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Trump versus the Visa Office
For all the emphasis on the southern border and The Wall, asylum procedures and criminal aliens, little ink has been spilled over the other side of immigration, the issuance of visas abroad to foreigners by the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. Literally millions of temporary nonimmigrant visas (tourist visas, students, temporary workers) are issued yearly, many of which go to foreigners who have no intention of ever returning home. They join the millions who flood across the southern border, entering quasi-legally and staying on indefinitely illegally. What reforms are due at State visa offices worldwide?
Project 2025 is harsh towards the State Department in general, citing one study which concluded the department is a “crippled institution suffering from an ineffective organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals, and in which sound management, accountability, and leadership are lacking.” The major source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness, Project 2025 believes, lies in its institutional belief “it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” Strong medicine.
The Project contains many country-specific and region-oriented policy plans for State to follow to remedy all that. There’s always more to do, of course. For example, it is interesting how many major political events of the last few years crisscrossed the State Department: Hillary Clinton’s emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and many things Russiagate, and the first impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind two Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton and John Kerry, found a home there. That’s an awful lot of partisanship for an organization which brags about being non-partisan.
Yet for all the policy and institutional changes proposed for State, it is the visa function which Project 2025 singles out as among the most important. The Project says “the department’s most noteworthy challenge on the global stage has been its handling of immigration and domestic security issues, which are inextricably related. The State Department’s apparent posture toward these two issues, which are of paramount importance to the American people, has historically been that they are of lesser importance than other issues and that they can be treated as concessions in broader diplomatic engagements. In other instances in which access to the U.S. in the form of immigrant (permanent) and nonimmigrant (temporary) visas could potentially serve as diplomatic leverage, it is almost never used. To some degree, the State Department and many of its personnel appear to view the U.S. immigration system less as a tool for strengthening the United States and more as a global welfare program. To ensure the safety, security, and prosperity of all Americans, “this must change.” Stronger medicine.
What the Project is getting at is visa issuance is typically divorced from larger policy issues and almost never used as a tool to gain concessions on other issues. It is instead given away, the mantra in the Bureau of Consular Affairs being each visa case is decided individually without reference to larger global issues. Yet in many countries, particularly in the developing world, visas are a form of currency, and possession of a full American tourist visa, or having a son at an American university on a student visa, are treated as much as a sign of wealth and status as a nice home or an imported car.
Upstairs in an embassy the ambassador and his staff may fret about trade deficits while downstairs in the Consular Section visa candy is handed out to locals as if nothing is the matter. Project 2025 wants this “Chinese Wall” knocked down. It would question why the U.S. imposes significant tariffs on China with one hand to pressure the CCP, while freely handing out 64,187 multi-year tourist visas in the month of September 2024 (latest statistics) alone. Similar statistics belie the leverage wasted in Russia (3,552 tourist visas monthly), Mexico (over 186,000 border crossing documents) and against Iran (1,092 tourist visas) just as examples. In most non-developed nations the burden of some sort of visa pressure would fall nearly completely on the elite as far as tourist visas, or on important companies with juice with their own governments in other cases (over 3,000 temporary worker visas were issued in China.) Exceptions could always be made for compelling American interests, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s H1-B workers. It would just drive home the point of using visas as a negotiating tool, as Project 2025 envisions.
For example, one could imagine the impact of withholding visa issuances on Central American nations unwilling to cooperate with the U.S. on returning migrants, or a recalcitrant Mexico looking at the “Remain in Mexico” plan likely to be a Day One proposal from the Trump administration.
Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people. The State Department should evaluate several key security-sensitive visa programs it manages. These include the Diversity Visa program, the F (student) visa program, and J (exchange visitor) visa program. The State Department’s evaluation must “ensure that these programs are not only consistent with White House immigration policy, but also align with its national security obligations and resource limitations.”
Following the events of 9/11 a massive overhaul was done to the visa issuing system, and numerous steps were added to the process. These include fingerprinting and photographing all applicants, and coordinating file checks among State and the intelligence agencies. Supporters point to the apparent success of the program — no additional 9/11’s — but Project 2025 calls for a more detailed answer. The threat still remains — the U.S. issued over 1,000 student visas to Saudis in July 2024, 32 to Yemenis, and 338 to Iranians.
