This is so utterly frightening.
And disturbing to see how quickly stories like this are flagged into invisibility on HN.
edit: luckily enough people vouched for the story to be rescued.
replies(4):
edit: luckily enough people vouched for the story to be rescued.
As an outsider, especially as one who visited the US every quarter for over two decades, and was asked every time on the purpose of my weeklong trip, I see nothing wrong with the deportation of someone in violation of their visa requirements.
I also don’t see how foreigners (or “aliens” as US law seems to prefer) can claim protection under the US Constitution. If the latter does provide it, that’s great, but frankly it makes no sense to me.
As a visitor to a country I expect to follow that country’s laws, and not expect any privileges which are afforded to that country’s citizens.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit
If you need to discuss politics, then the easiest solution is to find another social media about the article - one that desires political comments.
Please downvote this comment.
Everybody, including the country's citizens, are also expected to follow the country's law. If you come to the US and get mauled, as a non-citizen you have the right to the same protection as anybody else. If you are suspected of mauling someone, as a non-citizen you are afforded the same rights to a fair trial as citizens. If it was legal in the US to beat up a foreigner because they are not protected by the law, it wouldn't be very safe for you.
This is the rule of law [0] and is a really important concept in modern democracy. This is why foreigners on US soil can expect some protection by the laws of the country, of which the constitution is the foundation.
> As a visitor to a country I expect to follow that country’s laws, and not expect any privileges which are afforded to that country’s citizens.
Visas indeed have additional legal requirements, typically around rights to work or study. It is unlikely that a US visa would specifically restrict speech or protests (you are welcome to check this in your visas), and so it is the rule of law that applies.
In short, what is being disputed here is not that a foreign citizen was deported for violating the law, but that the deportation was decided by the executive branch of government, which is a breach of the separation of powers.
The response by the government is that it is legal for them to rescind any visa arbitrarily. This is currently being debated hotly in the US, and is essentially the background for this article.
That used to be a good healthy rule, because down voting didn't used to be a systematic cover vile land stealing masochistic genocidal deranged people. But now there's an asymmetric force where bad people are systematically able to deny access to topics they find inconvenient.
The rules are inadequate & the crimes of this world too deep.
If people are so slammed incovenienced by having to skip over a couple posts they personally don't want to read, then a) fuck them, they are not too incovenienced, b) get over yourselves you shitty fucks, c) stop providing covering for vast human rights violations, rampant murder and starvation of children.
These rules used to work well, because complaining about down voting was because there were shitty pissants who would actively downvotes everything on systemd, or everything on Kubernetes, or everything about JavaScript. Today's there's enough up votes to deal with the haters, and these topics actually get a fair shake without negative comments immediately dominating any submissions. But it just wasn't real stakes. The fact that we lost a couple years of these topics being overrun by monsters wasnt great, but no one really enjoyed the complaining about that status quo of shitlords always winning. Today though, I think there's a lot a lot a lot of people sick to hell of the information system here being totally lopsided, sick of not being able to discuss DOGE, DOGE's desire to fire everyone & replace us all with mechanized unaccountable decision making, sick of not being able to discuss Israel being an absolute monster beyond words. The downvoting and flagging is totally out of hand, totally unacceptable, and suppressing the very real topics of our day from being even somewhat visible and it's a gross injustice, that we should be hacking towards better on.
I think that the suspension of due process in the home of Hacker News, the US, which was designed by its founders as a bastion of freedom from kings where people could pursue whatever their intellect desired with a guaranteed right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is important enough to merit discussion.
I think intellectual curiosity dies when due process dies, because if people can face arbitrary, excessive and (frankly) cruel punishment for thought crimes by the state, then what else is there?
Intellectually curious minds fled in the 1930s to the US when this happened in their nook of the world. And now, we're seeing the cycle repeat in their chosen nouveau homeland.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
Eventually, the Supreme Court extended these constitutional protections to all aliens within the United States, including those who entered unlawfully, declaring that "aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law." The Court reasoned that aliens physically present in the United States, regardless of their legal status, are recognized as "persons" guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
> bastion of freedom; kings; liberty; cruel punishment; thought crimes; 1930s
These are all fine intellectually stimulating things which I believe are critical to inform ourselves and others about. HN is not stopping you from discussing them. HN is not a jail. The request is that you discuss politics elsewhere: please just use other forums that welcome political discussion. Nobody is preventing you from doing that.
Disclaimer: those are just one users opinions (my own) on how things seem to work here. I'm most definitely ignorant about what the managers of HN think. I too have a deep interest in politics and civics and I too struggle with the HN guidelines. YMMV.