At my company we make a niche software used by companies globally. Our plan was to arrange a conference in the US for our clients in North/Cental America. Considering the state of the US, we will probably cancel it, as we don't expect our Mexican and Canadian clients to feel comfortable at all. Neither do we at the head office in Europe.
We will instead host it in Europe most likely.
I remember when the ACM ICPC had to be moved from Egypt to the US during the Arab Spring. It's got to be a logistics nightmare to move a conference, but it's best to bite the bullet at the first sign of trouble.
This is deliberate. To my knowledge, absolutely no US airports allow you to transit without going through immigration, and stopovers in the US are very hard to avoid because the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country unless they stop at a US airport.
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
They require issuance of paper visas and an in-person interview. It's _easier_ than B1/B2 visas; but in the overall scheme of things not _that_ much easier.
For a person deliberately avoiding the US (whether out of principle or otherwise), I can't imagine a trip through customs for a transfer would be acceptable either.
That's a great idea. I can't speak about Mexican alternatives but there are many great locations in Canada for a conference.
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
Depends on when the conference is scheduled, but Mexico has some world renewed venues at the seaside - say Cancun- that nobody minds visiting when it’s winter at home. :-)
I noted that a bunch of physicists met in Cancun on December 10th to discuss the new Galaxy survey that led to questioning the stability of the strength of deep energy.
Traveling to awesome places is a perk of (physics) academia that is not widely appreciated. A large fraction of physicist seems to do rock-climbing or other hobbies that align well with exploring the outdoors when traveling.
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
Yes absolutely. It’s odd to see people here suggesting Mexico as an alternative based on safety of travelers. It’s a giveaway that they’re simply being opportunistic in attacking America due to their opposition to the administration, rather than anything actually safety related.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
There are certainly plenty of areas in Mexico that are dangerous (typically along the US border and drug routes), but it's not as though everywhere in the country is more dangerous than everywhere in the US. E.g., I've been to academic conferences in plenty of US cities that rank among the most dangerous in the world (Baltimore, Oakland, Philly, etc.), [0] as well as Mexico City, which decidedly does not rank among the most dangerous -- let alone the resort destinations. The reality is, "family on vacation murdered in cartel territory" is going to draw a lot more media attention than "family on vacation robbed in New Orleans" or "overwhelming majority of families have perfectly safe vacations". You can't judge by sensationalist articles how safe a place actually is, let alone an entire nation the size of Mexico.
No, he is right. Mexico still has an awful problem with the drug cartels that control whole regions and can actively undermine the government in the whole country. They just recently discovered a death camp that might explain where some of the hundreds of thousands disappeared people ended up.
But there are regions where hosting a conference would be possible, mexico city or Querétaro for example.
I have been going to IETFs on and off for 20 years. As if the past few months were not nauseating enough in the US, I never thought I would see my own country on a page like this, and described in this way, and I feel even more deeply saddened, ashamed and horrified.
I don't want to downplay your feelings there, but under Trump 2.0 it has become clearer to those of us in allied nations that things are not as they were, and that even long-term friends can now be insulted and thrown under the bus. I think there is a qualitative change here.
> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
The full quote extends that to adderal. To be clear he said the wellness farms would be for those who want to go, and he's describing a massive undertaking that you'd see coming before it was implemented.
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
Keep in mind he's also a guy who, contradicting all the available evidence, is saying incorrect things about the nature of adhd and dips heavily into moral issues when discussing medical problems. So any facilities related to his ideas are unlikely to provide actually care.
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Are you trying to claim that all users of Adderall have ADHD? Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall", but that conflation is objectively untrue. Countless people without ADHD abuse adderall / ritalin / etc.
In fact, people without ADHD are much more in need of an intervention if they are abusing adderall than someone who has ADHD, wouldn't you say? So the much more reasonable interpretation is that he is talking about those people, not people with ADHD.
> Because that is the only way you can say "well he is effectively talking about ADHD if he is talking about adderall",
No it's not the only way, because he's also talking about SSRIs, which have only medical uses (no abuse potential really). Therefore it is reasonable to argue he is also talking about Adderall's intended medical use against ADHD rather than its abuse.
No, you can't put words in his mouth. He said Adderall, not ADHD.
Yes he said SSRIs, but SSRIs are not for ADHD, so that has no bearing on whether or not he said "people with ADHD should be sent to camps", which he just... did not say.
This shouldn't need to be stated, but I personally think RFK Jr. is a nutter. That doesn't mean you can stick words in his mouth or imply things he didn't actually say.
That's all nice and well, but he also did say "psychiatric drugs", as if those were somehow generally bad and appropriate to reference in the same breath as illegal drugs.
Maybe, had he not said that bit as well, I'd agree with you. He could be talking about Adderall purely in a sense of misuse.
But he included psychiatric drugs, and that (and the SSRIs) makes his statement ambiguous enough that I'm comfortable interpreting it as including ADHD patients.
(And, just purely for vilifying psychiatric drugs, the threshold for intolerance [which must not be tolerated in order to achieve a tolerant society] is crossed. Lots of people have mental health issues and need treatment, including with drugs.)
I think you and plenty of other people on this thread are missing the point. As I understand it, it's not "round up people with certain conditions and stick them in camps" (is this not obvious?)
It's to provide people a path for getting off of all manner of drugs that are difficult to get off of. That could be heroin, or it could be Ritalin or some SSRI. It's basically socialized rehab based on some model that RFK seems to favor.
From what I've read (and seen in friends and family), the system is really good at getting people on pharmaceuticals. It doesn't seem to give much of a shit about helping them get off when they choose to do so.
I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a focus on misuse or abuse. Someone could have used the drugs exactly as directed and now doesn't want to use them anymore, and is running into an inability to do so on their own.
You could make the exact same argument about his mention of SSRIs. "Oh, he just means all the people without depression, who are abusing SSRIs."
No, you're being intentionally disingenuous here. Obviously, he dislikes the fact that these drugs are being prescribed to patients, and he would prefer it if they were not. I'm sure he imagines that these "farms" would be a better treatment for depression than SSRIs are, and likewise for the other drugs and conditions.
The idea is a place for anyone to get off any kind of drug they want to get off of. Note the "they want" part. Who are you to fault someone for deciding they no longer want to take a substance but need help doing so? Or someone trying to help that person?
If the parents went with the child, and stayed with them, then maybe.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
Perhaps, but I have family going through this and it just makes you so mad. I'd pay to send him to a camp where he's beat with a bullwhip every day if I knew it could cure him.
Perhaps it clouds my judgment a bit, but the alternative is just watching him die, which I'm not stoked about.
The profit margin on drugs is good. I think it would take about zero days before "remote location" is programmed into the Google Maps of several local dealers.
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
Not just parents. Its a method that actual addicts employ. I have heard this not only once. "Moved a few months to a rural place where I had no access to the stuff to get my system clean" is a tactic that people turn to. Heck, one example I am thinking of even moved from the USA to Europe in the 90s to get rid of his crack addiction.
This actually resonates a bit with my own thoughts from these comments.
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
What makes it so that some people/cultures seem to value age over anything else? If their lives continue to be miserable, broken inside, violent temper thanks to being treated like a slave, a long life to me sounds more like a punishment than a goal.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
Your thought experiment, the drug dealer being universally doomed, the only consequence being a state of slavery for a finite time, etc has no relation to reality.
He has no heart. He is cruel, as he subscribes to the idea that a disease isn’t something you get because you rolled the dice wrong, but something that can be avoided by being “pure”. For him, pure health is never systematic or unlucky; the person is at fault.
