Looking at the crazy New York city, with the crazy architecture and such or going othe replaces and seeing the crazy car centric structures, but also the crazy neighborhood between rich and poor or just the crazy landscape around Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls.
The positive crazy compared to negative crazy sums up less and less to a positive value, though.
Yes but then you hang a “no guests” sign outside. You don’t let them in your house and then scream at them, lock them up in the bathroom for 2 weeks before kicking them out.
The public cruelty is the point. Make people suffer horrendously outsized consequences for the most minor of innocent infractions and it quickly sends a message that you're not welcome here.
That is perfectly reasonable, when it is literally your house.
But within the metaphor - elected leaders need to balance the short-term approval of voters who are angry/xenophobic, against the longer-term disapproval of voters who don't like losing "their" cuts of withering travel/tourism-related revenues ...and can figure out who is mostly to blame for that.
This is more like the sad case of someone who got out of their car and knocked on a door to ask directions, in Texas, who was murdered by the occupier who was paranoid and armed.
This is more like hosting an AirBnB but then sometimes you lock your guests up in the basement and torture them. So you get some bad reviews on AirBnB. If that's what you're going for.
The US used to be the coolest place I'd do anything to visit growing up. In the last decade or so it's become way more unattractive and not worth the effort compared to alternatives.
ICE statements about detention say it's supposed to be non-punitive, but clearly it's punishing for the detained. Lots of people get detained for what are actually civil violations or even just suspicion of civil violations, not crimes. We really need a new system. People shouldn't be locked up for more than 24 hours until they've seen a judge, and I imagine in many cases, lockup could be avoided entirely with a court summons (which if violated would justify arrest).
> Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin
Sounds like all her paper work was good to go...
> she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.
Ok, that sucks but not too crazy...
> Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.
What?
> US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.
Ok, let's say that's actually the truth. Let's say she told them "yeah I'm gonna work here". Ok, she's in the wrong, worst case but being detained for A MONTH?!
> According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.
?!
> Lofving also said she tried to get help from the German consulate in Los Angeles.
I wish they would have reached out to the Consulate to see if they'd supply any information about what's going on here. Maybe its policy for the consulate to not have any comment about cases though... not sure.
Cases like this make me wonder how long it will be before the first "digital nomad" or simply workaholic gets detained, after admitting they might check the email and have a Zoom call during their vacation.
Accused of planning to violate your visa in the future, how do you even defend yourself against that accusation? "She's thinking about doing something bad in the future"
Sounds like due process was exactly what she got. Are you suggesting everybody gets a trial before they are deported? Or that the US has to allow you to enter if you do so legally, determined by trial? Either will result in much, much longer deportation times.
Usually not a the border, no, because there it's an administrative thing, but then you are sent back to your originating country.
However, if arrested within the borders, yes, it becomes a different matter where you _are_ going through a judicial process, to assess whatever should happen, and why exactly (and to document the process).
What reason is there to think that there is any more backstory? More transparency might yield new information, but it might not. The situation might simply be exactly as it appears.
The backstory is that she illegally entered from mexico but CBP is in the US, Mexico won't take her back so ICE has to arrange deportation. Unsurprisingly there are no return flights from bumfuck border town to Germany so she is detained (and interrogated, her Instagram shows her giving tattoos to people in mexico) and sent to San Diego and detained until ICE arranges a flight. ICE prioritizes mass deportations so a single person likely gets put at the back of the queue.
A sane border would just block illegal entrance. But pretending that ICE should be optimized for single person expedited deportation is just stupid. While in CBP you may not be allowed to contact your lawyer the 60 days she was in ice custody was completely fair game, but she didn't for some unknown reason.
I'm an EU citizen who's on the organizer team of Elm Camp 2025, and I'm really on the fence whether to even risk the flight to US and attending, hearing these stories :(
What visa do you hold? I wouldn't be confident that organising a conference would fall under ESTA or B1, speaking at one should be, but ultimately it's upto the goon looking at your application at the desk. In any case ensure you immigrate as early in the day as possible to maximise the chance of a quick deportation if you are rejected.
First, do it for your own safety. A wrong form or the wrong answer to a verbal question after 18 hours of travel could land you in weeks of brutal detention.
Second, do it to help the cause. We here in America need to suffer the consequences of our actions. We need to see conferences canceled. We need to see imports stopped. We need to see people refusing to bring their knowledge and expertise here.
It is going to be a long, dark four years for the globe. It's going to take all of us working from within and without to have any hope of dismantling this evil empire.
"While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. "I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me."
It makes sense if you view it as an intentional effort to demonize the US. Terrorizing visiting tourists is a great way to get the “we are crazy, your best never come here” message out.
The simplest explanation is that this administration wants the US to be hated and sees atrocities as an important tool in that effort.
Off the top of my head, playing Devil's advocate it could be to encourage illegal immigrants to self-deport. The jailing of Germans with green cards for a fortnight is an unintended side-effect of cranking up the overall hostility level.
That department -- customs and border enforcement -- needs to be ideologically pure for the next phase. They'll need to be able to rapidly judge new hires for culture-fit. Can you do the things that only make sense if your boss wants USA to be hated? Can you deftly talk that group of travelers into all unlocking their phones for imaging?
That story starts with her being refused entry to Canada. So, there's more than just "US border guards mean" going on here.
Then it turns out that she was using Workaway, which is like AirBnB or Uber but for foreign labor on tourist visas. They don't tell you that you need a work visa to work in another country [1], but you almost certainly do anywhere you go, not just the US. The woman in the story was working in exchange for accommodation, which is legal for citizens but not for aliens: work permits and visas exist to deter illegal immigration. She didn't have intent to immigrate illegally, but the scheme under which she entered the country was illegal, and she confessed to it in her statement to the border guards.
The real bad actor in this story was Workaway, and I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. They offer an alien labor arrangement that is almost certain to get you detained if caught with the wrong visa, don't give you advice on visas, and aren't there to help if something does go wrong at the border. I doubt there are many countries who welcome their alien labor arrangements, either.
[1] "Workaway is a listing site that enables contact between members, we are unfortunately unable to arrange or advise on visas. There are so many countries with different regulations or laws for different types of volunteering activity, so we would suggest directly getting in touch with the relevant embassy of your destination. It is the responsibility of the host and/or volunteer to make sure they are within the law." https://www.workaway.info/en/stories/workaway-for-newbies-co...
Nobody is denying her visa wasn't correct for the type of work she was doing. But that doesn't justify the treatment she got. Nobody but violent criminals should be treated like this.
This was a paperwork issue and should've been resolved with paperwork - refusal of entry and a plane ticket back.
You're right. But as someone who has been internationally nomadic for 15 years, I don't think most people understand how many tens of thousands of people travel internationally on tourist visas doing work exchanges to be able to afford their tourism. It's commonplace. Yes, it's usually illegal. Most countries don't dedicate a whole lot of resources to enforcing that. And in most countries, getting caught working while on a short term tourist visa will get you 1) a fine 2) deported (probably self-deported, on a commercial flight) and 3) banned from re-entering the country for a period of time.
What does NOT usually happen in these cases is 1) having a full body cavity search 2) being shackled in the back of a van 3) having your phone confiscated 4) being forbidden from contacting any family or legal representation 5) having your clothing cut apart 6) being transported to a different city without being informed of what is happening 7) being cut off from access to your foreign funds 8) being detained for 19 days.
The notable thing isn't that she broke the law. The notable thing is the cruel and unusual severity of the punishment for a relatively minor visa violation. Typically, when countries punish tourists so severely for what should be a slap on the wrist, tourists stop wanting to go there.
The thing is: this isn't entirely new, it's just something that happens very rarely to Westerners who don't alert sniffer dogs.
The "kids in cages" Southern border immigration detention ran through both the previous Trump administration and the Biden administration. Some pretty horrific stories from then, especially during COVID.
> And I rolled it over 30 days to be able to show any recent changes while not getting lost in the noise of daily change.
small thing, but learned at work that often there's a weekly pattern (and I'd bet there is for airplane travel) so you ought use a rolling 7 day average instead of 30 because there are different numbers of weekends in each day's 30 day number.
This is why there's a slight zigzag in the line charts in the article.
One fun one is that in a lot of year on year change reporting for China specifically, Jan-Feb is considered a single month and then all the other 10 months are seperate. Reason is:
[spoiler]
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The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.
