Congress shall pass no law — but executive branch under Trump does whatever it wants regardless of laws anyway…
Read textually, it covers “the people...of the United States" [1][2].
The courts have interpreted this to mean people physically within the United States, with some ambiguity at the borders.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/preamble/
[2] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Also, going through social account history is not only for reasons of oppressing freedom of speech. Presumably you might want to reject visa applications from someone who threatens others with murder
That's how the law works in the US, due to the textualist nature of our jurisprudence.
Sort of [1]. (“We the people” has specific case law.)
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/pre-3/ALDE_00...
A citizen of another country is not allowed to open carry at the border just because they showed up, for example. Similarly, there is no universal right to get a student visa.
The US borders aren't a constitution free zone. It's a region where you can search people, not anything else.
A better way to put it is that even if the 1st amendment doesn't apply, it's still against the ideal of "free speech"
Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)
> freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)
> constitutional protections extend to “all persons” within the U.S, including undocumented immigrants.
Note: US Embassies, where interviews are often conducted, are still considered US soil subject to US laws (otherwise the latest declaration from Trump pausing them would not apply to them)
I don't think that's how it works. The US visa application requests significant amount of personal information, and this is supposedly cross-checked with the US databases/intelligence agencies.
So I doubt they sit down with you going over all your posts on hackernews, but rather ask what you use and your usernames and cross reference that with lists of people interested in ISIS telegram groups.
I would be uncomfortable giving that data myself, but i was uncomfortable writing a lot other things in my visa application, and never thought anyone is forcing me to visit the US
It’s why in the past tourists could expect due process under the law, and not be disappeared out of the blue, etc.
So if the US is rewriting that social contract, they should probably explicitly say what provisions only protect US citizens and which apply to everyone. Because otherwise, is it none?
There is specific distinction between citizens and persons.
Habeas Corpus applies to persons. But there is no right that applies to every person in the world that would give them a right to get a student visa to a US university.
Some Supreme Court decisions—
Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)
> freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)
> constitutional protections extend to “all persons” within the U.S, including undocumented immigrants.
It is none, and that predates Trump.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
> No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
> No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
"it applied to all residents of the US…"
Slaves? Native Americans?
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/a...
In regards to slaves or Native Americans - again it depended on the states' laws. Hence the entire reason why the 14th Amendment was passed.
The fact that they only called out the requirement of citizenship for office should make it pretty clear they intended the rest of the constitution was universal.
Then we agree; it very much includes the concept of citizenship.
If this is what you are defending than we couldn't disagree more.
It does clearly imply a difference between "natural-born" citizens and naturalized ones, and that citizens and residents/people/persons aren't the exact same thing.
The choice to use "citizen" in some spots and "person" in many others seems very deliberate.
I guarantee that you cannot imagine the course of American history if every foreign national was vetted for dissident works. Losing WWII would have only been the tip of the iceberg.
(Just to make sure we're all aware of the facts, here's information from the State Department that the nature of "catch and revoke" social media screening is to target this issue: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-...)
Israel is strategically advantageous for the US and the rest of the West. Having a Western strong arm in the middle east is the goal geopolitically. Nobody actually cares about Jews or really thinks they're entitled to that land. We just really, really want that land because of course we do.
If the US only cared about power-projection in that area, Cyprus would also be an easy option (like the UK does with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_and_Dhekelia), as would Turkey (a NATO member), and these days they could probably have an easy time working with Egypt.
Sure, Israel has a lot of stuff going for it (nukes that won't necessarily be blamed on the USA; MOSAD is infamous; etc.), but counting on them alone is an all-eggs-in-one-basket strategy that comes with risks.
You say that without having seen the screening criteria.
I mean, when China bars renowned scholars from entering its borders because of what they might say, we judge it pretty straightforwardly.
Yeah, I keep hearing people say this kind of thing, or that the first amendment only protects US citizens. But ... where does that come from?
I thought SCOTUS was supposed to have been jammed with conservative "textualist" justices, and the amendment states "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Nowhere does this mention citizenship. Nowhere does it say it can regulate speech outside or at our borders.
Now, from just the text I could imagine someone trying to claim that the Executive is not bound by the first amendment which specifically says "Congress shall make no law" ...