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
Before downvoting, do look at many available yt videos about his views of mental health. He puts that into much nicer words, but the comment is a good summary.
I had a drug problem once, and di something like that. It helped a lot. If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
> If there's no way to procure any drugs, it takes away a lot of the pain and anguish you feel coming off of drugs.
Or the fact that you're not longer in the environment with its stressors that cause you to seek out drugs in the first place? Lots of people sleeping rough go for drugs of any kind just to be able to put their mind to rest.
Finland shows this with its "housing first" policy, giving people a home is a relatively easy way to get them off of drugs.
would you, in the context of fascist Germany or other totalitarian regimes with concentration camps, not understand the quoted text as cynical euphemism for such camps?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
It's not after that fact, or any euphemism - this is the exact way the regime tried to pass them off at the time. Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds. The reality was much different as we know. They did have a small pool on the grounds for show.
Your source for this is an article that takes down a description from a book that was written in 2010. Not sure if you quite caught that on your thorough reading of it.
I just wanted to find some supporting information, what I know about this I know from visiting the camp myself so I didn't have an amazing source at hand.
Good for you! If only things like this were taught in schools so that by the time people find Hacker News, they'd already know about them. We would be having entirely different conversations.
Seems like a waste to update the curricula every few years to include, for example, some random lady who published a holocasut denail book in 2010 as referenced in that source. Doesn't seem very useful pedagogically!
this gets me the wrong way. see, I live in Nuremberg, Germany. I went to school here, "higher education". I've learned a lot about fascism, how it lured voters into electing them, how they grabbed and secured power, how they introduced concentration camps ("animal protection" legislation, prohibiting kosher butchering, introduced the camps as punishment for those insisting on kosher law. twisted)
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
AFAICT, this wasn't actually how the Germans framed the concentration camps at all. The article you responded to is about how a woman described them in 2010.
What about this article from AP, Monday, April 24, 1933, doesn't say wellness farm, but it also isn't very accurate. Was a cursory search of contemporaneous articles and that popped up, probably not impossible to find more with similar descriptions. Enough to at least understand the message at the time was much softer than reality.
> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.
> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."
> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.
> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:
LOL yeah this really paints them in a positive light. If this is the best resource you have for how the Nazis propagandized their concentration camps (this is literally right after the earliest ones opened so you would expect whatever propaganda to be as strong as possible then) as “luxurious” then I’m going to land on that not being the case.
> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.
It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.
My "LOL" is at people condescendingly trying to prove things like "Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds" with sources which repeatedly don't do that in any way.
I guess anything we don't agree with can sound condescending but I assure you I thought I was relaying accurate information gotten at the place the things happened. I saw the pool and the guide had a whole bit about the Germans doing news stories there to prove how good it was. Maybe the guide was politically motivated, I guess, and I was just gullible, but the second article I shared definitely seems to paint a much rosier picture of the camps than starving people fighting for survival every day. And it doesn't sound surprising to me that people would lie about it being nicer? Is there maybe some deeper point that is annoying you in this imprecision that I'm missing?
there was "exemplary" KZ Theresienstadt which was used to pretend these camps were educational facilities, quite successfully so for some period of time.
Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.
>> I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
I only have nightmare memories, I was way too young to process what I saw :-(
I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.
I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
If RFK’s comments were made in isolation, I wouldn’t be so worried.
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
I like that you scrolled past the relevant paragraph here and then quoted a different thing that he said as proof that the paragraph that you ignored didn’t exist. I’m curious as to why you would bother including a real quote from the article? If your starting point for crafting a post is “Nobody will read the article I’m talking about” the sky is the limit, you could say he said anything you like.
Well, all I am going to take from this after reading some of the replies is that there is a slight change that the Brainwormguy is going to send the Rocketmann to a farm upstate. I can live with that.
Considering he has been a lifelong addict to various drugs, with endless wealth to be sent to "wellness farms", I'd take his opinion on how to treat any disease with the same perspective as I would any other drug-addled, brain-holed, rich narcissist, that caused his wife to commit suicide.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
Yes and some of the links to the “traumatizing” deportations are for people who are clearly in violation of their visas.
I had a friend deported from Denmark when he overstayed his visa and it was basically the same thing.
Some of these look really bad and could be sensible justification for the proposed boycott/cancellation (see French scientist eg) but a lot of it looks completely hysterical.
I don’t quite remember and would have to ask. I think he was detained for 5 days, maybe?
> Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
> That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
Again, I agree that there are a few stories of deportations that are legitimate causes for concern about hosting a conference with internationals in the US. But if you use people getting deported for overstaying their visas as a part of justifying that concern, then that is hysterical. It conflates issues that are effectively totally unrelated to one another.
It would be like claiming it’s not safe to travel to Italy because the local justice systems will charge you with trumped up charges and quote both the Amanda Knox case as well as cases where Americans actually broke the law and got charged justly. Only the Amanda Knox case is actual justification for the claim!
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
Correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying that inefficiencies due to incompetence are exempt from criticism.
It should go without saying that detaining innocent people is BAD, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence.
I’m not saying it’s exempt from criticism and honestly I don’t know how that could possibly be an interpretation of that. I’m literally calling it incompetent which is clearly criticism. I’m saying that a 2wk detention due to glacial pace of our shitty bureaucracy isn’t really “fishy” about anything.
And to be clear, they aren’t innocent in the referenced example. They were breaking the terms of their visa.
> The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bugs.
> If my system regularly ships bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to regularly ship bugs. If my system ships rarely bugs, then yes, it's purpose is apparently to rarely ship bug
And that's why a lot of us are pushing to change the system by eg. making it use a memory safe language. Otherwise it's gonna keep producing more bugs than it should :).
I've known people get caught up for months in immigration detention over simple snafus. I've also known several people who were literally just turned around at the gate and shoveled straight onto the next flight home. There are thousands of border points, and thousands of border agents, so I'm guessing there is an element of luck depending on where you appear.
All of those things look like they’re about being detained for several weeks when trying to enter the US? Why wouldn’t they just refuse you entry instead?
Yeah, why detain and treat people badly when you should just send them back home on the first available flight and then ban them from using the ESTA program? The pointless and expensive cruelty is the issue.
RISC-V moved to Switzerland as well a while ago. I think it's a shame to see stuff like this happening. Regardless, of where one stands currently in the current environment making standards bodies want to move or move events to other countries is not a good.
Regardless of the political situation, the EU is probably a more friendly environment for a standards body taking their stance in interoperability into account.
More importantly, and according to your link, only Estonia rejected 50+% Indian applications, everyone else rejected less than 50%, with only 2 others anywhere near 50% (Malta and Slovenia).
So out of 29 countries in the Schengen area only 3 were anywhere near the 50% mark and all 3 are tiny countries as far as both area and populations are concerned (those 3 combined account for only 4 million people in total).
Also, just to take one of those 3, Estonia has an overall high rejection rate in comparison to all the others, and that started happening after the pandemic.
Schengen isn't "different from EU". It originally was separate from EU, but since 1999 has been an aspect of the EU. Per Wikipedia:
> Originally, the Schengen treaties and the rules adopted under them operated independently from the European Union. However, in 1999 they were incorporated into European Union law by the Amsterdam Treaty, while providing opt-outs for the only two EU member states that had remained outside the Area: Ireland and the United Kingdom (which subsequently withdrew from the EU in 2020). Schengen is now a core part of EU law, and all EU member states without an opt-out which have not already joined the Schengen Area are legally obliged to do so when technical requirements have been met. Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements.