People might choose to fly somewhere else instead though, so it doesn't necessarily reduce the overall amount of carbon emissions from air travel. Especially if you see Europeans deciding to go somewhere else in the Americas instead, which I've heard some of my friends considering. Although if Europeans choose to travel within Europe instead then yes we'd see a reduction as the distances are rather shorter (and with any luck some of them would go by rail)
Trump thought of that so now he is also singlehandedly starting a global depression to ensure nobody will be traveling at all. Truly he has done more for the climate than Gretha.
On the point of air travel specifically, Canadians are being advised to use airports over land borders because if you are denied entry at U.S. customs at a Canadian airport, they cannot detain you as you are on Canadian soil.
So for Canadians still travelling to the U.S. it might actually increase their carbon footprint.
Americans do not understand how much press there is outside the US about tourists from Ireland / Germany / Canada getting locked up in ICE jails for weeks on end.
It's one thing to refuse entry to someone who doesn't have the right documents. The fear goes to a completely different level once people see tourists getting locked up.
As someone who lived in the US for 22 years legally and most of my social and business network there, I an not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.
Exactly this. If someone from "high tier" countries like Canada and Germany can get locked up in ICE jails for several weeks imagine someone like me from a peripheral European country. Even worse, my youngest brother that has a more "tanned" appearance. tattoos, and a beard.
I won't be visiting the US for the foreseeable future (used to go several times per year for work), just not worth the risk.
> Exactly this. If someone from "high tier" countries like Canada and Germany can get locked up in ICE jails for several weeks imagine someone like me from a peripheral European country. Even worse, my youngest brother that has a more "tanned" appearance. tattoos, and a beard.
Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
EU Eastern Europe, you might get funny looks but it's still not an extraordinary situation to have various shades of skin colour (e.g. Syrians, various Central Asians are migrant workers in a few of the countries in question; a lot of e.g. the Balkans are on a palette of skin colours).
Non-EU Eastern Europe (referring more to Belarus than Montenegro here), might get casual racism.
Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
> Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
As a person who matches the description above, and has traveled to Europe extensively and frequently, I can tell you that as much as Europeans like to believe this is this case, it is absolutely not true.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
Unless you're making some extremely critical assumptions about how much wear the word "indefinite" can bear, this is unfortunately not true either.
A couple years ago my girlfriend and I spent about 2 months travelling through europe. We visited about 10 countries on our trip. A lot of our travel between countries was by bus. After a few bus trips we started noticing something strange - the busses often pulled over for rest stops just after we'd changed countries. Everyone would all get out of the bus to stretch our legs, and some police would miraculously appear and decide they wanted to talk to some of the people who were on our bus.
Now, officially the shengen zone means there's no need to show your documents between countries. But countries still don't want certain people coming in. And they don't want drugs smuggled in either.
It was really interesting who they decided to pull aside for a chat. It was almost always men who were travelling alone. Almost always men who were in the 25-45 age range. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some racial profiling going on as well. The police never questioned me - probably because I was with my girlfriend the whole time. If she wasn't there, I bet I would have been pulled aside every time too.
Anyway, I believe your experience in Europe. But if you were a man travelling alone, its possible it was partially or fully due to that. For about a decade, every time I went through security at an airport I was always "randomly selected" to have my bag swabbed for chemicals. It never happens any more, and I'm as white as they come. I assume it was a gender + age + travelling alone thing - but its still a mystery to me.
I'm white, male. I travel to some lower-income countries for work. I can dress like a neat, well-paid software developer with the €2000 laptop and €1000 camera in my bag. I'll sail through security in Europe and at the destination, then have a horde of people hassling me for a taxi, sometimes pretty aggressively, and I feel I stand out as an easy target for robbery.
Instead, I wear some old, faded clothes for the journey. Then I get the "random" drug swab check in Europe, border control at the destination might ask to see my hotel booking, but the taxi drivers and street kids will ignore me as another cheakskate backpacker.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like.
Most EU country police don’t need probable cause to detain you. It does happen to be detained for no reason outside of profiling. For example, in France, you can be sent to jail for up to 24h with no probable cause.
A friend's family flew into a EU country with a letter, they thought this letter was their visa but it turned out to be a rejection from the EU country's consulate (maybe it was a request for more information for their visa application). They were denied entry, but there was no indefinite detention, they were just told to get on the next plane out of the country and had to wait in the "international area" of the airport until said flight.
Also, a 24 hour detainment in reasonable conditions is very different from an indefinite detention with a possibility of torture (solitary confinement) or being sent off to an El Savadorian prison with no hope of being returned.
In the US you need probable cause to get pull over or temporary detain you.
In France, you don't need probably cause for temporary detaining you, but if they suspect you of something they can also send you to jail. You can't be sent to jail in the US just on them just suspecting something.
Are you implying there are similar arrests and indefinite detentions going on in Europe? Any data to share? Certainly worth being upset over if that’s a true accusation.
I constantly travel to EU for work. I see all kinds of people from any part of the world, and they pass through fine.
When I traveled last time, I have witnessed an European denied entry for a reason I don't know, and a white male without any beard has been escorted into the immigration office.
Said office had a giant window. The officers were just chatting with him while checking his documents, and also drinking some coffee and eating some cake. I didn't look that long to see whether they have offered the same to him (because it's rude).
Also, I don't have an EU/UK/US passport, and I just pass fine.
It all depends what part of the EU and how you look.
For some EU perspective: last summer we traveled with a group of social dancers from Berlin to Pula in Croatia, going to an event at the coast.
Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023.
We had one couple in the group that where not "white". She is German but her parents are Vietnamese and he is from Syria. They're married, they have German citizenship.
They were the only ones from our group of ~20 people who got singled out and had their papers and luggage (!) checked. She looks Asian, he looks Middle-Eastern (oh, and he has a beard!).
That said, they just took 10mins longer to make it through the arrivals hall. They didn't get incarcerated.
However, the year before they were traveling to a dance event in Belgrade. That was was before they got married so he didn't have a German passport yet. He only had a Syrian passport and a residence permit for Germany/Schengen.
Serbia is not part of the EU. Usually such a mistake means they just send you back on the next flight. Happened to two friends of mine, both "white US citizens, who didn't also know this and were traveling to Belgrade from Switzerland two years before.
My Syrian friend however spent three days in a jail in cell with a dozen criminals before they let him fly back to Germany. Mind you, the event they went to was four days and he had a return ticket that could have been easily changed to the arrival day.
Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
> Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
Some countries are more "famous" for it, but that's really just a matter of perception and how it fits into an existing narrative, not based on actual evidence.
It's not like there's data showing that racial profiling is lower in France, Germany, and Sweden than it is in Eastern Europe.
I'd say racial profiling is probably around the same everywhere, but rule of law is not, and while you have a lot of corruption at the top level in France, bureaucratic processes makes it hard for low-level public servant to ignore said rule of law, which isn't the case in some Eastern European countries (i've heard that Romania made _huge_ improvement though, so maybe my only first-hand experience wouldn't happen these days anymore)
It is entirely outside of the EU until it's a member country. Serbia doesn't have any special status like Switzerland or Norway that are closer to the EU even if they are not members, and anyway the leadership of Serbia is currently closer to Russia than to the EU.
Though my point was that as someone who's moved into a EU country, it might not be entirely clear that it's not inside EU, given it's proximity and that they might have read about it in an EU context given its status.
Heck I'm in Norway and had to check to make sure I was right.
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
> With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
> First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.
But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.
Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.
> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.
I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
> It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries
That's not relevant when, as I said, they detain you without knowing what passport you even hold.
> You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
Being a citizen does not, in fact, exempt you from being profiles and detained at border crossings, either in the US or in Europe.
Normal stuff, millions folks like that come every year. Millions folks like that live here and also have citizenship, I have friends and colleagues working in banking fitting that description (including passports).
Now I am not saying we are uniform half a billion, not at all, wear burka in eastern EU in some small backwardish village and you will raise eyebrows and maybe more. Try that in US and its the same, to put it mildly.
That's not the case in the US either. Like, how would that work if a non-citizen isn't bound to law anyway? "Oh you're not American, so you're not bound by our murder laws. Free to go".