A couple of places to start are Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972) and United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990).
That said, the right to free speech does not mean you are free from consequences from that speech. If you're hoping to gain access to a country, it would be wise to refrain from criticizing that country. Yes, views can change and maybe you talked negatively before realizing you wanted to visit the offended country. Not sure what to say to that.
No, it's not. The First Amendment is a legal provision restricting what the U.S. government can do. Free speech, as a principle, is a broader construct. Some people believe it's a natural right [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
say something bad about israel, and you lose entry to the US, if you're poor
I agree with you that this violates the spirit of the first amendment as it is currently interpreted and portrayed, but how do we square that with this interpretation producing results that are squarely at odds with the intent of the founders? Pornography being protected by the first amendment is another example that is pretty straightforwardly against the original spirit.
If this is actually about anti-Israel sentiment being policed though then I’m just confused generally. If the views in question aren’t “destroy America” or “revolution in America”, both of which should be left to US voters and not foreign agitators, I don’t think that is really any of the US government’s business.
> In the eighteenth century, bookstores in the American colonies carried an extraordinary array of erotica, ranging from Boccaccio’s Decameron to such explicitly sexual works as Venus in the Cloister, The Politick Whore, and Letters of an Italian Nun and an English Gentleman, and there were no statutes forbidding obscenity during the entire colonial era. To the contrary, throughout this period, the distribution, exhibition, and possession of pornographic material was simply not thought to be any of the state’s business.
> The first obscenity prosecution in the United States did not occur until 1815, at the height of the evangelical explosion of the Second Great Awakening, which triggered a nationwide effort to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity.
Benjamin Franklin would've loved Pornhub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing...
They were right about the first amendment but were wrong about a bunch of other things.
Don’t forget that the first amendment isn’t the only amendment. America didn’t even achieve equitable civil rights until the last half decade or so. Within living memory women weren’t allowed to get bank accounts without spousal consent.
This idea that we should go back to the original ideas thought up before industrialized society was invented is super weird.
By not pretending we can read the minds of the dead, not letting racist rapists dictate our society from beyond the grave and enforcing the law as written and as interpreted by the courts. This idea that the founding fathers are the sole source of truth is not only dangerously destructive, it's explicitly denied by the constitution itself. This doesn't violate the spirit of the first amendment as currently interpreted, it violates the first amendment.
What makes you think that? Slave-owning aside they were a pretty outward-looking, foreign-fashion-following, elitist bunch.
Is there any example of colonial or early federal period governmental actions demanding that anyone make a record of all of their correspondence available for review to determine whether they had anti-American views? Even at the level of senate confirmations, did the standard of "we should be able to check that you never wrote anything which we view as unacceptable" ever turn up? Bear in mind that for years after the fight for independence, many of them lived in communities where they knew and interacted with former British loyalists, so this wasn't an idle concern.
I think a bunch of them were on record making very broad statements in defense of personal liberties, and a bunch of them had been accused by the crown of being treasonous based on stuff they had written, so one could understand them being _not_ on the same page of creating punishments for categories of speech.
> Pornography being protected by the first amendment is another example that is pretty straightforwardly against the original spirit.
Is it? My understanding is anti-obscenity laws at the federal level in the US really go back to the Comstock act in the 1870s, i.e. the founders and multiple generations after them didn't attempt to ban porn. I think it's entirely consistent to believe that the founders didn't imagine that a government had any business making such stipulations.
By "foreigner" do you include Native Americans? From what I gather, Harvard, Dartmouth, and other colonial era colleges nominally encouraged educating Native Americans, as part of their Christianization. There wasn't much of it, to be fair, but it was a stated goal. There were also schools like Moor's Indian Charity School.
By "foreigner" do you include the Black population? We know there were schools for black children, like the Williamsburg Bray School. From what little I know of slaveholder Madison, I don't think he was against free blacks getting an education.
Could you point to anything specific from Madison on this topic?
Jesus christ. Don't you feel at all obligated to provide support for the thing you're "pretty sure" about before asking people to accept it at face value? Based on your surety? It's hard to tell if this is basic rage-baiting with the absurdity of your claim sans support, or if you truly believe that wild claims don't require any, because enough people's reactionary vibes align with yours.