Yes, but the inclusion of a non-EU country in an EU programme as a special exception (not unique to Schengen) doesn’t thereby make it a non-EU programme, which is a natural interpretation of what you said
I never wrote that Schengen "is not an EU programme", I pointed out succintly that the countries in Schengen and the countries in EU are not the same thing.
In fact there are also EU countries NOT in Schengen. And there are countries in Europe but not in the EU which are not in Schengen either.
I would guess that 90% of the applications were for travel, not work.
> their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies
These countries don't even bother to apply their policies. Some cases I heard about indicate that they randomly reject applications, without reviewing them.
Ah, you’re right. The linked article doesn’t say, but apparently a Schengen Visa is “for short-term purposes, such as tourism or business trips. Work permits are apparently not counted in these numbers, then.
As to whether they are conforming tot heir own policies or not, I can’t find any evidence either way in the linked article. They’re just stating the numbers.
>Estonia, Malta and Slovenia rejected the highest percentage of Schengen visa applications from India last year, while Germany, Italy and Hungary were most accommodating.
Sounds like Estonia, Malta, and Slovenia didn't want their countries to become transits for illegal immigration from India to the UK.
Countries like Germany get legitimate Indian immigration for work and higher education so their rejection rate is lower.
As far a I know, all of the listed countries are reasonably safe to travel to. I’ve not heard any stories of arbitrary detention from any of them, which is what this article is (mostly) about.
Trans people might not enjoy Slovakia or Hungary right now, but I’m not sure they are unsafe to visit for them (yet)? Someone local might fill me in here…
Yeah, I've seen that. It's been well documented that they are slipping into authoritarianism, nationalism and even a dictatorship. Free speech is not really in place anymore. I was just not very well informed about how civil liberies for trans people look, specifically. Whether the country is safe to travel to for conferences being the issue at hand. I see on Wikipedia that Orban has ended "legal recognition of transgender Hungarians", which I guess is probably significative of the trend, if nothing else.
It’s not unsafe for anyone to visit the US either. Unless you’re violating the law in some way, like presenting false documents or overstaying a visa - in which case there would be consequences like in any other country. Sure mistakes can happen on rare occasions, like in any country, but “arbitrary” detention isn’t a thing. That’s just sensationalism from a biased news media that has no idea why anyone was denied or detained, since that isn’t public information.
I don’t know if you’ve read about it but apparently if a trans woman has “F” in her passport and a border agent determines that she was previously a man, that’s now considered fraudulent and grounds for detention and deportation.
Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention. These people are not even being given due process. I’m sure each of them is detained for some mistake in their paperwork, but some of these stories are really not flattering to the ICE.
> Overstaying a visa in any other (developed) country does not result in this kind of detention.
The US doesn't have a monopoly on immigration horror stories: Australian immigration illegally detained an Australian citizen for 10 months. [0] They illegally deported another Australian citizen to the Philippines, and when they discovered their mistake, their initial response was to cover it up rather than try to rectify it. [1]
This is a 20 year old article and no we don't have "nazis kill foreigners with some regularity". Yes hate-crime happens, but you make it sound like an active war zone where you have to be afraid of your life if you are "foreign" looking.
> I'd wager for tourists it's very safe in Germany.
Unless they're Black or "look Muslim", in which case I'd stay the fuck out of Eastern Germany. There's more recent reports as well, e.g. [1] - and it's been a massive issue for Eastern Germany, especially since the rise of Pegida [2].
But don't get me wrong, Western Germany also has its no-go areas, especially anything rural. The large cities tend to be decently safe from far-right violence - but even the smaller ones can be dangerous. Just last week a friend of a friend and her child was attacked in Landshut near Munich by a drunkard (and no it's not hearsay, there's a police report).
Regarding your knowledge on this topic your recommendation is an insult.
Every month a crazy asylum seeker drives into a crowd of people here, I don’t make this up look it up.
All kinds of outdoor festivities are undergoing brutal security regulations, making them unprofitable and many don’t even happen anymore because of this.
Not even mentioning the knife crimes which are absurdly.
Nazi crimes are the lowest they have been in history. Most problematic are the antisemitic tendencies from the Palestinian movement at the moment.
> Every month a crazy asylum seeker drives into a crowd of people here,
Did you forget (or not hear) the Magdeburg x-mas market car attacker was an AfD supporter and antiislamic? And the Mannheim one was a German gardener with "Reichsbürger" connections?
It doesn't quite make for snappy headlines, so a lot of people never hear these details…
The Madgeburg terrorist is a Saudi Arabic refugee which dislikes the Islam and not really an AfD supporter, but mentioned that he liked some position regarding the Islam critique the party has.
The Mannheim terrorist is indeed a German but I guess that the exception confirms the rule.
Overall all extrem attacks if from right, left, foreigners are an issue and need to be adressed accordingly. The problem which the Germany people have with the current state of affairs is that the bad behaving asylum seekers mostly the ones from the middle east get a soft treatment to say the least when they commit heinous crimes and the deterrence of appropriate punishment through law and order is not given.
You call someone who has lived in Germany for 18 years a refugee, and dismiss his AfD sympathies. That says nothing about him and everything about you really.
Try to look a little bit beyond your polarized bubble. I'll be happy to meet you halfway there.
Well he is official an political refugee in Germany because of his anti islamic activist activity, his origin country wants to prosecute him. He was until his arrest an anti islamic activist and had a very active social media presence in which he lamented about the way Europe and especially Germany are handling the refugee crisis which are mostly Muslims. In this context he reposted and referred to some AFD politicians and their position on the crisis.
Does that make him an AFD supporter?
Afaik his social media was so messy that people would connect him to various even contradicting things. That the big press settled with AFD supporter after they found some repost is lazy and misleading.
I did not claim the article contained that information, I specifically claimed it did not. It is an example for non-deadly violence that indeed does occur regularly there. https://www.bpb.de/themen/rechtsextremismus/dossier-rechtsex... is a source for the murders and also describes why the statistics are hard to gather.
109 murder in over 30 years is not "regularly" either, more people die from falling of stairs in a single year.
Meanwhile there where over 750 group rapes/attempts in 2023 alone of which 50% of the perpetrators where foreigners. But I guess that one wouldn't count as "regularly" for you....
Hungary is run by an authoritarian leader (Viktor Orban) who has strongly aligned itself with Christian nationalism and is opposed to immigration, gay rights, and what it calls “Western literalism”.
What makes you say that it is family-friendly with a blooming economy?
Orbán just banned Pride events nationwide, and vowed to use facial recognition software to fine anyone attending. This all in an attempt to placate the minority of the populace who want these kind of draconian measures (polling points out that the majority of Hungarians do not support this ban), and to draw attention away from the inflation, economy, and terrible state of healthcare and education.
A utopia for white Christian traditionalist families who feel Putin is just a misunderstood leader trying to protect his people. Not quite as family friendly to any other family. Family-friendly to me means that a place is actually conductive to raising a family, regardless of what your children grow up to be. This includes children who discover that they are gay or trans (or even just atheist or non-Christian). And are families made up of two gay parents welcome too? Otherwise 'family-friendly' is just a fascist dog whistle.
Does that mean you actually approve of banning something like a Pride event?