But this admin highly disagrees with that notion. Really hope the courts start throwing heads sooner rather than later.
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
I can answer that! It is pretty uneventful. My experience with the border checks in airports was always very pleasant (despite the lines, depending on the airport they can be pretty long)
I think the news feeds within the US may be approximately equal in their delivery of "this is good change" versus "this is catastrophic change", whilst internationally it's almost entirely "this is catastrophic change" with minor pockets of intolerance apologia.
I'd be interested in alternate viewpoints since I may be in a bleeding-heart, empathetic, progressive, consequence-considering news bubble.
My reasoning is that a family member who lives in the US said that they feel protected / insulated because they're in a deep blue state. I don't feel this is representative of reality, or at least they should be more alarmed than they sounded.
>I think the news feeds within the US may be approximately equal in their delivery of "this is good change" versus "this is catastrophic change", whilst internationally it's almost entirely "this is catastrophic change" with minor pockets of intolerance apologia.
Exactly.
Americans generally don't understand the degree to which the rest of the world gets the CNN 5min recap of what's going on in the US, and it's very much the CNN recap and not the Fox one.
"Tourists locked up, school children shot, government defunded, California on fire, tune in at 11 for more".
The fact that ~half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason and the other ~half doesn't think ICE should be locking up anyone gets skipped.
Edit: Just to head off the nitpickers, by "good reason" I mean stuff that border guards of any nation would lock anyone up for if they found, regardless of visa type, status or nation or origin.
assuming your point is correct about what almost the entire country thinks about ICE locking up tourists (and I don't think it is) it's irrelevant: ICE does it anyway and that's all I as a potential turist care about
exactly. As a Canadian I don't really care that half or more of the country thinks that ICE should not be locking up random Canadians or that the annexation threats aren't real or that the tariffs are a negotiating tactic. It is not relevant to my life how they feel if any of these things affect me.
There’s no reason to lock tourists up. If you don’t want them put them on the first flight back. Locking people up is expensive and if they’re willing to leave anyway, totally pointless.
You would think that a country with a whole department devoted to government efficiency could work that out.
Aren’t a lot of jails private and for profit? Just bill the tourist for the stay and detain until they pay in full (accruing even more debt in the meantime). It makes perfect business sense which is all that seems to matter to the US nowadays.
No, it's a small-ish minority of them. Most are government owned and run.
That said, there's a huge incentive to piss away money holding people so you can justify your budget and use poor conditions to justify increases in budget. And on top of that the contractors that supply government jails are pretty evil too.
So it's really a distinction without a difference at the end of the day, it's all a pretty rotten system.
ICE sure isn't. That is tax payer money at work, sadly.
But yes, there are incentives that do reward cells and even individuals for number of imprisonments. And no, they do not check nor punish "administrative errors".
As has been a rising sentiment as of late: "The cruelty is the point"
You're right that it isn't efficient in any sense. But the kinds of people who go into and are chosen for "law enforcement" tend to be the very people that should never be given a weapon. It's just a large scale Stanford Experiment in that regard.
There's no reason to lock criminals up. If you don't want them doing crimes send them home. Locking people up is expensive and if they are willing to stop being bad, totally pointless.
What are you trying to argue though? I am a bit at a loss to follow. Be so kind and explain.
You want foreign readers to read news about how half of the US wants you, the foreign tourist, be locked up in a jail cell?
The news is already out there. Everyone assumes it's so wanted, because well... it does actually happen
As a potential tourist to the US of A I could not possibly care less if I am detained due to a boondoggle or for no good reason. Both make me not want to ever go there again.
For everyone outside the US, the fact that half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason is irrelevant since that half isn't barricading detention centers and tearing prison gates open with their cars.
... not that these things would make it safer to travel to the US. In the short run.
The status quo of power is that it is less safe to be a foreigner in the US than it has been in a long time. Possibly at any point in time the US wasn't actively at war with another nation.
> ~half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason and the other ~half doesn't think ICE should be locking up anyone
That is not remotely a good faith representation of the controversy.
I've lived my entire adult life in the USA (international student -> non-immigrant temp worker -> resident -> citizen). People are delusional if they think the USA is split in half about immigration. The anti-immigrant sentiment among whites, blacks and some naturalized immigrants (like Cubans in FL) is truly the only thing that crosses political boundaries here.
Like the sibling comment, I don't understand the analogy.
Also, I'd like to emphasize what someone said elsewhere in this comments section: the rest of the world doesn't see the US through the "CNN vs Fox" lens, that's almost exclusively an American phenomenon.
I hope that's true. In some places there are high chances to be robbed, killed or kidnapped as a tourist. The more wealthy you seem to the criminals, the higher the danger.
> Why would the police treat you bad? I you don't commit any crime it's most likely you have nothing to do with the police.
It's not true, in general, that police won't treat you badly as long as you don't commit a crime. (As an aside, you also have to interact with police officers if you've been the victim of a crime, and again, there's no guarantee they'll treat you well in this situation either).
> Doesn't the crime rate go down when Republicans hold the power?
I don't think that's true—or at least, not a strong correlation. Crime rates were going significantly down since the early 90s, regardless who is in power. There was a smaller spike during COVID years, which has I believe returned to normal.
> I think the crime rate is a major concern for every tourist.
It is, but it isn't the only concern, and ICE sending tourists to prison is by definition not a crime, but is just as relevant to potential tourists.
> As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I really don't think you really want to look at the state level crime rates, you should look at the crime rate for the place you're going to visit. For instance, the violent crime rate in Florida was 260 per 100k people in 2022 (according to Wikipedia)... but if you're going to Walt Disney World, specifically: it's a whole lot less.
> Doesn't the crime rate go down when Republicans hold the power?
Federally? There's no reason to think the federal government changing hands would impact local crime rates. Overall violent crime has seen steady decline from the 1970s to the present day. [1] That period has seen both Democratic and Republican administrations.
At the state level it's a different picture. 8 of the top 10, and 17 of the top 25 states for homicide rate are "red" states.[2] I think poverty and per-capita income rates in a state are a better predictor of crime rates than which party is specifically in power.
> Doesn't Florida have a much lower crime rate than California?
If you consume exclusively right-wing news media (or your favorite social media ragebait) you'd have that impression. Depending on your source they're either about equal (FBI stats) over the past 2 decades or Florida's murder rate is higher (CDC).[2] Either way it is not "much lower". For "much" lower I'd go to states like Massachusetts, Utah, or Hawaii which have murder rates closer to Western Europe.
When the President of the United States threatens to invade ex-allies, I don't think that the threatened people give a shit about what the American people think about it. The fact that this guy is the President means that most Americans were not against it, right?
Of course most Americans don't want random people detained. But still, this is happening in the US.
And one thing that I believe is absolutely clear outside the US (whether it's true or not), is that most Americans are perfectly fine with "America First". Americans don't really care about the impact of Trump on the rest of the world; they care about the impact on themselves. Boycotting US products is a way to impact the American people, in the hope that the American people will eventually realise that what's best for them is also better for the others.
Something that I found interesting: when Canadians started booing the US anthem in NHL games, Americans started booing the Canadian anthem. Why? Canada didn't do anything to the US. Does it sound that most Americans are against what's happening, when they defend it? There is this kind of American patriotism where people seem to be like "Yes, my government, is bullying you, but I won't admit it and I will fight against you if you say it. But I'm a good guy, I don't want my government to bully you. I'll just support it because it's my country".
So yeah... pretty sure that it feels a lot different from the outside than from the inside.
Doesn‘t look much different from Russian, Israeli or Chinese patriotism. When outsiders criticize your tribe for doing bad things, many are standing in support of the tribe, not the values, and they are the most visible.
Probably, but if your dad starts beating a kid in the street, I hope you'll do something about it. Also for your dad's sake and for your family reputation.
Sure. But when the US threaten to invade an ally militarily, therefore destroying the status of "allies" for the foreseeable future and looking more like enemies, I suppose it's more shocking for those ex-allies than... say... when the US find a bullshit reason to invade Irak.
> most Americans are perfectly fine with "America First".
I agree with everything you said, except this. Sub “many” and I’d go with it. But at least here, in blue state / more-sane land, there is widespread horror and outrage. We’re only at the “tens of thousands of people protesting” stage and I’ll be the first to say Americans need to do more, but I think it’s going to far to say most Americans don’t care about the impact elsewhere.
but I think it’s going to far to say most Americans don’t care about the impact elsewhere.