But in addition to the broader security questions about student visa issuance addressed by Project 2025, there lurks the individual case questions and whether or not these will be folded into the individual visa decision. For example, how many of those Iranian or Saudi student visas are issued to students planning to study STEM fields applicable to nuclear engineering? Such data are unavailable. While some cumbersome speed bumps for that sort of thing exist in the current system, State visa officers are not empowered, never mind not encouraged, to refuse such cases outright at first glance on national interest grounds in alignment with national security obligations. It ain’t rocket science, people.
Project 2025 seeks such change, change which will require serious new thinking in the Bureau of Consular Affairs and closer coordination between Consular and the so-called “political” side of State. State may have held paid “crying sessions” after Trump’s election win, but it looks like the tears are just getting ready to get started.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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Rich Bauer said...
1Prezidunce Musk bribed Donnie D., and making bank on H-1b. Countries wishing to lower their visa refusal rates should follow suit.
12/31/24 10:13 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
2Donnie Dementia cant remember he was against it before he was for it:
DD: The H1-B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary workers foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” said Trump in a statement issued during the 2016 election cycle. “I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H1-B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”
12/31/24 10:26 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
3If Donnie Dementia is really concerned about foreigners threatening our national security, then give back the $300 million MuskRat slipped you.
As for stemming illegal immigration, Labor Department numbers showing that 44 percent of the 2.4 million farm laborers in the United States are undocumented migrants. Deport them and the inflation rate for MAGA’s veggies will double.
01/1/25 12:28 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
4Contemptible Crook Trump versus the “Contemptible Fools”
For all the emphasis on the southern border and The Wall, asylum procedures and criminal aliens, little ink has been spilled over the other side of immigration, the issuance of visas abroad to foreigners who take good jobs from (as Prezidunce MuskRat refers to them) CONTEMPTIBLE FOOLS. In fact, Donnie Dementia swears he has no memory of saying he wanted to do away with these visa programs.
FOOL DISCLOSURE: the only thing I agree MuskRAT has ever said is his denouncing CONTEMPTIBLE FOOLS in the Party of Grifters, MAGA. These fools swallowed DD’s lies. These fools will fall in line with MuskRat as he cuts their Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare so he can run the world as the Contemptible Crook he is (no relation to that Crook in PA). MuskRat is right. MAGA MORONS dont have the intelligence to read code. They cant read the fucking writing on the wall.
01/1/25 10:44 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
5FFS, Donnie Dementia cant go a single day without saying something stupid like “the criminals coming into the country are far worse than those we have here.” Turns out two recent terrorist criminals were US military vets.
Not off to a good start, DD. Never go back.
Jack Reacher: What does an Army cop do mostly? What you do, with one minor difference: every suspect was a trained killer.
01/2/25 12:05 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
6None of Peter’s obvious attempts to connect Donnie Dementia to discredited Project 2025 will work. Donnie Dementia has always denied any connection to Project 2025, the handbook for a new conservative government written by the Heritage Foundation and several right-wing think tanks, in his Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Demented said in the ABC News Presidential Debate. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.”
So there.
01/3/25 2:50 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
7Donnie Dementia vs The USA
DD is very upset Jimmy Carter had the gall to die just before His Big Day at the Capitol,
“The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration,” Dumbass said in a post on Truth Social, incorrectly using the term that refers to flags being flown halfway up the mast on a ship at sea, not a flag pole. “They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves.”
01/3/25 3:33 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
8PROJECT 2025 BREAKING NEWS: Convicted felon Donnie D getting the Big House after the White House as NY judge upholds DD’s conviction in hush money case and sets sentencing for January 10, 2025.
01/3/25 4:28 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
9“State may have held paid “crying sessions” after Trump’s election win, but it looks like the tears are just getting ready to get started.”
Agree. While the Party of Grifters dont have a monopoly on stupidity, they do have more of the properties. Funny thing about reality: it doesnt care what you believe.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Thursday congratulated the Party of Grifters for winning the 2024 presidential election. The House Democratic leader used his statement as an opportunity to draw a stark contrast with Republicans in 2020, saying he is “proud that the Democratic Party does not believe in election denial.”