'Gender ideology' as a term is awfully vague and not really a thing outside of extreme-right politics. For some this appears to even include homosexuality and expressions of a non-binary gender identity, in addition to acknowledging the concept of gender dysphoria and transgenderism. The way the right-wing Hungarian political parties are using that term to me has nothing to with a critical or conservative stance with regards to transgender healthcare, or healthy public debate. Rather it seems to serve as a deliberately constructed straw man.
The problem is that no matter what restrictive policies and laws are enacted, gay, non-binary, transgender, and other queer Hungarians exist.
I'm personally not in favor of pride but I don't feel THAT strongly about it to be in favor of banning it either. This is how I imagine most of the country feels. What I was getting at with my first comment is that if our opposition fully owns up to being pro-gender that would torpedo their chance of defeating FIDESZ (which I think is ultimately more important than anything else in country level politics).
>'Gender ideology' as a term is awfully vague and not really a thing outside of extreme-right politics. For some this appears to even include homosexuality and expressions of a non-binary gender identity, in addition to acknowledging the concept of gender dysphoria and transgenderism.
Yeah this is where we are getting into fundamental disagreements. I, and most people I know just flat out don't believe that you can transition into being a woman as a man or vice versa. It's just not a thing. Much like how I don't become a car overnight if I sleep in a garage and make motor sounds. To me the whole topic transgenderism seems like some kind of mass psychosis where people delude first themselves and then threaten others to follow along with their delusion. Sure, wearing a skirt and calling yourself Jane as a Joe doesn't hurt anyone of course, where I draw the line is when this inevitably turns into demanding that others be a part of this farce.
>The way the right-wing Hungarian political parties are using that term to me has nothing to with a critical or conservative stance with regards to transgender healthcare, or healthy public debate. Rather it seems to serve as a deliberately constructed straw man.
It kind of is a strawman. But in a "broken clock is right twice a day" way I have to give this one to FIDESZ. As long as they are preemptively preventing stories like these[0] occurring here, I can't fault them for this one. That being said, I hope TISZA won't give any concessions on this either.
> I, and most people I know just flat out don't believe that you can transition into being a woman as a man or vice versa.
I think I see where you're coming from. To be fair, I don't think many people actually believe in a magic fairy who turns men into women or vice versa.
But : In the playground, have you never looked at some kid at a distance, squinted, and gone 'I wonder if they're a girl or a boy, it's hard to tell'?
I know I've had that experience myself back in the '80s, before there was this much debate.
I could have said Switzerland, but I believe that my point expands to the entirety of the EU, why I expanded a bit.
As some of you sibling commenters also write: Not all parts of the Schengen / EU is equally - just like you probably wouldn't move these things to rural Alaska.
If you’re saying that being able to legally bring cannabis into a country is a test for whether the IETF can host their meetings there… I don’t know if that is accurate.
Sure, Singapore has draconian laws when it comes to narcotics. But surely everyone attending will be aware of this? It’s been widely reported over the decades how foreign nationals have gotten life sentences or even the death penalty for drug running. What I’m saying is that Singapore are up front about it and it’s not enforced arbitrarily. Leaving your personal stash at home and abstaining for a few days should hopefully not be too difficult for the attendant engineers.
I am aware of that, but the fact that it was still on the books matters. For one, it has psychological impact, and for another if some police officer in a bad mood doesn't like your face geometry or number of thumbs, things like this can become 'power trip utilities' even if they're thrown out a few hours later.
Those are very fair points. I too am glad that the law was repealed.
I frequently get the impression that the policymakers in Singapore are more progressive than they reveal, but are extremely cautious about loosening up because they don't want to antagonise certain voter groups (e.g. people of certain religious persuasions). It is quite telling that the law was repealed in its entirety only in 2023, one year before the former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stepped down from his position.
It's true that since 2007 charges have been laid by the police in a few cases, these have been challenged, and variously overturned or thrown out from court.
So, enforcement was certainly attempted and people were certainly detained for periods of time and forced to defend against charges that were laid.
It's not readily clear how often charges under Section 377 (1860-) or Section 377A (1938-) were laid in Singapore prior to 2007 (or of the charges laid how many cases came to trial and how many convictions occurred).
Clarification: the “not new” part is foreign attendees not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. So, if you valued inclusion, holding international conferences in the U.S. has been a bad idea for a long time.
Being detained is way worse than being denied entry.
> I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
> The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
> I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
They're not blind to it. They either like it and want it (sometimes because they benefit from it), or they're indifferent to it because it doesn't affect them personally. I know — it's really hard to appreciate the mindset of people with no empathy.
Don't forget the concern trolls that imply doubt of it happening at all, and then downplay the severity if you dig a little. We have some in this very thread, deploying their "scare quotes".
That exact same article says someone has been tossed around in that system for ten months. That’s just someone among the 100-200 people they met. That same article even has photos of the system from the 2000s. There’s a photo of people sleeping on the floor wrapped in the exact kind of aluminum sheet “blankets” dated 2014. It’s been going on for very long. (Btw, I suspect it’s only getting attention now that the more-equal-than-others groups are also getting the same treatment, but I’m not going to push that point.)
And I was very clear about which part is “not new”. What a shame people can’t read. What a shame partisan commenters read “U.S. has been blah blah for a long time” and immediately jump to “Trump defender!!!”
The links you shared in your original comment all pointed to "rejections", not "legal people being detained".
What has always been going on: people overstay their visa, depending on the scale and country, people get treated badly almost always in these cases.
What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
These are clearly very different things and very much a fault of specifically Trump administration. Searching phones and messages to look for Trump critical messages .. unbelievable and totally new stuff is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
> ... now: ... legal visa holders are being detained
I disagree. These legal visa holders are caught for small (or slightly larger) infractions, like a previous visa revocation due to running a cannabis business, sort of working (helping?) on a non-work visa, obviously planning to work on a non-work visa, etc. These could always (at least after 911?) land you in big trouble in the U.S. if you have the wrong nationality and/or skin color. I believe these were almost completely ignored by (mainstream) press because most Americans won't sympathize with them, they are obviously illegals, criminals, terrorists, etc. Now that Canadians/Western Europeans are caught in the system, suddenly people with the same infractions or suspected infractions are obviously legal visa holders.
I personally know someone with the wrong nationality and wrong color who was detained at the border (maybe not technically "detained"? let's say held) for no apparent reason for hours and got their devices searched, then released and allowed to enter. That was either 2013 or 2014. Thankfully not weeks or months.
The only fundamental change now is the bar is lowered and sympathizable (to most Westerners) people are being caught in it.
And I maintain that people who actually valued inclusion shouldn't have held conferences in the U.S. since a long time ago, if ever.
Complete disregard for any kind of due process for a Canadian seems absolutely new. (Either she's a criminal and they charge her or she's not, and ... escort her to the airport as she said she is willing to go and pay for the flight. Suddenly treating people like enemy combatants, telling them absolutely nothing of importance, is ....)
I agree with your "this didn't start yesterday" view and with the "holding US conferences was always less than maximally inclusive" (for example because it was fucking expensive to go to Las Vegas, and because the phone searches, and ... in general the whole border patrol can do anything for miles around ports of entry)
But many things can be true at the same time. Trump found his paramilitary troops, the scale of the operation(s) and the source of the cruelty being the White House seems new. (At least since Nixon/Contra.)
> What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
The agencies don’t reveal reasons why someone was denied or detained, so there is no evidence whatsoever that someone was detained for being critical of Trump. The claim that this happened is from Philippe Baptiste, a French minister for higher education who has been attacking America continuously in a bid to attract researchers from the US.