Indeed.
Recently in Palo Alto for a few months. Saw lots of people protesting Tesla dealerships, lots of interesting and creative anti-Trump and Elon signs.
Not one word of Canada, of Greenland. Trumps stated goal of destroying Canada's economy to force annexation, or to outright just take Greenland seem not protest worthy.
Most people I spoke to seemed barely conscious of the issue.
To be fair, other matters may be higher pri in their minds, so if other events were not happening in parallel, it may be different.
But when 65 billion dollar defence hardware purchases are being dropped (they are), when future military purchases are not going to happen, when police cars, municipal vehicles are not going to be from US companies any more, when natural resources are going to be sold to the EU and China instead (sadly), the US is going to feel this for a very long time.
Because these are choices for decades. And it's not only Canada making them.
Why should US citizens deeply care about Canada? It's not their country, they don't live there. Don't tell me Canadians lose sleep thinking about the well being of US.
> Why should US citizens deeply care about Canada?
You don't have to deeply care about Canada to oppose annexation threats.
> Don't tell me Canadians lose sleep thinking about the well being of US.
A Canadian prime minister said Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.[1]
Just basic empathy I guess. Some people want good for others, even those they will never meet. It’s why disaster aid flows in from all over the world. Understood that it’s incomprehensible to some people, but I think that’s a small minority.
The Hands Off protests had signs and chants saying hands off Canada and hands off Greenland. And I think it's understandable current events have higher priorities than possible events.
I can't edit it, but my point was that this is the perception from the outside. And really I believe that the perception is that most Americans are fine with America First.
"Most" in this case means 49.81% of the vote, with 48.34% voting against. And that's with people largely expecting Trump to behave the same way as last time and a historically unpopular Democratic candidate. Whatever right wing cope you may have read, if the election were held today he'd probably lose.
Granted I don't blame foreigners for not risking ICE abuse. And Hockey fans can just be dumb sometimes. A lot of Americans have severe recency bias, the right is saying "the same people telling you this will be catastrophic were the same ones who locked down schools over a cold and told you inflation would be transitory". These people are going to have to touch the stove to learn it's hot, and then they'll admit that it's hot but deny that it's burning them, and then enough at the margins will start to defect such that they start losing elections, leaving a hard-core to endlessly complain about how if they'd only held on until 3rd degree burns the stove would have turned itself off.
I haven't. I am just telling how I believe it is perceived from outside the US. It seems like Americans here find it a bit excessive for tourists to choose not to come to the US "just because of a mistake at the border". I'm trying to say that from the outside, the US is behaving at least like a big bully, sometimes like an enemy. You don't go on vacation in a country that threatens to attack you militarily.
> The fact that this guy is the President means that most Americans were not against it, right?
I don't know if that's strictly accurate. United States citizens are some of the most heavily disenfranchised in the western world. Our oligarchs have spent decades making it more difficult to vote, especially for people of color, who overwhelmingly disapprove of the current administration. In some urban areas, it can take hours of standing in line to vote, and we don't get time off from work to do so. We've also had a decades long propaganda campaign telling us our vote doesn't matter.
More people didn't vote in the last election than voted for Trump. That's not to say they all would have voted against him, but it's not really the will of the American people.
I don't blame your sentiment, but as part of the 57% that MASSIVELY DISAPPROVES of that nutjob, I don't like the "most" word being used here ;)
Try to remember our weird Electoral College, and that ultimately the vote came down to ~230,000 votes in swing states. (I'm in one of them, and I voted against the felon.)
Also hate that "mainstream news" like ABC and CBS covered Saturday's protests with the phrase "tens of thousand" while the protest organizations reported MILLIONS of protesters (about 1% of the population.)
I'm not going to split hairs over what 43% means, but the point is that we are still in an ecosystem where "Trump supporter" is a viable political stance and very much has a seat at the table of discourse.
That state of affairs is utterly unacceptable, and signals that overwhelmingly the country doesn't get it yet. Look at how many Greenlanders like Trump— those are the numbers you need to be pulling at home. Once 80-90% of the US population agrees that he's not only a bad president but a threat to democracy and a criminal, then we can talk about feeling safe to travel there again.
Oh I agree. I'm angry that the 77 million people voted for Trump. I'm angry that ~22% of the population got out there and voted and supported Trump. And I'm angry that so much of the eligible voting population did not vote. And I'm angry that he's tearing my country apart from the inside.
And zero judgement of anyone's wise decision to avoid or boycott our country, or arm themselves against us.
Also don't know what to think of polls, but anything above 0% approving of Trump is stupid. It's still not "most", which is my only contention. But whether or not it's most doesn't matter as long as all of our checks and balances have disintegrated, and there's one person in charge and making horrible decisions that hurt many Americans, threaten tourists, and are currently wreaking havoc on the stability of the global economy.
Let's face it, this is the "regular" newsflash we are getting everywhere: one part world catastrophes and one part local news. Or almost. And as the US is a big player in the world, or used to be at least, most eyes are on your catastrophes.
> Americans generally don't understand the degree to which the rest of the world gets the CNN 5min recap of what's going on in the US, and it's very much the CNN recap and not the Fox one.
No, Americans generally don't understand that the rest of the world, and the rest of the world's news, genuinely don't see things in this dual "us vs them", "CNN vs Fox", "Democrats vs Republicans" lens.
When Trump does shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
When Biden or Obama before him did shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
Fox are genuinely deranged hypocrites who themselves claimed in court that nobody sane would believe them. Very few of the world's media reflect their point of views, because they are absurd. CNN is all over the place, so sometimes their point of view matches with e.g. BBC or Guardian or Süddeutsche Zeitung, sometimes it doesn't.
Nobody watches or cares about some CNN, that stuff, or Fox and your bipolar political stuff US very much internal US matter. We care about outwardish things, trump mood swings and so on.
Feelings of Americans don't matter much in this equation. Most are delusional about what is happening in one way or another. People from other countries will not get even close to the US while there is a chance they will be jailed and sent to a lawless detention center for looking different.
>People from other countries will not get even close to the US while there is a chance they will be jailed and sent to a lawless detention center for looking different.
I am from Europe. I don't think I look different than an American.
Suggesting that giving the rest of the world the "fox news viewpoint" would somehow improve foreigner's views or knowledge of America is spurious at best, and delusional at worst.
The bigger debate I see is if it's worse for the US or worse for the rest of the world. The consensus is it's awful for everyone, apart from a few environmentalists that are looking forward to the reduce carbon emissions from a great depression.
I think the consensus is that if the rest of the world grows a spine it will emerge far stronger and the US a weaker state to before - akin to change the British Empire post ww2 compared with before, probably with the same glee they saw the British Empire falling.
This is off topic, but I've actually found comfort in how it has galvanised Europe.
What worries me is which side the US (government, not people) would choose to support if EU states send troops to Ukraine's front lines, which would absolutely instigate a Russian response.
(Trump wouldn't like that the little EU states are messing with his negotiations for the shrinking and pillaging of Ukraine, and Trump is, if nothing else, vengeful).
A defining pillar of a society is either a very strong common goal or enemy. US supplanted both, so yeah actually thank you for that.
My 2 cents - wanted to take family on a trip to western US, parks and maybe SF, not in fucking hell now or in next 2 decades. I know its just some tiny drop in the bucket, but that ~10k spent locally in those few weeks will be spent elsewhere and if enough people will do the same (which they will do), tourism will suffer a bit. Maybe US folks will go there more, who knows (US tourists are still very welcome in Europe, we just hate the people you vote in because they clearly hate us).
> What's wrong with El Salvador? Isn't it a diverse country with wonderful people?
You are also incorrect in your last 2 sentences but no point breaking it down, that much I've learned in past few years with various versions of maga supporters (yes, we have them in Europe too, they usually vote ultra right pro russian and/or obviously corrupt populists).
> The United States has decried "poison pills" embedded in proposed rules which could shut third country allies such as the United States out of European defense projects.
> US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland emphasized the point in a letter and warned of possible US sanctions: "I hope we can avoid contemplating similar courses of action," he said. The EU has been asked to respond to the letter by June 10.
