that the question was asked around 5-8 AM in the continental US on a
Saturday morning, so early responses were likely to come from abroad. Like
many others here, I'm an American who lives abroad. There are a lot of reasons
for this, but part of it was concern about the direction the US has been
taking in the last 16 years.

I'm horrified and terrified of what this government holds for the future. It
seems like the US is quickly abdicating its role as guarantor of peace (flawed
as it was in that role's execution) and I worry deeply about the possibility
of a divided and poorly-armed Europe being overrun by Russian influence or the
Russian military. In addition, there is a terrible human cost to GOP policies
with regards to healthcare, the environment, and of course telling Iraqis who
put their lives on the line for the US that they can just go home and get
murdered.

I worry that Trump's bluster about voter fraud has less to do with his injured
pride at losing the popular vote and more to do with claiming reason to annul
any GOP failures in the 2018 or 2020 elections. I can imagine a GOP supreme
court, GOP congress, and military with GOP sympathies might be willing to go
along with it.

The world's democracies, under both conservative and liberal leadership, have
been too willing to infringe on their people's privacy, and I wonder where
this goes if you extrapolate the trend over the next decade or two. The
closest thing we have to a leader of the free world is Angela Merkel, and
she's suffered politically for her policies.

------
NTDF9
Two questions:

1\. What is the difference between elected dictatorship and democracy?

2\. Will Americans stop screaming 'Murica', 'We are number 1' from now? This
president and how elections are held in this country are a joke. So much for
democratic process and respect for the office.

~~~
zigzigzag
Well, but how is it not democratic? Didn't Trump say many times he'd do
exactly this, and he won?

Arguably executive orders should not exist, nor should a powerful President.
The Swiss system of a rapidly rotating presidency and strong "state rights"
seems preferable to me. But the USA has strong elected Presidents and I never
saw any American seriously challenge that setup, I hear more talk of states
seceding than I see talk of changing the constitution to limit the power of
the POTUS.

So I don't see your point. The people were given a (fairly crappy) choice,
made it, now their preferences are being implemented. That's democracy.

Don't get me wrong. I think locking people who live in America out of the
country because they happened to be on vacation at the time is outrageous,
stunningly stupid. But maybe if prior generations of politicians had been more
responsive to anti-Muslim sentiment things wouldn't have got so extreme now.

~~~
jbmorgado
_" Well, but how is it not democratic?"_

It's quite simple, it's not democratic in the sense that the _majority_ of the
population voted for another candidate, but in the end Trump got elected.

Final ballot count:

Hilary: 65,844,610 votes

Trump: 62,979,636 votes

Now, I understand these are the electoral rules in the USA and I'm not saying
Trump won _unfairly_ , but he certainly didn't win _democratically_ since the
majority of voters didn't want him there.

~~~
zigzigzag
That takes you down the road of arguing the USA isn't a democracy, which is a
fine semantic argument of little relevance to current events.

If this starts a movement to abolish the electoral college, great, but the
core problem here isn't a few million votes. Even with a different system
Trump could still have won. The core problem is that such a guy was able to
even get close to the White House and the root cause is a dire failure of all
the other politicians to address the concerns he addressed.

------
gotchange
I don't think that this EO is applied to holders of valid green cards in the
US but definitely people on visas like H1B are definitely to be affected but I
think that a company of the size of Google could make some arrangements as a
quick remedial to situation by transferring some to other countries where they
have operations to work from there till they figure out how to handle this
situation going forward.

~~~
TuringNYC
Applies to all aliens, which includes GC holders:

According to NY Daily News: "Within hours of President Trump’s executive order
limiting immigration from Muslim countries, green card and visa holders were
already being blocked from getting on flights to the U.S."

[http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-order-
blocks-...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-order-blocks-green-
card-visa-holders-airports-article-1.2957910)

~~~
gotchange
I have read the full text of the EO and I couldn't find any reference to this
applied to GC holders.

Can you please point me to the paragraph or item in the EO where it mentions
this?

~~~
TuringNYC
"It will bar green card holders," Gillian Christensen, acting Department of
Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an email.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-
gree...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-greencard-
idUSKBN15C0KX)

~~~
gotchange
I must say that I was stunned to read about these reports as I was thinking
that the worst part of this despicable EO was singling out Syrian refugees for
an indefinite ban from entering the US followed by the fake concern for the
welfare of women and religious minorities in the ME by instructing the AG to
publicly shaming wife beaters only of foreign nationals but to deny entry to
legal permanent resident who went through all the vetting procedures and hoops
is just equally despicable as banning Syrian refugees indefinitely.

------
Oletros
It is astonishing that people with an already legal card to work in the US and
living there are banned from entering the country.

------
hartator
Don't forget the initial executive order was signed by Obama. Banning dual
nationals from these countries to use the Visa Waiver Program.

~~~
Jabbles
Could you explain in more detail please?

~~~
simonbyrne
I believe the parent was referring to [1], which blocked dual nationals of the
aforementioned countries from using the visa waiver program if they were
eligible under a different nationality (e.g. a dual UK-Iranian national could
not enter using the VWP on their UK passport). However it was an act of
congress, not an executive order, though it was supported and signed by the
former president.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/15/iranian-
amer...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/15/iranian-americans-
visa-regulations-waiver-programme-us-immigration)

------
tristanj
Assuming the executive order holds up, In the best case they will be allowed
to reenter the U.S. after 90 days. The executive order suspends immigrant and
nonimmigrant entry for only 90 days for people from specific countries not on
a Diplomatic, NATO, UN, or International Organization staff visa.

~~~
gotchange
This suspension could be renewed very easily and even extended to other
countries. There's a report on NYT [0] which fielded questions to Iranian
officials and politicians looking for their reaction to this EO and they made
it very clear that they won't share any sensitive info about their citizens
with the US admin rendering them to be the most likely candidate to be
permanently banned from entering the US esp. when taking into account that
they top the list of those seven countries in terms of visa holders in 2015.

[0]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/world/middleeast/trump-
vi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/world/middleeast/trump-visa-muslim-
ban.html)

~~~
denzil_correa
> This suspension could be renewed very easily and even extended to other
> countries

Well, it seems that the current execute order is illegal.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-
immigratio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigration-
ban-is-illegal.html)

------
_callcc
We should not be banning our Kurdish comrades!

------
geomark
Are there any noises about coming capital controls on foreign remittances?
Seems like a logical next step to enforce the lock-out of foreigners and lock-
in of assets.

~~~
gotchange
Would this actually be legal?

I think that there are international agreements and treaties that ban such
draconian and vindictive measures.

~~~
geomark
I don't know the legalities of it. But the government hasn't been bothered by
legalities in many things for quite some time.