People aren't blind to the abuse. They want plausible deniability, permitting them to opt out of the duty and responsibility attached to citizenship. Therefore the metaphor is flawed: blind suggests an inability. People are capable of understanding what's happening, and are choosing to be a spectator, and not a citizen.
What are they waiting for? To see if they will come out ahead. It's classic rebel's dilemma.
Eventually the truth will catch up to us all. We'll undeniably realize this is a tyrannical movement that intends to replace the Constitutional order without the consent of the governed.
In no universe is the election of a dictator equivalent to 3/4 of the state legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution.
Getting a visa to travel to conferences was one of the major blockers for non-EU citizens during my studies. It was heartbreaking to see people work for years on a subject, finally get accepted to a top conference, and then not be able to go and present just because the visa was impossible to get in time or was simply refused.
However, these cases were rejections of visa. And even Stenberg's case was about being denied entry, not arbitrary detainment and torture like we see now. IMHO this wave of cases is a change in quantity that results in a change of quality already. But the quality of the rejection/detainment has changed as well.
The first isn't the same at all: Chinese scientists were prevented from attending based on an official government policy, not randomly arrested and detained.
The second and third are the same incident, from the prior Trump administration. But the visa was denied; nobody was arrested or detained.
People are randomly arrested and detained base on official government policy. And they have been arresting and detaining people long before Jan 2024, but it was scaled up recently. A recent story made it clear that some people with minor visa overstays have already been detained for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548
The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time. That’s not new. In fact [2][3] is only noteworthy because it was an influential individual (in this circle) with a strong passport; people with weaker passports are routinely denied. Hell sometimes UN diplomats are denied.
Once again, when I say “not new” I’m talking about
> The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time.
TFA says
> As an Internet community we strive to include everyone. Holding a meeting in the US is incompatible with our values.
It’s been incompatible with their values for very long.
No, I’m arguing with someone who thinks I’m saying arbitrary arrests are not new (in fact I believe those aren’t new either, but I’m not arguing that and can’t be bothered to dig up sources), when I’m saying not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. is not new.
> “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.
I don't think this has been a basis for denying entry to people in past?
I believe people make roughly similar amount of noise depending on the situation, but we are not there to hear it. (And in case of many people from eg. South American or African countries this is not a completely new situation so.)
Thank you. I am in the U.S. and am threatened by these measures. I'm not a member of the IETF, but I rely on their work heavily, and the solidarity is meaningful.
(off-topic but common misconception that should be corrected:) IETF doesn't have "members". You just show up on the mailing lists or meetings and sometimes do productive shit, other times get into massive bikeshedding and almost-flamewars. It works surprisingly well but does have its issues.
People do take you more seriously if you've been around for a while and they know you aren't full of shit, but that's just social dynamics.
This website mixes some very real and very big problems (erosion of basic freedoms and rights in the US) with some entirely hallucinated ones (concentration camps for people with ADHD, and torture? I'd certainly want to learn more about that than a passing mention).
Personally I think the hyperbole only serves to cheapen the real problems.
Translation via DeepL:
"The German's mother made serious accusations against the immigration authorities in the US media. She told NHPR in New Hampshire that officers had "violently interrogated" her son for hours. He had to strip naked and was forced to take a cold shower by two officers before being put back in his chair. He was then taken to a room with other people in bright light and was given hardly any food or water. He was also denied access to his medication. According to his mother, the man eventually collapsed and was taken to hospital. It later turned out that he had the flu."
The government employees at these border crossing definitely feel too confident that whatever they do will get covered up or ignored by the people above them. And all trust I ever had in the forth estate - nationally and internationally - has gone with this entire mess of a presidency too. They mostly seem to parrot each other's assurances that things that are happening are completely normal, or at least understate heavily. I'm happy outliers exist, including some unexpected ones like Wired Magazine.
WIRED Magazine crawling out of the pits of being a glorified collection of advertisements to having quality journalism pieces about tech related news was not something I was expecting for these times, but I'm happy to have been pleasantly surprised.
Americans should learn that solitary detention is torture. Check out all the effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement Also support for genocide is major international crime, btw, which is another crime Americans are very blasé about, while commiting it.
This is an administration that openly is talking about annexing Canada, as well as invading panama and Greenland. It's an administration that has literally said "we want government workers in trauma."
3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.
You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.
"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."
That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.
In the 1965 book Night of Camp David the president's cabinet realized he was insane because of his fixation on annexing Canada.
In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.
People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.
What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully.
No, they don't.
They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.
> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.
> If the People want to set aside the Constitution
No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.
Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.
> The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.
> autogolpe
No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.
> CEO-dictator
This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.
> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.
Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/
It's flagged because it's one-sided political activism. I mostly support the first EO that is on that front page. What am I supposed to do? 1) Post here and defend it, then get in a flame war with people who disagree? 2) bite my lip because we're not supposed to support Trump's actions? I'm not allowed to support the elected president because it's not popular?
I'm sure there's a left-leaning tech group you can join where everyone agrees with you. But this post doesn't belong here, and neither do flame wars.
This is insane, everything that criticize US and current gov is flagged. Really disappointing and frightening. As a European citizen who reads European news, it was really strange not to see topics about the deterioration of US relations with its allies and its closer ties with Russia on this site. It was major news in the EU and completely silent here.
I can easily sympathize with those who want HN to be some kind of bubble to where they can escape from the/their troubles. (Using the flag feature for this is not what I would do, or ever did.)
Maybe? But the US is a weird two-bubble system in which "you're either with us or against us" is held to be true by most people. Which is why a sane 3rd option isn't available on the voting card. And it's why "being pro-Trump" is not the only reason one might flag that post.
Outside the US, where a completely polarisation hatred between just two parties is not the norm, there are people who can agree with their opponents on some issues. MANY people outside the US hate Trump and think that he's screwing up America, the global economy, world peace, their pension etc, but they might still be able to agree with him on some things.
Unfortunately it's becoming the norm. (Not to mention that in many places with de facto one-party this was also the norm since their first day on the internet.)
And dang refuses to recognise that there is any kind of problem with this. Just tells people with a straight face to assume everyone is acting in good faith and that you shouldn’t ever question that assumption for the sake of harmony.
I heard last night from my friend who works in astronomy that they decided to cancel their event in the US and let the US attendees travel to Europe instead.
I can’t get used to the fact that the US seems dead set on destroying its reputation in the world.
But with the direction the comment section of HN has taken over the last few years I’m sure there will be lots of commenters who will dismiss this as virtue signaling.
It is real. It is interesting, because I don't think US wars or international interference over the years have caused this effect but now people are avoiding the US for pure "look out for number 1" reasons. I.e. it isn't safe enough for them to enter and it ain't worth the risk for some conference, holiday or work thing.
Wondering why this is flagged. Sure, it's politics, but it's also a serious issue on one of the major internet SDOs. It's certainly relevant for "good hackers"?
Fence-sitting these days is a political decision all by itself. Well, it always was, but now that we've established a new normal (that's not very normal) rooting for the status quo is even more partisan.
The tech community has an interesting role to play here - I wonder how long it will take for gafam to start having issues recruiting skilled foreigners (or simply flying them to the US for interviews.)
It's not too much of a problem now, as t
Big Tech is not in the "software business" so much as in the "laying off people to make the stock look good" ; but at some point they'll have to bring people in to actually write code.
Or, are they expexting LLMs to really make the bulk of the jobs?