This is of course despite the fact most EU defence spending has always gone straight into the US economy.
> "The EU is actually at the moment much more open than the US procurement market is for the European Union companies and equipment," Mogherini said in Brussels. "In the EU there is no 'buy European' act and around 81% of international contracts go to the US firms in Europe today."
>What worries me is which side the US (government, not people) would choose to support if EU states send troops to Ukraine's front lines, which would absolutely instigate a Russian response.
Even the Biden administration was going out of its way to not push Russia too far. None of The Powers That Be in the US are interested in stumbling into WW3 with Russia, over Ukraine. Stumbling into WW3 with China, over Taiwan? Maybe. So I'd say Europe should approach such a decision from the assumption that you will receive no support from the US if you go down that road. If Europe wants to send its men to the killing fields of the Ostfront, it's on its own.
Assuming Europe, collectively, can even change the balance of power on the ground is also a stretch. Even some of the larger established militaries in Europe don't have the bodies to move the needle in this fight. The British Army, for example, has woefully understrength infantry battalions and is struggling with enlistment.[1][2] France claims they can put a division into the field [3] but I doubt that, probably more like a reinforced brigade (~5,000). I really don't get the impression European civil society is ready for hundreds or thousands of bodies to start coming back home either, but I could be wrong on that.
Meanwhile Russia inducted ~440,000 men last year, beating recruiting goals courtesy of MASSIVE cash enlistment bonuses, and still expects to grow their end strength this year as well.[4]
> whilst internationally it's almost entirely "this is catastrophic change"
Of course it is. Because the chance of a global recession is about 50% now.
Which means millions of people are going to lose their jobs, businesses will collapse, governments will go into deficit and cut services and there will be needless suffering only a few years after COVID.
Something i like doing from time to time is picking a foreign movie, ie Russian (you know, the standard bad guys) and just pretend it’s a US based movie. Or the reverse, watch something based in the US and turn on Russian dubbing.
It’s funny how quickly you realize the bad guys are both sides.
I say this because often when trying to interpret media i feel the language and accent of the presenter influences me. “They sound like me” therefore i start with an assumption they think like me. Rarely anyone in fox thinks like me.
Odd media literacy take? Yes of course the propaganda is supposed to influence you, and of course if you're actually trying to analyse media you shouldn't let it.
(I retrospectively put the high point of recent West-China relations some time around the release of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin , which is an obvious propaganda war film with Americans on the "enemy" side .. that was shown in Western cinemas. Certainly in the UK, I think in America as well. Very odd. BTW, MOSFILM is on Youtube if you need some classic Russian cinema)
Must have been a long time ago, because efforts to remove "he" as the default gender have been ongoing for years (80s?) and everybody has more or less settled on they rather than the awkward he/she.
Chinese and Japanese also do not have grammatical gender. Chinese imported gendered pronouns about a century ago for ease of translating Western gendered languages, but both languages tend to either refer to people by name or have no word at all and infer from sentence structure.
Yep. Last time I went to the US I made a mistake with my visa and was briefly detained. it could totally happen to me again, so I'd need a really good reason to run that risk again.
Aren't all immigration "arrests" all "detentions", technically speaking (not that it makes any difference in reality - you're behind bars)? Aren't ICE prisons called "detention centers"?
So... immigration services in the US don't use criminal language when discussing how they handle people accused of immigration offenses, because there's a whole legal structure to pretending it's a civil infraction and thus you don't have any rights related to say... trial by jury or the state proving your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
But. The mechanical processes can include indefinite detention in facilities that look and function exactly like jails.
So... what you CALL it is almost certainly something different than what it is.
I've been in secondary, but didn't have it described to me that way. I would not call it detainment without clarifying it because I associate that word with incarceration, but I am also reluctant to travel knowing the odds of that happening again are up.
They were quite clear that I wasn't allowed to leave and I wasn't allowed to use my phone. I'm not sure where a debate about semantics would have gotten me.
Flying from the EU to the US isn’t cheap, and the thought of potentially being denied entry (or worse) makes me think it's best not to visit again for another four years.
The fact that Trump is nuts and possibly serving Putin by destroying the West is one thing, but the fact that so many people seem fine with it, corporations and institutions eager to do his bidding, Republicans all voting along with things they used to strongly oppose, that's really an eye opener.
It's not even about being locked up in an ICE jail.
In Australia, we just had someone [1] who was detained for 8 hours with their phone/laptop searched all because they stopped over in Hong Kong rather than flying direct to the US.
It's that kind of irrational, unpredictable behaviour that makes travellers stay away and instead choose from one of the hundreds of other desirable travel destinations who want you to visit.
I'm Italian, my wife is Russian and my sister lives with her family in California. I've always been pretty vocal online about my dislike for Putin, and since the war in Ukraine started, I became very worried about visiting Russia, just in case they needed some random Italian guy to extort concessions from the Italian government. So, I stopped going (we were planning a family trip right in the Summer of 2022).
For this Summer we wanted to visit my sister, so we bought tickets last December. I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails; you know, for lèse-majesté. I reckon that the risk is too little to warrant us canceling our trip, but honestly, if I didn't have my tickets already, I would probably not have bought them now.
I literally do not have any social media accounts (does HN count?), and I'm concerned that would immediately mark me as a suspicious individual (although I can eloquently justify this to the nth degree if required).
Having said that, weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of scrubbing your social media accounts to minimise that particular concern?
I don't have any, so I don't know what I'd be losing, but I can say that I feel sorry for some family members of mine who have been sucked in to the social media dopamine addiction farm. They'd be better off without it and having more time to be their own selves and live their own lives rather than other people's.
Strikes me there's a new AI service in there: aged social media accounts. Run by bots for at least 2 years and available for purchase to give you a plausible looking online footprint when needed.
(A similar service exists for Cayman Island holding companies IIRC)
I have always only listed GitHub as my "social media" for ESTA since I don't use any of the other options. It has never been a problem, including with the current administration.
>I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails;
I've been a vocal Trump supporter on social media. By this measure they should give me a green card if I'll ever plan to visit US.
This is the nature of social media. If you see 10 examples of something happening in another country there is a good chance you will alter your behavior.
The reverse scenario is happening too. There are americans that refuse to go to europe because of the examples they seen of immigrants committing crimes and ruining neighborhoods.
As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare, and can logically overcome the emotional response after seeing examples online. But for people who don't travel much I understand.
I travel quite a bit, and there are only 2 places on Earth where I was close to a shooting happening in real time: São Paulo, Brazil, and Oakland, California.
As much as the scenarios can be rare, there is an undeniable sense of everything hanging by a thin thread when traveling around the USA, which I've only experienced in Latin American countries in all my trips.
Giving that I'm originally from Brazil even though with Swedish citizenship, I won't be traveling to the USA anytime in the near future. I have no idea what could happen, might be a completely rare occurrence to be profiled at the border, jailed for no cause, etc., but there's nothing in the USA worth enough to make me even more paranoid at crossing its borders. It's more like the straw that finally broke the camel's back, it's been brewing for a while, I've been stopped by CBP for holding both a B-1/B-2 visa on my Brazilian passport as well as an ESTA on my Swedish one, I do not want the potential issues that another interrogation by CBP at present times could create, like being sent to some jail for 20 days instead of just being refused entry and put on a plane to get back to the EU.
I travel even more than you and only got robbed twice in 40 years on earth: in Johannesburg, South Africa and Stockholm, Sweden.
You can claim it's rare, but it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden. Therefore, I will never travel back to Sweden. It's just not worth it and I have no idea what could happen (stabbing? murder?). Nothing in Sweden is worth the absolute fear this country provokes.
Please don't come here, it's definitely dangerous and you shouldn't ever step foot here again to avoid any danger to your life, it's a hellhole that no one like you should ever attempt to visit :)
It's not rare, it will happen to you. Do not come.
How do you know? It doesn't look like OP specified how much they've traveled.
> I only got robbed twice...in Johannesburg, South Africa and Stockholm, Sweden...it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden
That sucks, I'm sorry that happened. It sounds like it happened once, and so that "100%" is just one trip by one person? Unfortunately, that result is within the realm of randomness, though I'd understand if, to you, it felt bigger than that.
That said, I don't think it compares to arbitrary (or worse, politically- and personally-motivated) government detainment (or otherwise harming) of innocent people.