Least nobody forget the twitter files where it was revealed the Trump administration was ordering twitter to take down tweets.
This whole policy is dumber than conventional security theater.
But then again, that's the point of this policy. It has the thinnest veneer of being for a legitimate purpose while hurting those that this administration wants to hurt.
Every social-media background check I've seen searches extant and archived media.
That is the goal of the policy.
> What threats will actually be caught by this approach?
Catching threats is not the goal.
Americans believe we're exceptional. The mere idea of copying Europe is dead in the water before you can explain why it's a good idea.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after we've tried everything else.
This attitude and culture will probably be the downfall of the USA.
Trump personifies this view and takes it to extremes, he basically talks as if whatever he says is all that matters and nothing else is important.
Going to learn the hard way, that's for sure.
I'm a British national. When I left the UK in 2018, people were still talking about Dunkirk like it was a British victory rather than a rolling defeat whose only (even then partially) successful component was the final evacuation; about WW2 like it was a simple victory rather than a Pyrrhic victory; and about the Empire like the end of it was the UK's choice.
I don't share your positive outlook. There's at least two other likely scenario's:
- a large part of the country might not learn at all
- the only lessons being learned are about how to stay in power
Scrutinizing belifs generally don't lead to anything but misery for everyone involved. This is very different from scrutinize crime that has happened.
The only grey area is the role of secret police. Some people, possible a majority, do want the government to scrutinize belifs and political views in order to determen risk. I am less sure, but I also know that human rights and protected classes has less protection against risk assessments conducted by the secret police.
1) The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [0] which was written by the United Nations (with Eleanor Roosevelt as the committee chair). As a Declaration, the document itself has no legal weight, and the US has only ratified three out of nine core treaties that are based on it. One of them is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [1], which does seem applicable here. Before rejoicing however, consider that the other two treaties that the US has ratified are the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [2] and the United Nations Convention Against Torture [3] -- so don't expect any miracles here.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICCPR
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICERD
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCAT
For reference, ACLU fact sheet from 2013 about the US' track record on human rights: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/121013-human... (PDF)
2) The European Convention on Human Rights [4], which is both a document and a court where human rights violations can be tried. Its jurisdiction is all members of the Council of Europe [5], which is broader than just the European Union (even Russia used to be a member, but was kicked out after the invasion of Ukraine). The EU requires all members to ratify the ECHR as one of the conditions of membership.
[4] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-convention/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_europe
For reference, the text itself: https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG (PDF)
3) The EU itself has a Charter of Fundamental Rights [6] which covers the same topics. From what I could find, the main reason for the name change is that the EU fundamental rights are broader than the international human rights, so this avoids confusion when discussing either in international contexts.
[6] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...
For reference, explore the Charter: https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/title/title-i-dignity
But because of a perception that Academica is a liberal power center, conservatives are focused on destroying it. And that's what this is, make no mistake; this is a culture war, an anti-intellectualism crusade, and a celebration of ignorance and raw power triumphing over reason.
A dark time for America as the destruction of our education system unfolds, but good people are fighting back.
It was a golden age of knowledge that is being crushed by MAGA.
For example, in the Shanghai ranking, 16 of the top 20 universities are in the USA. https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2024
In US News and World reports of top universities, 14 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the USA. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...
In The Times Higher Education ranking, 13 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the USA. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
To be blunt, your assertion has extremely weak evidence. I urge you to look at facts and evidence and not your feels.
This one.
In most rankings of work universities US schools dominate the top of the list. Same when it comes to winning Nobel prizes--8 of the top 10 are in the US (the other 2 are Oxford and Cambridge).
The animating reason has less to do with Israel and much more with popular distaste with academia's left-leaning tendencies, particularly since the 1990s, combined with the Columbia protests having been incredibly poorly handled by all parties.
Obviously, if left-leaning academia was actually impaired by it's tendencies then right-leaning academia would overtake it. Alas, there is not a better-known school in America than Harvard. The auspices of free market competition have not funded the construction of more conservative schools. The liberal academics have American innovation by the balls, and the market is okay with that.