“Our Democracy is precious and it involves elevating public trust in our system of free and fair elections, not undermining it. We cannot love America only when we win,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries and other Democratic leaders have long dismissed the notion of an organized effort to object to a Trump Electoral College victory. That is a departure from Republicans’ reaction to President Biden’s win in 2020, when they engaged in a wide-ranging effort to nullify the results.
01/4/25 5:45 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
10Remember when Ebola was considered the worst thing that came out of Afrika? Elon Musk, the disease that cant be cured by a vaccination.
01/5/25 9:17 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
11“Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people. The State Department should evaluate several key security-sensitive visa programs it manages.”
If you are concerned about protecting our security, then evaluate this:
From 1990 to 2022, 170 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds plotted 144 individual mass casualty terrorist attacks in the United States, according to START research using the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States, or PIRUS, database, which includes information on more than 3,000 subjects who committed extremist crimes in America. These troops and veterans represent approximately one-quarter of all individuals who plotted mass casualty extremist attacks during this span, outstripping their representation in the U.S. population.
01/5/25 7:22 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
12“Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people.”
And the rest of the world is too. This year the European tourist precheck system is called ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorization System), which requires travelers from visa-exempt countries to apply for an online authorization before visiting the Schengen Area in Europe for short stays; essentially acting as a pre-screening process to enhance security checks at the border. To protect its citizens from MAGA threats, ETIAS has downloaded the US Republican database and will screen MAGA tourists for enhanced security checks.
01/7/25 10:14 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
13Donnie Dementia vs THE WORLD
DONNIE D (as he was known at Wharton for his GPA);refused to rule out using military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal on Tuesday in a bizarre even for him media appearance.
“No, I can’t assure you on either of those two,” he said in response to a question about use of the military in the two territories, one controlled by Denmark and the other by Panama. “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
Yes, and so may the sane countries in the world.
01/7/25 1:09 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
14AMERIKA vs. THE WORLD
Congratulations, America. You got back with your ex who is supposed to be in prison.
That the majority of Amerika would vote for a serial sexfiend, a pathological liar, a racist and bankruptcy king should not be surprising to anyone who has read a book on Amerikan history of the 20th century.
The Vietnam war ushered in a style of politics where truth is, at best, an inconvenience. Long before the Demented King’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway spouted “alternative facts”, far prior to DD exploiting the term “fake news”, and much before a current lawsuit revealed the nefarious coordination of a rightwing media empire and a lying government, we were already living in a post-truth world, one created in part by an established media willing and able to amplify government lies.
Yes, politicians have been proffering lies from the moment lies were invented. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ushered the US fully into Vietnam, was almost certainly a lie. But the difference, with Bush’s invasion of Iraq, was how the apparatus of lying became institutionalized in our government and abetted by our media: if you don’t like the information that your own intelligence agencies are providing, simply create your own agency, the office of special plans. By the time Bush left office, US troops may have begun to leave Iraq’s major cities, but the larger “war on terror” had truly become a way of life.
But it is Amerika that continues to be a threat to the world. The case can be made the US stock market speculation CRASH in 1929 fostered the Great Depression, which created conditions for other sick politicians to reign terror on the world. The Reign of TERROR by The Demeted King will only make it more obvious.
If the world was smart, it would help pay for a wall to be built around the US not to keep poor immigrants out, rather to keep the disease contained within for the world’s protection.
01/7/25 1:50 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
15THE DANISH DIVERSION
Having failed to start a second Civil War, Putin’s Puppet General Bonespurs Donnie Dementia the MAGA PEACE PREZIDUNCE SAYS he wants to start a war with NATO in attacking Greenland. BUT NATO SAYS THAT IS A NO-NO.
France has said the European Union will not allow other nations to attack its “sovereign borders”, after DD refused to rule out using military force to seize Greenland. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told French radio “there is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are”.
Relax, NATO. General Bonespurs is a bigger coward than he is a bullshitter. His Danish Diversion scam may be a ploy to leave NATO or designed to keep his MAGGOTS in a constant state of anxiety after his election thwarted his plans to attack the Capitol again.
01/8/25 9:27 AM | Comment Link