> This is the nature of social media. If you see 10 examples of something happening in another country there is a good chance you will alter your behavior
That's actually the nature of bayesian probability: if something is happening a higher proportion of the time vs. before, it's more likely to happen now vs. before. If that something is bad, that means higher risk. It's expected that a rational actor would act to minimize risk to them.
> As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare
Precisely how rare is it, over the last couple months, for US immigration officials to detain someone (perhaps "for further questioning", perhaps to a prison) who hasn't violated any laws? Claiming "it's rare" isn't very useful. Remember, the expected probability is ~0.
> Americans do not understand how much press there is outside the US about tourists from Ireland / Germany / Canada getting locked up in ICE jails for weeks on end.
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.
It's not spite, or doesn't have to be. Non US-citizens have very few ways of exerting pressure on the current administration, but money happens one of them.
Most stuff on Amazon is made in China anyways. Might as well order directly from Aliexpress or the producer's website. Exactly the same items, but without the American middleman.
There's definitely going to be some sort of EU-China rapprochement now. Not that China is less oppressive - they remain more oppressive, and I wouldn't like to, say, get caught with weed going into China. But they're much less loudly annoying about it.
(another one to watch out for: opiate painkillers in your hand luggage into Middle Eastern states, including Dubai.)
Same here. There's one or two things I can't bear to cancel, but I've moved all my email from Google Workspaces to Proton, cancelled Netflix, cancelled plans to go to DEF CON, downgraded storage for Apple iCloud to just above what I need instead of way above, cancelled plans to get a new MacBook Pro this year, stopped buying groceries from companies with American owners, etc.
Sending money to Netflix means sending money to the administration through taxes in the US. Funding left wing news sources in the US isn't our responsibility either.
You're going to have to come to terms with the fact that a growing number of non-Americans don't care about the left/right paradigm in America anymore.
They just view America itself as the problem and are deciding to detach from it as a whole.
What I respect most about the European countries' leving tarrifs in response is when they're choosing to issue tarrifs on products that are heavily sourced from red states, and lesserly so from blue states.
The threats to Canada aren't attracting nearly as much attention as they should. The problem is people have got too used to just assuming that what Trump says is bullshit: it's just there to sound good on the news, there's no intent to actually do it. Then the tariffs hit.
If there's the slightest possibility that what he says is not bullshit, then Canada needs to take it very seriously and the entire northern hemisphere security architecture needs to permanently change.
The annexing is so unhinged that I can't be sincere, yet anything Trump had any power to do he did do. He didn't get peace in Ukraine because he can't control Russia nor Ukraine. He can attempt an Canadian invasion because he is in control of the army.
If you are from Canada, get Nexus. Much less trouble crossing in USA. Small fee to pay for the peace of mind and the process to cross is so much faster.
Well yes, that would be a thing to do if this was only about personal safety (and one was only worried about the border and not getting vanned on some random street corner).
At this point it's also about standing with our countrymen and spending our tourist dollars at home.
I'm not surprised at all. That's North Korea/Russia levels of terror and it's honestly sickening that Trump can just go on TV and say "yeah it's a good deal I'm glad we're working with El Salvador".It's maddening the admin can admit a "mistake" but then fight with a judge that they can't be ordered to fix a blatant obsruction of the constitution they loved waving around the year prior
Ireland or at least Dublin Airport is unique in that it has 'US Preclearance' so when you land you simply pick up your bags at the carousel and leave the airport as you've passed US immigration based in Dublin Airport.
This means if you're going to be denied entry it will probably be in Dublin which will make it a preferred airport of origin within the EU -- this is massively more convenient than getting stuck in JFK.
What jurisdiction extends where depends entirely on the agreements some diplomats must have worked out. When I travel between France and England for example the paper checks are at the point of departure and there are no more checks on arrival.
> I am not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.
I've turned down a 7-day-all paid-trip my company was offering me to San Francisco for this (and I had in the past a bad experience at Puerto Rico's border).
Anecdotally: a couple of years after 9/11, when I was a student, some of my friends who travelled to the US mysteriously disappeared for a few days. Turns out someone in the friend group had done some hackery type things (I won't go into more details to preserve their anonymity), and they were basically "detained" and interrogated for several days without being able to notify anyone, including any potential lawyers (not that students have lawyers on speed dial, but whatever). The culprit wasn't even among the people who were detained. No arrests were ever made. Just some good old scare tactics against teenagers.
Basically: behaviour at US borders has been iffy for a lot longer than some folks might think.
Yeah, recent news are essentially raising this from "crossing US border is dangerous, prepare yourself" to "US border guards got a quota of terror to inflict, do you really want to gamble?"
That is very much not what I said. Additionally: some of recent people who've been detained are "criminals" as well, a missing document, a tattoo-gun there on a tourist visum, etc. Doesn't make it right to treat them like utter garbage or to make their rights disappear.
I'd like to provide a counterargument that it's not "iffy" to detain and question people who you're not sure sure should be allowed into the country at a point of entry, and that basically every country on the planet does it.
Non-citizens at US points of entry have very limited constitutional protection. SCOTUS has consistently held that the federal government has broad authority over immigration and border control. Basically nobody has a 1st or 2nd amendment protection at a border crossing, and non-citizens have further-restricted 4th and 5th amendment protections among others.
Border agents do not need any level of suspicion or probably cause to search your person or your effects. Failing to answer questions can result in entry being denied. US v. Ramsey held that everyone, citizen or not, has no inherent right to enter the US at a particular point of entry on a particular date and time and that basically any search is "reasonable" due to national security and law enforcement needs. That ruling was half a century ago.
Shaughnessy v. US ex rel. Mezei (1953) held that even a lawful resident who is re-entering the country after an absence can be denied re-entry without a hearing as long as that denial is lawful. Mezei lived in the US as a lawful immigrant from 1923 to 1948 then went back to Hungary for just over a year and a half. A 1924 law classified him as an "excludable alien" when he returned in 1950 he was permanently barred from re-entry. This was before LPR status was codified so I imagine there is more relevant case law to that classification specifically.
SCOTUS has consistently held multiple distinctions between citizens and non-citizens at the border: Citizens have an absolute right to enter the country, non-citizens (including LPRs) do not. Everyone loses most 4A protections at points of entry, but citizens have a reasonableness bar that non-citizens do not (US v. Montoya de Hernandez 1985, US v. Flores-Montano 2004). Citizens still enjoy due process while non-citizens do not (Shaughnessy again, Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding 1953). Citizenship ensures someone is not in a legal limbo status of being detained unreasonably or indefinitely (Boumediene v. Bush 2008), a non-citizen denied entry without the means to leave is basically stuck there. Citizens are presumed able to enter the country and have faster processing, all non-citizens including LPRs must prove admissibility every time.
So there's a century (or more) of case law supporting what some might call extreme power on the part of the federal government to deny non-citizens entry at any port of entry, for any or no reason. But what it boils down to is whether there are any countries in the world that don't have this policy? There is no country in the world where as a non-citizen I enjoy the same rights and legal recourse as a citizen if I am denied entry, and no country where it is not on me to affirmatively prove to the border agent(s) that I am legally permitted entry. It is always a privilege to enter a country other than your own.
Edit: At the risk of breaking guidelines and making for boring reading, I have to question the odds of someone being able to read this comment in ~30 seconds, process the argument, and decide its worth a downvote vs. "oh I don't like this first sentence."
It's probably more like "your first sentence doesn't address the GP's situation at all, so the rest of the post is just gonna be grandstanding without foundation". Which happens to be a correct assessment of your post.
Specifically, "disappeared for a few days" is not at all what basically every country on the planet does.
I'm very clearly responding to the oversimplifying final sentence and I cited several instances where non-citizens can indeed be held for days without violating US laws.
The GP frames this as the US doing something nobody else does, which is objectively false, and even if his specific example is an egregious violation of someone's rights I'm sure if we looked through the last 25 years of immigration detentions for other countries we could pick out something equally upsetting from each one.
Most of your comment is spent arguing about "can question and deny entry", which is missing the point by a mile.
Also, things can be legal and iffy at the same time (indeed, such wide-ranging powers basically invite that, since they give wide latitude to go overboard in cases that do not deserve it).