The good news is, that's a very American process. Your school can be dirty, base, vile, poorly-sorted, distasteful and frugal, but completely validated if your results are superior to your peers. Attempting to force any other outcome is a subversion of the market's will, tooled by the instruments of a planned economy.
> particularly since the 1990s
You know, I recall a certain jingoist American conflict before the 1990s where students protested nationwide. It didn't do much, adults also blamed "both sides" for handling it poorly, but it did ultimately prove the students right when America lost the war. Goes to show how quickly things can change, but I'll leave that as food for thought instead of bringing up Saddam's WMDs.
That’s the point. Before the 1990s, student protests tended to find purchase across a broad set of the population. Since then they haven’t.
Are there Israel-specific factors amplifying this response? Of course. Is it enabled by a deeper loss of legitimacy for academia? Absolutely.
Then no, she was jailed for calling for incitement to commit crimes.
If you mean this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
Then I'd say essentially yes, despite it being a fine and not imprisonment and getting quashed later anyway, because most of us aren't lawyers and won't care about that kind of distinction — and that goes double for students on a visa.
[Edit: Just realised the "you" in your comment can either be the poster or the police, with very different consequences.]
The rules are something that looks like a credible threat.
Both these, at the time of the conviction, did look credible.
The second was only overturned because enough people argued well enough that it wasn't credible and shouldn't have ever been seen as credible. The rules were then changed to emphasise the arguments people had made so this didn't happen again.
Maybe China can become the destination for ambitious smart people.
There is a big opportunity to pull in brain power for any country who wants it and can offer the follow on career.
Don't underestimate the language barrier. All those stereotypes about Chinese people mixing Rs and Ls? That works both ways, not just tongue twisters like Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den*, but even "Hello": https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=“你好”%20%2F%...
And machine translation is currently so bad, that the last few time I tried giving an example here, people who actually speak Chinese would respond with something along the lines of "I have no idea what you tried to write, that is nonsensical".
* https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4&pp=ygUhTGlvbi1FYXR...
Have you tried LLMs for that?
> According to separate Home Office figures, 393,125 student visas were issued to foreign students in the year ending December 2024.
> That is 14% fewer than in the previous 12-month period, but still almost 50% higher (46%) than in 2019.
So a 14% decrease between 2023 and 2024. I am willing to bet this will go down further this year.
The post-brexit surge in international students was driven by UK universities leaning on foreign students to fill their financial hole. The fees for domestic students will start to go up now that foreign student enrollments are declining.
Applicants can provide some but not all of the logins. Also, people will then turn to multiple accounts.
If the form asks you for all your social-media handles, and you fail to list one, that's visa fraud.
If at some point I opened a throwaway reddit account to ask about the mole in my anus, does should I report that account? And if I forgot the handle, am i doing fraud omitting it?
Practically, if you’re posting pro-Hamas content here and the guidelines wind up citing that as something they look for, yes.
> if I forgot the handle, am i doing fraud omitting it?
Fraud typically requires mens rea. Not legal advice. But I don’t think this would count as visa fraud.
- Target schools as centers of dissent and either co-opt or failing that, dismantle them.
- Portray 'intellectuals' as enemies of the people or agents of foreign/cosmopolitan influence. Use the state apparatus is to punish, exile, or eliminate intellectuals to make examples of them and enforce ideological conformity.
- Elevate the the "common man" or "true proletariat" as the ideal citizen embodying folk wisdom, in opposition to educated elites.
- Frame any opposition as existential threats to the nation's values or vitality; invoke religious or nationalist themes.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvi...
I'm pretty sure a bunch of three-letter agencies have intel on potential extremists entering the country legally. Intel agencies in allied countries do share this information.
This is nothing more than a move to stop the "politically undesirable" from entering the country. I guess it's going to work like this:
- Crawl all social media activity (and probably mails, text messages, etc. in the future)
- Run a semantic analysis, if the person scores high on subjects which MAGA opposes, refuse entry.
Stopping "activist students" is to kick open that door.
So much for separation of powers.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/se...
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ar...
China (Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Greater Bay Area), India (Bangalore, Hyderabad, NCR, Mumbai), and South Korea (Seoul) - which represent the bulk of international student admissions in the US - especially at Ivy tier and T10 STEM programs, where the majority of grad and professional students tend to have studied in their home country for undergrad.