Or maybe everything settles down in two years, and this is just a bout of neo-McCarthyism.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess Europe must not be that bad, if people are organizing conferences here instead of China or Dubai ?
Hear hear. Great initiative. I am not in the US but I do feel threatened by the way the US is conducting itself these days. It's time for people working in tech to push back.
Half the people on HN either support what’s happening in the US now or say “doesn’t directly affect me so leave me out of it” as if this is an argument about yankees vs mets.
I feel like we took the wrong lessons from atrocities in history. We treat them like they happened before some special enlightenment that magically shields us from history repeating, so it's okay to face the early warning signs with apathy or paint anything as a difference in opinion. Surely someone will care when things escalate; surely there would be an outcry more loud than this if it was serious.
Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
Iceland is a nice halfway point between the EU and the American continent, its a 5 hour flight from Boston and a 3.5 hour flight from London, its not a bad place to consider
you don't exactly need to be beaten with a hose. that said:
- psychological manipulation through prolonged uncertainty and withholding information
- dehumanizing conditions like freezing cells with inadequate blankets
- sleep deprivation
- physical suffering during a 24-hour transfer between facilities while shackled and confined in a prison bus
- humiliation and degradation particularly during pregnancy testing procedures where she was forced to squat over a communal toilet with others present
- arbitrary detention without any timeframe without clear legal justification despite having an approved visa and no criminal record
The German tattoo artist got 8 days of solitary confinement, like so many others in ICE detention, that ICE only ended after her mental breakdown and self-injury, and not out of ICE having respect for their own rules.
> Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
Regardless of your take on this, it's very interesting to see the UI components they're using. These look identical to the gov.uk system, but I wasn't aware of it being available for use outside of their government websites.
It's kind of ingenuous to take RFK's views on drug rehabilitation options and re-state them as if people are being sent to re-education/concentration camps.
That said, I do find the US border incidents to be super scary. I don't blame people for not wanting to come.
It should, but there is, understandably, a lot of inertia and disbelief that this is the new status quo. That, and obviously, as the pamflet points out, a lot of people assume that this won't happen to them.
And let's be honest, a lot of people do indeed feel that this will only happen to people who make mistakes in their visa application (knowingly or not), have tattoos (or travel with tattooing gear), participate in any form of activism, are transgender or otherwise queer, or any other reason not applicable to conservative/right-leaning, white, middle class or higher, educated white collar workers. Some people are quite comfortable with all this (I won't bother pointing out the historical parallels), and it does come down to privilege and having an approved political mindset.
And here's the really nasty thing: if you point this out, you run the risk of sounding exactly like the 'woke' bogeymen this administration is 'fighting'. Language and the imagery invoked have been hijacked to a fascinating but troubling degree.
I support the initiative, but it seems half the respondents are trolls (Debby does Dallas, USAID Fake news, etc), which make it all look very unserious. I would recommend some moderation or validation.
Yeah, this is a question that has been discussed for many years but since so many good conferences happen in the US and that Europeans rarely had to suffer this treatment in the past people have been lazy and allowed this to happen since they were not personally affected. Now that all of the world is affected it is easier to get momentum for action on this.
He won every single swing state. Under his leadership his party got the house and the senate. You’re in denial picking an arbitrary metric that doesn’t reflect how elections are won.
It was neither a popular nor an electoral landslide (it was a below-average electoral margin for a US presidential election, the 17th narrowest of 60 elections).
Yes, the party won a trifecta, but that's a completely separate thing from a landslide.
While it indeed "doesn’t reflect how elections are won", that is only relevant to the fact that Trump lawfully occupies the position of President. It matters very little to issues related to e.g. "public support" (which can change dramatically even with larger margins) or, pertinently in this case, "are the members of this group at risk if they attend this event in the USA?"
Even your response is echoing my observation, going on about him. Whoever really sought to defeat him should have been focused on proffering a cohesive, affirmative platform.
For the record I’m not a fan of his on many issues but it’s still fascinating to see millions of people endorse a failing strategy and after it completely blew up in their face just keep pursuing it.
Right? This is hacker news, not reddit. Whether one finds their stance silly or not, one should respect that real people are making real decisions to skip a conference. This isn't a meme.
Our country is being destroyed and I don't mind some foreigners putting pressure on our society to get our shit together.
> doing things unpredictably and appearing arbitrary, they try to create a situation where feels safe - it could happen to anyone.
This is a great point: doing menacing things here and there creates a sort of illusion that they can do menacing things everywhere at once, which they actually cannot.
> yet it was actually no threat at all to US security or even NY security, beyond ~two buildings.
If we're talking about carried out threat and not achieved aims: there were more than those two flights and more than those two buildings targeted. And even if you are talking about achieved aims only: the Pentagon was hit as well if you are forgetting that or maybe that just belongs in the '~'. In fact more than two buildings in NYC itself were destroyed, even if only two there were targeted.
The seat of the main elected branch of government (US Capitol) was targeted and likely would have been struck without the passenger interventions (fighter jets had been sent out towards the atlantic ocean and FAA had not yet ordered all planes grounded even if NORAD had been alerted by that point). We were very lucky passengers and crew had made airphone calls and some disallowed cell phone calls to get enough critical mass to fight back.
I think the subsequent war on terror, used to invade Iraq without any relation to the attack, was terrible, but this kind of deflation is pretty insane to read.
I should have thought more carefully and included the DC buildings, but it's still only a few buildings and thousands of people. And that took an enormous amount of planning, plus luck, etc. He was never going to take over the US, defeat the US military, or endanger more people than the flu.
Keep thinking even more carefully, it was more than two buildings destroyed in NYC and a huge portion of legislative branch could have been killed if in session. Threat of total defeat of US, which Capitol attack wouldn't have caused, isn't exactly a reasonable benchmark for being the only thing that would balance out the response we had.
"seemingly arbitrary state violence is an old, well-established tactic of states"
You weren't referring to the subsequent "war on terror," relating the state response to that to the state reponse to this? It was just thrown in unrelated?
> But because it was seemingly random, people thought it could happen anywhere.
While people everywhere did fear, what was "seemingly random" about targeting: the Pentagon, the US Capitol, and the most prominent buildings in the NY skyline, which had already been targeted before in a bombing plot by the same groups?
The german cases are true and there is nothing you can say that would justify putting people in prison for multiple days without their relatives knowing what’s happening.
There is also no evidence of them of any wrongdoing. Just claims by the ICE.
The fact that the current administration and its supporters have managed to categorize The Guardian in this manner speaks volumes about their goals wrt any media that attempts to hold them to account.
> This is just activist extremism. There’s no threat to anyone’s safety. The US is perfectly safe to visit.
Except the link you're responding to is literally linking to reports of threats to safety.
> Activists who are in opposition to the US presidency are overreacting to a few lone cases of people being detained at borders without knowing the details of those situations.
We know more than enough to point out that it shouldn't have happened at all. Even without those incidents, the previous concentration camps are not acceptable.
> Three of the stories linked are from the guardian, a far left publication that has been attacking the Trump administration.
The Guardian is a centre-left outlet, not a far-left outlet. Also, other outlets across the political bias spectrum are reporting the same thing so your comment here is boiling down to ignoring the message and attacking the messenger.
> All of the stories lack details and evidence of wrongdoing. So this just looks like hysteria and manufactured outrage.
You mean, except for the details, and the evidence of wrongdoing?
> Except the link you're responding to is literally linking to reports of threats to safety.
Typically when you break laws in a country, for example violating the terms of a visa, you face consequences. For everyone else, there’s no issue. But none of this is a “threat to safety”. Again, this is activist hyperbole.