> Americans do not understand how much press there is outside the US about tourists from Ireland / Germany / Canada getting locked up in ICE jails for weeks on end.
And they shouldn't. As far as I know, those cases of German getting locked up media coverage was intense, but the stories didn't check out. Those were cases of Germans entering by foot via Tijuana, making condracting claims to the ICE officer - raising suspicions with those officers. In case of entering the US by plane, I haven't seen and credible articles that resulted in detention.
He failed to show up to a hearing about his green card. Not saying his treatment is warranted, but all those cases had at least some kind of merrit where an ICE agent might become suspicious. It is not as random tourists getting detained.
"Schmidt’s green card was allegedly tagged for him failing to attend a hearing because the invitation was sent to his old address, according to the family’s fundraiser to cover Schmidt’s legal costs and loss of earnings.
“To compound this error, he had just recently been provided with a new replacement Green Card since he had lost the original one,” the fundraising page says. “Even then U.S. Immigration failed to let him know that there was an outstanding hearing which he had missed and that his card would be tagged.”"
^ this. Once (oh, actually twice!) while travelling, I have had entirely benign trouble with paperwork (things like not filling a form correctly on the first attempt). Explaining the circumstances to someone who has to figure out if you're scatter-brained, unlucky, or an actual criminal, isn't particularly fun, but it's been entirely professional and civilised. We resolved it all in about half an hour. Didn't even miss a flight.
Now that it's a political issue, rather than a logistical matter, so it's no longer professional or civilised, no thanks. I have one US customer and thankfully Google Meet is enough, because I'm not getting anywhere near the US for them. I can find other customers if I have to, but I don't think legal fees for navigating the oh-we-totally-had-good-reason-to-think-he-was-a-terrorist-your-honour jail are as easily deductible. As for leisure, haha, no, there are plenty of things to see all over the world where the chances of getting jailed because you said the wrong thing about the wrong president are much smaller. My visa expires this year, I'm not planning to renew it any time soon.
At the border? Well, it's not a high chance in absolute terms, but the risk of being deemed to have broken the law due to visa/ESTA noncompliance is a lot higher.
I would certainly no longer do US travel for a conference on a tourist visa in case that's deemed "work". (pop quiz to Americans: what visa do I need for that situation, and how difficult is it to get?)
> So you genuinely think that if you go to the US you have a high risk of being imprisoned without due process even if you you don't break any US law?
I think that the risk of being imprisoned without due process is very low, but still substantially higher than in any other Western country, and certainly high enough not to justify the risk.
I also think that the risk of being temporarily imprisoned with due process, until they figure out that I haven't broken any law anywhere, is also very low, but still substantially higher than in most Western countries. And certainly high enough that it's not worth the risk.
I don't have an issue with border controls being a thing. I'm not a free travel idealist. I get why border controls exist, I think the premise of not letting people in unless they provably meet the host country's requirement is perfectly reasonable, and I certainly think that, even if someone did nothing wrong and just doesn't have their documentation in order, sending them back home on the first flight is an entirely reasonable thing to do. I just think that, in the current political climate, both the chances of being the victim of good old abuse and the chances of well-meaning ICE personnel screwing up are too high to be worth crossing the Atlantic for.
From what I understand, being arrested at the U.S. border while entering the country is strictly worse than being arrested by regular police while inside the U.S. In the latter case, the police arresting you will at least read you your Miranda rights, will have no right to search your phone unless authorized by a warrant, and will generally offer bail to get out of the jail in exchange for a court appearance. That's what due process, at a minimum, entails.
None of that happens at the border.
At this stage it doesn't even matter whether you have broken any U.S. law or not.
If they happen to look at you on social media / somewhere on the Internet and see that you've spoken out against the current administration's policies, you might be imprisoned (based on what's happened so far). It's the new lese majeste.
Lol there is no due process at the border for a simple imprisonment, it is 'administrative' and I have been held up to a day or so without any sort of hearing. I pulled my FBI record from the last time they tossed me in immigration holding cell, there is no record of it. They don't allow you to have a phone, they do not let you have an attorney, and they do not document they've imprisoned you. They lock you away and that is that, it is your word against theirs and your word from behind a jail cell. You will never prevail in such a situation, and if you complain outside of some place like HN the vast majority of people will angrily ask what you did wrong and that there 'must be more to the story' so you rarely even bring it up.
I do not think most people can conceive just how common and deranged the situation is, and that not only that the documentation is so poor and that most of the people this happens to will not speak up, either because no one will believe them or because they are not a citizen and are afraid it will result in reprisal.
Just look at the Chinese woman that died while the Border Patrol held her. They didn't release that she commited suicide it only came out because media kept requesting information on her otherwise Border Patrol wouldn't have released anything.
No shit. They're the one that do arrest histories. If you're arrested by podunk local sheriff or ATF it will show up on FBI report even though it's not an FBI arrest.
> and if you complain outside of some place like HN the vast majority of people will angrily ask what you did wrong and that there 'must be more to the story'
That's because in most publicized cases it turns out there is something more to it.
We have multiple examples. It happens, because the incarceration has been privatized and they have no incentive to get you out. They want to keep making more money.
Shit, I'm a US citizen flying domestic while colored and I have that fear. If you don't think that's reasonable, you're not paying attention. It's not hyperbole to say that ICE is the new Gestapo, and because international airports are considered borders and thus they have jurisdiction, they cover most of where I'd want to go to or transit through in the US.
> Americans do not understand how much press there is outside the US about tourists from Ireland / Germany / Canada getting locked up in ICE jails for weeks on end.
We read about it, too. It just seems absolutely nobody close to power is willing to do anything to even tap the brakes.
There's a pretty sizable proportion of USians that have a hard time accepting that other countries exist.
For what it's worth, we're also starting to have similar (though so far less pronounced) reactions to domestic travel. There's a number of states that are unsafe to travel to if you or someone in your family has a gender identity that's not on the approved list--and that has an outsize effect. I won't go to those places since they don't deserve my tax dollars, and am just jumping on a bandwagon of plenty of other people in making that decision.
They didn't simply expel them, the sent them to a foreign prison. Don't misrepresent what occurred. And Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a legal resident. They are doing this to people who _do_ have the right to stay. Even for those who are in the US illegally, they are entitled to basic human rights and have protections under US law. They can be deported in accordance with domestic and international law.
Sending them to foreign prison camps instead is in fact a crime against humanity.
I don't think this is the main reason. US show hostility to the rest of the world, talking about annexing other countries or trying to ruin their economy. I know Trump doesn't represent all USers, but still, I much rather spend my tourist money somewhere else.
Just like a lot of Americans (including the left) that I personally know who still think "51st state" is a light-hearted joke or "Trump doesn't mean it" or they don't think it's a serious threat.
They don't know or don't think canadians takes this seriously and it's not fucking funny.
Not necessarily the same distance. For example if you consider academia, the center of gravity of "serious" "western world" universities that can reasonably be visited has shifted considerably towards Europe now.
Remember that many (most?) people coming from Canada go thru US immigration there, so these numbers (from US airports) likely represent non-Canadian visitors.
With so many fewer people coming the ratio of fliers to immigration people is going to be lower, chance of getting hassled is going to be that much higher.
Personally I'm unlikely to return while these stories of bad things happening to people at the border continue
(this isn't a new thing, in particular because the US has no exit processing infrastructure - people get tagged as overstaying even though they've left, get popped into detention when they return - always keep your boarding passes when you leave).
Countries all over the world are issuing US travel warnings. If there's an error or mistake on your visa you risk being detained by ICE for weeks on end or even end up in the Gulag in El Salvador.
For European visitors, they can see the fascism miles away. A lot of Europe was occupied by Hitler while the US wasn't. The extraordinary claim that Musk's salute wasn't a Nazi salute is mind boggling. Even when people have seen it side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Zwiv8erk0
It's mostly a footnote in the form of "contact the embassy if you're trans/non-binary". The implication seems to be that those people will need to alter their passports (again) to gain access.