Those same students who would have done an PhD in CS at Stanford or an MBA at HBS will now do an MSCS or an MBA at their domestic equivalent, or most likely go straight into the workforce or start their own company with the equivalent amount of capital.
> places like London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver could take up some of the tech-trajectory students
Canadian, Singaporean, and British universities that aren't Oxbridge haven't done so hot with the top tier cream of the crop for undergrad.
If you are good enough to get into an undergrad program at a Tsinghua, IIT Delhi, or SNU tier program you tend to attend those instead of studying abroad because you can command a European salary with Asian CoL, and can anyhow study at a top tier program for graduate school.
Furthermore, top universities in China, India, and South Korea have been attracting Chinese, Indian, and Korean faculty from abroad with tenure track deals and/or significant subsidizes, seed grants, and labs for several years now.
It's also extremely difficult to immigrate to Singapore or the UK as a student AND THEN gain residency (the US was significantly easier until today, but is now on par with both those countries).
The cream of the crop of Chinese, Indian, and South Korean graduates already largely stopped immigrating to the US by the 2020s due to EU-level domestic salaries, more financing options for creating a company, and onerous visa programs.
That said, Singapore will remain a target destination for incorporation because of it's Bilateral Investment Treaties with China, India, and the US thus making it easier to access global capital, but the bulk of operations will continue to occur in China and India.
This was a very real thing when I was an undergrad, and it's surely much worse today. I have family with long histories of attending Ivy League schools, and their seniors are no longer applying to those schools, entirely over antisemitism.
If American universities were 1/3 populated by, say, Russian students with a high propensity for harassing gay students, implying that all gay people are predators, etc., I think the left-leaning commenters here would take a very different perspective.
I dressed up as Ghadaffi in college for a party. Not because I knew almost anything about the man. But because it was edgy and adolescent brains are dumb, particularly when male. Plenty of students who will go on to be good and productive members of society hold stupid views now, possibly most given the state of scial media.
This move, in particular, comes across as in particularly bad faith inasmuch as it's being done by the man who pardoned the January 6th nutters. Actual violent criminals subscribing to terrorist tactics.
For example, if you show solidarity for killed children in Gaza, that also means that you're by proxy pro-Hamas, because Palestine = Hamas. Thus you can not be pro-Israel, and must be anti-Israel.
Likewise we've come to the point where you can say: "I feel for the Israeli people after the October 7 attacks, but I don't like the Israeli government". You automatically get classified as something other than pro-Israel, and, thus anti-Israel.
The middle ground has eroded. And with the Trump administration being what it is, I have zero faith that they'll see it any other way.
Not really. I take the third option: I don't know enough about the situation to reach almost any policy recommendation with high confidence. Not engaging is always an option, particularly when you're dealing solely with rhetoric and not any fundamental action. (Obviously, if you're greenlighting weapons purchases your duty of care is higher.)
Sure. But declining to use the term "genocide" similarly illicits a negative response from a lot of the pro Palestinian side.
Single-issue advocates will tend to dislike you if you don't take their position on an issue. That doesn't mean anyone has to. (My pet war was Ukraine. I, similarly, took a dim view of anyone who described Russia's invasion as a defensive war. And I'd similarly argue with folks who thought what happens in Ukraine has nothing to do with America's security, though I hope I was more respectful than the status quo with Gaza.)
These are the people who will determine whether or not you get a visa over a statement both you and I see as benign. Anything other than explicit endorsement is seen as adversarial.
We don't know that yet, the guidance hasn't been issued. (And we haven't seen how it's being interpreted by consular staff.)
Yes. They're publish something and then a picosecond later a district court will issue a nationwide injunction.
I didn't have any similar experience with any white international students.
Do you think we should strip citizenship from and remove white men who are antisemites?
It'll take a while but people will start hiding their political beliefs and actions as a reaction to this and then the culture of oversharing may change.
This will ultimately be detrimental to national security as the US won't be able to so readily determine who is radical and who may potentially become radicalized.