> We know more than enough to point out that it shouldn't have happened at all.
You don’t know any real details. You just have vague claims from individuals that likely were breaking the law, and partisan news media amplifying their claims with zero investigation. There is no evidence of why these people were questioned or detained. We know at least a couple of the cases involve explicitly violating immigration law - visa overstays, attempts to cross the border after a denial, working while on a travel visa, etc.
> The Guardian is a centre-left outlet, not a far-left outlet.
AllSides correctly lists The Guardian as 'Left'. By adding 'far' to your characterization I can only assume you wish to advertise your own biases and / or denigrate the publication. It is a reputable newspaper with a long history of journalism awards - an appropriate example being this: https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2023/jun/23/gua...
Left on all sides is far left. It’s as left as their categorization goes. Unless you also agree that breitbart is not far right just because it is classified as right.
Israel uses threats to reveal sexual orientation in order to gain and control informants in Palestine, which increases distrust of and threatens gay people in Palestine, in adition to regular homophobia.
Special targeting and persecution, due to their position in society, is not something a gay friendly country would do to gay people.
Eg. this is a statement about what one Palestinian civilian organization that deals with sexual diversity in Palestine has to say about the topic of sexual diversity:
> The footage that we have been witnessing regularly, of Israeli soldiers posing with their rainbow flags and other Western gay symbols atop the ruins of our society, alongside genocidaires boasting about their sexual abuse, torture, and rape of Palestinian men, women, and children, only affirms what the Palestinian queer movement has been saying for decades: the Zionist colonial enterprise is predicated on the sexual abuse of Palestinians. Adopting an anticolonial, anticapitalist queer framework in understanding our reality is not merely an option, but a necessity.
> The Israeli state would not have been able to pinkwash its crimes without the aid of Israeli LGBTQ groups. These groups work closely with the Israeli government, army, intelligence institutions, and local municipalities. They have co-developed pinkwashing as a colonial tool by promoting racist myths about Palestinian society, framing Palestinian queers as victims of our “supposedly homophobic” society, and participating actively in destroying and erasing our queer movement.
Nowhere in there is any admiration of or inspiration by supposedly "gay-friendly" Israel, which is strange given that it would be the closest gay friendly country to Palestine, right?
And also a friendly reminder that Israel killed at least ~2400 gays incl. ~1000 gay children since Oct 7 and continues to kill them daily.
95% of the world put people in privately owned prisons so that someone get make some money from the government and the imprisoned before their flight back home?
> I will now spend some time looking up five articles of American citizens detained in some way in Europe and other parts of the world.
While you're at it, you should stick your fingers in your ears and shout LALALALALA.
I love my country, but it's a real shitburger right now. Just because we haven't fully closed our borders to all foreigners doesn't mean there isn't some insidious nastiness happening right now.
I prefer to live my life by what I see and hear around me and not anonymous posts on social media and, at the moment, this HN thread is nothing but a social media post as you would see on on Reddit.
It bears nothing of the reality I see and hear around me.
"All are welcome here." -- Ha. Ha. Ha. The US has never had an open border policy, and pretending they had is beyond disingenuous. You're just trolling at this point.
If you're traveling internationally, do so legally and with the correct paperwork. This isn't too much to ask for. People freaking out because the US is finally enforcing its immigration laws is hilarious. This boycott page has some incredibly delusional takes. Follow the laws of the country your visiting and don't worry about it.
> Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
> She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
> “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
> He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.
It's torture even if applied to guilty people. But your point is valid, it's just "how to treat prisoners". Having no privacy on the toilet as a default is dehumanizing in itself but may not be torture, but sleep deprivation by strong lights and inadequate heating certainly is, according to most definitions of torture.
Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.
I just did 10 straight years of this. No daylight is common if the facility is strapped for land to build outdoor areas, or is inside a city where looking in or out would be discouraged. The hand towels they give you for showering suck.
I tried suing over those, but even though there is a statute saying they must be bath towels, laws in the USA don't necessarily have to be followed. There are two types of laws, mandatory and directory. Directory laws are laws that are just "if you wanna" and don't carry any weight. A large majority of laws governing prisoner rights are these type of laws and there is no enforcement mechanism when they are broken. [ironically these laws specifically use the word "shall" in their wording, but in most jurisdictions "shall" is legally read as "may" in the USA]
I understand the sentiment that the Trump administration is draconian, especially for people traveling from abroad considering the new border policy. But, pardon me, how is that executive order about sex a "threat"? Listed as the top issue undermines the credibility of this petition I think.
if a post-op trans woman is arrested, she's denied access to HRT and sent to a men's prison, where she will be given to violent male inmates to pacify them. this is known as v-coding. even having a vagina doesn't exempt you from men's prison, it just makes you more likely to be repeatedly raped as the justice system grinds on. this was already the case in some US states but the EO makes it Federal.
the State Department has also announced that it considers sex markers that don't correspond to sex at birth to be fraudulent. ostensibly for the sports ban, but it actually applies to all visa applications and documentation.
combine those two facts with the administration's stated antipathy towards us, and the recent trend of Germans and Canadians being detained for weeks with no apparent cause, and I think you should see why trans women ought to avoid US travel right now.
I have never understood the trans women in sports thing. I see why it could be unfair to allow them to compete but that is a thing I would like the sports associations to handle. Being born with a male body could be a big advantage in some sports but not in others. Why should our politicians micromanage sports rules? Especially to make them more restrictive. Let the sports associations handle this.
I hate this culture war micromanagment where politicians write moral laws for things where there should not be any law.
Check out all the issues currently faced by people with either updated or X gender on their documents. Look at what happens with documents at government level that use even vaguely trans-related words. Do you get why people would see erasure like that as threat, given historical context?
Just to add one more example, the anti-trans frenzy led someone to call the cops on a cisgender lesbian woman who was using the women's restroom, where the male cops barged in to arrest her:
The order being reasonable or not is not germane to the topic at hand. It isn't relevant what sex a transgender person is defined to be. What matters to the boycott is that transgender people in tech are facing difficulty entering the U.S. to attend the conference. Wouldn't you agree that's a problem?
Right. I think I was unclear -- my point is that whether or not you agree with the E.O., you must surely agree it makes travel to the U.S. difficult for transgender travellers, right? And that's a problem for the conference.
If you're wondering why transgender travellers don't have documentation that matches their birth sex, it's because (gender identity aside) it's usually more important for documentation to match one's appearance. Documentation that doesn't match one's appearance can lead to questions, delays, and confusions. I have no source for this.
If you're wondering why it's a problem for the conference, I don't have a source for that either. But from the tech conferences I've been to, I generally have observed a higher proportion of apparently transgender people than baseline. So by hosting in the U.S., the conference could potentially miss out on many transgender foreigners participating.
It’s usually more important for official documentation to be accurate, not for it to match appearance. Many people appear younger or older than they are, but it would be bizarre to put apparent age on a passport. The document is supposed to act as the ground truth. Passports don’t currently contain a gender marker, so maybe that could be campaigned for.
Apparent age vs actual age follows a very different probability distribution than apparent sex vs actual sex (whatever that is). We don't have 10-year-olds looking like 90-year-olds, and if one existed, they would encounter a lot of problems at the border. This is analogous to someone who appears male, even on close inspection, but has an F on their passport (or birth certificate, or driver's license). Plus, these are the sorts of things you use to get a drink at a bar, not just borders.