Organizations profiting from theft and exploitation should be prosecuted as the pirates and criminals they are. If they want to profit from content, let them license it and pay with real money instead of likes and upvotes.
People need to stop impoverishing themselves and their communities by giving away all their personal details. They need to stop giving away what is precious to them to the likes of google, meta and X. If that means a decline of media subsidized by advertising and AI, so be it.
So I hope your prediction is correct. I would love to see stupid laws like these lead us to a world of small community networks protected by encryption and rights laws.
When the best and brightest of a county went to America it didn't feel like brain drain because whatever they do in the USA was about all the humanity. It was just this place where they invent the technology and the whole world benefits of it, so our tax money and resources weren't spent just to make US companies richer - that was a side effect. Even the aliens in the movies always arrived in US, always wanted to talk to the US president and whatever US did later was done for the whole humanity and all that felt right.
Why USA decided that they no longer want to be that place? It looks excruciatingly stupid to deny people who already got lots of investment on them to get some more investment on them in US and they cash out.
Is it possible that the decision makers believe that AI replacing human intelligence is just around the corner and they can cut off the actual intelligent people to reduce liability on race/nationality issues from MAGA supporters?
If you can understand this (and I know understanding politics for a foreign country can be very difficult. I've spent a lot of time learning to do this as a hobby) the behavior of the US electorate will be much more understandable.
If you could explain what this means it would be a great help in trying to understand.
FWIW, I think there's a legitimate complaint that illegal immigration depletes our resources (but there are also positives). I have a friend who teaches at a high-school with a large population of 'undocumented' students and he's constantly railing about how they unfairly use school resources to the detriment of the other students.
I think it's a much less legitimate complaint about legal immigration, visas, etc.
I know it looks like the whole country is just made up of corporations but there are actual people here who have lived here for hundreds of years. There's a whole country that needs to function and it only tolerates this stuff insofar as it benefits them which is a completely reasonable way for any citizenry to view their economy.
There are two parts to this. People are feeling frustrated and left behind. Its not only the US. Its nearly everywhere. COVID certainly didn't help. That is what is giving rise to right and far right parties getting elected all over the world. This is not as hard to understand.
But many people learning about US politics seem to confuse right wing incendiary rhetoric with what people want. People want solutions to the income divide. The easy solution presented by right wingers is that money, jobs etc is a limited resource and "outsiders are strip mining". Two entirely different things. What people need and how it is being achieved.
The reality is rich people have always disdained the poor - "they don't work hard enough and don't deserve help". While people at least had that empathy for fellow underprivileged. But under constant bombardment about being "strip mined" they have slowly let that go. COVID certainly didn't help. And even then that is not unique to US. Nearly every country populace has something against immigrants. US is not unique in that aspect too.
If America was passing a law to provide livable wages to its workers everyone would champion the cause. But I am sure many loud RWs will oppose that as "welfare society" and "not what people want" etc.
But to many outsiders who grew up in the era of American exceptionalism this is a unique situation. The last place anyone expected this to happen is America and everyone will lament that.
I don't really understand this. In my circles, I have heard people warning about the direction that the US was heading in since the 90s. The US government has been working for We, The Corporations instead of the people for decades (Bayh-Dole, repealing Glass-Steagal*, zero repercussions for the subprime mortgage crisis). The militarization of police forces didn't happen overnight either, and neither did the anti-intellectual bias in US corporate media (for example, I remember when Sarah Palin was hyped up as a viable presidential candidate).
So no, from my point of view none of this is unexpected nor unforeseen. The only thing that could have surprised some people was the timing (directly after Obama), but the direction was communicated loudly.
* sidenote: the Glass-Steagal act was enacted just a few years after the 1929 stock market crash which caused the Great Depression; and within ten years of repealing it, we got hit with the largest financial crisis since 1929. Lessons were unlearned and not learnt again.
Social media vetting has been in place since 2019, surviving multiple administrations. Most people I know do not fill in the boxes on their ESTA form despite technically being perjury from what I understand. Expanding social media vetting to better catch unreported social media accounts to enforce a now longish-standing policy on a smaller group of visa applicants as a start doesn't seem too insane I think? It does if you link it to university suppression like the Harvard case, but I think there might be some straw-reaching in connecting them.
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