Other countries allow one's sex to be changed legally to solve this problem. It's not "inaccurate" -- it's semantics. According to a different definition of sex (for instance, hormonal sex, which can be changed medically; or apparent sex), one's sex on passport might correctly differ from one's birth sex.
You might object that that's a worse definition, and those countries should change to the U.S.'s definition. But due to intersex people, there is no universally consistent binary definition of sex. For instance, no country which does not permit sex to be changed legally allows for options outside of "F" and "M". So if you believe sex cannot be changed, then you must also admit that there are people who can never have accurate passports.
Those different “definitions” of sex are not the plain and common meaning of sex as reproductive role. “Hormonal sex” is a characteristic, not an alternative conceptual framework of what sex is.
Yes, passports should acknowledge intersex conditions and this would be far easier if there weren’t people with unambiguous sex trying to use that mechanism too.
"Sex" is a disguised query [1]. I would not agree with you that the plain and common meaning of sex is that it's the reproductive role (which for many trans people is "permanently sterile" anyway). If you run a clothing store, you don't care about reproductive role, you care about whether someone wears men's or women's fashion. In daily life, a stranger's sex is entirely their appearance: we make a snap judgment to classify it as M or F, and most people will agree for any given person whether they are M or F. It's quite easy to see why that's what matters: if you get a public safety alert on your phone about, say, an "asian male, middle-aged last seen at ..." do you think, in the rare cases where they differ, that this refers to reproductive role or appearance? Let's hope it's appearance!
In daily life, outside of dating perhaps, most people generally don't care about someone's reproductive role. In a public bathroom, most don't really care what's actually between someone's legs so long as the individual looks like they belong. The authorities almost always care about sex only as a visible characteristic for distinguishing people. When you say the common meaning refers to reproductive role, you are probably saying that only because it's a proxy for the aspects of one's sex we actually care about.
This recent obsession that when we talk about someone's sex we obviously mean in a reproductive capacity regardless of context is a totally political fabrication in my opinion, and there's no good reason for a passport agency to prefer that definition. I believe the information on a passport is meant to help identify an individual -- so common-sense sex, i.e. appearance, is most important. (Similarly, requiring trans people to use the public bathroom they don't visually look like they belong in is only going to cause chaos, if they obey such a law.)
I mention reproductive role (gametes etc.) because that’s what sex is, not because it’s the sole feature of interest. Why we care about someone’s sex is a different matter. Sometimes we don’t! You can sell someone a coffee, and their sex has little bearing on the situation. But sometimes we do care about their sex, because their sex has material consequences. Perhaps sports are the most relevant example to this discussion about passports. The IOC uses “passport gender” to assess eligibility, which is possibly why the current administration is insisting that passports reflect sex, not gender, because sex is what matters to sporting competition. Gender is far less relevant.
There are many other situations where sex and its material consequences matter more than gender. Yes, it’s not gametes that make a man run faster, but there’s a clear causal chain between gametes, sexual differentiation pathways, gonads, and testosterone.
Incidentally, it’s a really weird idea that we can’t tell someone’s sex without looking in their pants, or without some advanced scientific analysis. In reality, outward appearance is extremely highly correlated with sex, and humans (and a lot of animals!) have evolved to be experts at detecting sex, sometimes at a great distance. Visual appearance, gait, voice, behavior, and more, are enough clues to not just make a guess at sex, but to do so with very high accuracy. Probably upwards of 99%. Official documentation is there to clarify the 1%.
Well, the justification for the visa ban is sports, so I could agree that your definition of sex is what matters in this case. But I think in the majority of cases, sex is listed on the passport just to help with identification. If not, then why is it on the passport at all?
There are many definitions of sex. Some would say that sex should be defined chromosomally. I think it would be very unhelpful to put an M on a passport for an XY cis woman -- it should be an F, or maybe an X, if X were just a marker to indicate an unusual edge case. If so, shouldn't transgender people at least be afforded an X on their passport?
And then there's what's between your legs. Well, this is surgically alterable to some extent, so do you mean what's currently between your legs, what appears to be your legs, what was between your legs at birth, etc.? Or do you mean reproductive function? Maybe someone might say that a regular surgery isn't sufficient to change sex, but stem-cell-grown genitals do count as changing sex.
Regarding outward appearance (etc.) being correlated with "sex" (however it's been defined) -- that's exactly my point! In fact, because outward appearance is what is important nearly always -- except possibly in dating, reproduction, and sports -- and because there are a plethora of different meanings when sex is defined as "biological truth," I honestly think that outward appearance (etc.) is what most people actually mean when they say someone is a "man" or a "woman." Therefore, sex, in common usage, is appearance (etc.). This matches with how a tomato is a vegetable culinarily (i.e. colloquially), but a fruit botanically (i.e. "biological truth").
(Anyway, all this is really beside the point of this thread. You can disagree with everything I've said -- I'm just trying to argue that the U.S. is presently a difficult destination for transgender travellers.)
But if a transgender traveller applied for a visa with their birth sex instead of the sex on their documentation, this would very likely cause them to be flagged at the border, and they'd have a very difficult time entering the country (and reaching the conference). Surely you must agree?
Well, reality is more complex then this.
It misses intersex as a biological option.
Not common, but still, it is not in there, but reality for some humans.
"compensatory actions", is that how you refer to Trump's executive order regarding gender identity? As if it was "provoked" by something? Do you know there is a word for someone who is "provoked" by others gaining access to basic human rights?
Who was denied a visa for being trans? Citation needed. Were they denied because they were trans, or were they denied for another reason but happened to be trans.
The current advice from the German government to me (a trans woman) is that I am ineligible to enter the US and will be detained at the border for presenting 'fraudulently'.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the U.S. is already denying entry visas for transgender travellers, either as a follow-up to this E.O. or based on the same principles as it. This doesn't seem hysterical to me.
This is just misinformation. Requiring factually accurate sex information to be submitted is not the same as discriminating against some group. It’s just common sense.
EDIT - response to defrost’s comment below:
The Australian passport doesn’t require fatally accurate information per your own link:
> Customers who identify as a gender other than male or female (intersex, indeterminate, unspecified, non-binary) may request that the gender in their ATD appear as X.
Sex isn’t a matter of “identifying” as something. It’s a biological reality. Progressive gender ideology cannot alter these facts, and it is unfortunate it has found its way into the identification documents of some countries.
The biological reality being that at birth babies are clearly reproductively male or reproductively female in roughly 98% of cases.
It's less clear for roughly 2% and indeterminate by any single means (chromosones, gametes, external organs) in small percentage ( 0.02% ) of cases.
Because of that biological reality various countries allow for people that were born neither [F] nor [M] to have a third option to avoid them having to lie on their passport.
The Australian passport requires factually accurate information and therefore allows [M], [F], and [X].
How do US border accept this under the current administration in light of the recent note by the current POTUS?
> The Australian passport doesn’t require fatally accurate information per your own link:
>> Customers who identify as a gender other than male or female (intersex, indeterminate, unspecified, non-binary) may request that the gender in their ATD appear as X.
No fatalities are required.
Passport applicants are required to be factually accurate about their identity and how they identify.
Perhaps you might think on that a little.
There is also the very real cases of people that have applied for and hold Australian passports that were born neither [M] nor [F] by any clear apriori definition.
Hence the applications for change, the court cases and the Federal ruling.
There's no real wriggle room wrt the edges cases of 25 million births, not all births fall into the neat buckets of ideal preconceived notions. Empirical observation begs to differ.