Germany also added a warning that minor criminal history can be a reason for imprisonment and deportation, as well as a reminder that an American visa or ESTA document are meaningless against an unwilling border patrol agent:
Weder eine gültige ESTA-Genehmigung noch ein gültiges US-Visum begründen einen Anspruch auf Einreise in die USA. Die endgültige Entscheidung über die Einreise trifft der US-Grenzbeamte. Es empfiehlt sich, Nachweise über die Rückreise (z.B. Flugbuchung) bei der Einreise mitzuführen. Gegen dessen Entscheidung gibt es keinen Rechtsbehelf. Den deutschen Auslandsvertretungen ist es nicht möglich, auf die Rückgängigmachung einer Einreiseverweigerung hinzuwirken.
Reisende sollten ausschließlich mit einem gültigen ESTA oder Visum in die USA reisen, das dem geplanten Aufenthaltszweck entspricht. Vorstrafen in den USA, falsche Angaben zum Aufenthaltszweck oder eine auch nur geringfügige Überschreitung der Aufenthaltsdauer bei Reisen können bei Ein- bzw. Ausreise zu Festnahme, Abschiebehaft und Abschiebung führen.
Denmark has added this to their VISA page:
Når du skal søge om ESTA eller visum til USA, er der to kønsbetegnelser at vælge imellem: mand eller kvinde. Hvis du har kønsbetegnelsen X i dit pas, eller du har skiftet køn, anbefales det at kontakte den amerikanske ambassade forud for rejsen for vejledning om, hvordan du skal forholde dig.
Germany added this:
Die ESTA-Beantragung ist gebührenpflichtig (21 USD).
Reisende in die USA müssen bei ESTA- oder Visumanträgen entweder das Geschlecht „männlich“ oder „weiblich“ angeben; relevant ist hierbei der Geschlechtseintrag der antragstellenden Person zum Zeitpunkt der Geburt. Reisende, die den Geschlechtseintrag „X“ innehaben oder deren aktueller Geschlechtseintrag von ihrem Geschlechtseintrag bei Geburt abweicht, sollten vor Einreise die zuständige Auslandsvertretung der USA in Deutschland kontaktieren und die geltenden Einreisevoraussetzungen in Erfahrung zu bringen.
The Finnish travel advice has something similar:
Yhdysvallat on myös antanut 24.2.2025 toimeenpanomääräyksen (25 STATE 11402), jonka mukaan Yhdysvaltojen ESTA:a tai viisumia hakevan on jatkossa ilmoitettava sukupuolekseen joko ”mies” tai ”nainen”. Määräyksen mukaan hakijan on hakemuksessa ilmoitettava syntymähetkellä vahvistettu sukupuolensa.
Jos hakijan nykyinen passiin merkitty sukupuoli poikkeaa hänen syntymässä vahvistetusta sukupuolestaan, Yhdysvaltojen viranomaiset voivat evätä luvan maahantuloon. Maahantulon edellytykset on suositeltavaa varmistaa etukäteen Yhdysvaltain viranomaisilta.
Suomen passissa ei ole sukupuolimerkintää X. Jos esim. kaksoiskansalaisella on passi, jossa X-merkintä on, voi maahantulon edellytykset tarkistaa etukäteen Yhdysvaltain viranomaisilta.
"So far, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Germany, France and the U.K. have all issued new travel guidance for those wishing to travel to the U.S."
Last I checked, Germany's advice was similar (i.e., not a general warning); and from the article, it doesn't look like Portugal's advice is a Travel Warning either. There's a difference between making information available, and providing warnings.
What changed is that they made the text clearer, that ESTA approval doesn't guarantee entry and decision is made by the border officer and adding a note that wrong information may lead to incarceration.
Those notes weren't "needed" before as that was rare, while theoretically the rules were the same, but seem to be handled stricter now.
It's absolute lunacy that western governments are giving out negative travel advice against the US at all, but I've noticed Newsweek seems to have an agenda on this topic.
Finland Ministry for Foreign Affairs has this section on their "Traveling to United States" page (Google translated):
Current affairs
When traveling to the United States, it is important to note that a valid ESTA or visa does not necessarily entitle you to enter the United States. Overstaying your stay or providing incorrect information about the purpose of your stay may result in arrest or deportation.
The United States has also issued an executive order (25 STATE 11402) on February 24, 2025, according to which applicants for a US ESTA or visa must in future indicate their gender as either “male” or “female”. According to the order, applicants must indicate their gender as determined at birth in their application.
If the applicant’s current gender as recorded in their passport differs from their gender as determined at birth, the US authorities may refuse entry. It is recommended to check the entry requirements in advance with the US authorities.
There is no gender marking X in the Finnish passport. If, for example, a dual citizen has a passport with an X marking, the entry requirements can be checked in advance with the US authorities.
Political demonstrations may occur in major cities, which may turn violent. Avoid large gatherings or demonstrations.
So far, the travel warnings I've seen all specify specific groups targeted by the American government, such as LGBTQ+ people.
News of tourists getting imprisoned for weeks or longer have been all over the news, but so far Europe doesn't seem to have actually brought out a general warning for that kind of danger.
That said, the people I've spoken to (most of which aren't LGBT+) are hesitant to go to the US now. There's a stark difference between the "haha, what the fuck, US" sentiment I used to sense and the "what the fuck, US" we're getting now.
The similarity is obvious, but there's a difference between "a travel warning has been issued for minorities" and "a travel warning has been issued".
Unlike what the right-wing media may make it seem, the amount of trans/nonbinary people is absolutely minute. The warnings apply to at most a percentage of the population, and even then it only affects the people that have come out of the closet and jumped through the hoops necessary to get their passport altered.
That obviously doesn't make the political trend _right_, but the geopolitical and economic implications are very different.
These warnings don't include advice against entering the country as a tourist, despite the recent reports of tourists getting arrested and locked away at the border. Such a warning would set a much more grim tone for the future of the western bloc.
WHAT THE HELL WHY DID YOU COME IN YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE
...sorry but you said-
I DON'T CARE WHAT I SAID.
...OK fine I'll just be leaving.
OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST LEAVE? YOU CANT LEAVE! You'll be locked in my dank basement for the next five days while I fill out the paperwork for you to be dragged out of the house!
>This newsletter doesn’t delve into politics, and the reason for this change is both pretty obvious and not in need of further discussion here.
Can someone state the obvious for me please?
The two thoughts in my head were "this is because tourism is down" and "this is because migrants/asylum seekers aren't crossing the border at the moment".
I would think you'd draw different conclusions if it's one or the other, but, regarding the latter, I don't know how many of them cross the border at the border and how many typically do it with a plane ticket.
A general sense that the US is actively trying to hurt us in the rest of the world. Enabling Putin, stopping USAID programs, imposing tariffs etc. the list is long by now. Just makes you not feel like supporting it by buying US or going there and spending money. Secondly lots of stories about tourists being detained by ICE make it feel even almost scary to go.
I get that narrative. I guess my point is that, if border crossings at the US-Mexico border are down 90%+ compared to last year, and if some migrants/asylum seekers fly in instead of crossing a border on foot/in a car, then how much of this decrease is would-be migrants deciding it's not a good time, and how much of this is would-be tourists being scared of detention? Is that even possible to know?
I was.. with my friend visiting family. Not knowing where they live - because the person picking them up is waiting at the airport (8h detained, 10y ago).
Another one being accused of selling drugs in LA (never been there, detained for 2 days, banned and put on a flight back home, 5y ago)
I voted for not him and persuaded a number of people to do the same (not that it mattered in my state anyway, other than reducing his popular vote margin). I'm not yet sure what more I could have done.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, but my question is about the proportion of people like you who are thinking about visiting compared to people who are thinking about migrating.
People are staying away from an oligarchy where habeas corpus has been suspended for a wide range of situations, and that results in extradition without an option of release to El Salvador. That's the obvious bit the rest of us know and can see and TFA draws a line to that you can't see yet.
Tourism is not down in other countries. Migrants/asylum seekers don't typically fly in by plane to the top 8 airports in the US, and those that do, do not do so in numbers anywhere near large enough to account for the change in numbers.
A lot of people do immigrate by flying in and not leaving when their visa expires. It doesn't make for very spectacular news footage though. Not sure what the numbers are, but I used to work in restaurants with lots of people who were "undocumented" and they all came to the US via flight. The people crossing the border on foot are absolutely destitute and easy targets of animosity
Just to note that in most places at the moment (unless you turn up in that red baseball cap...) the attitude to most Americans is likely to be a kind of horrified pity (again, unless you start saying how great it all is). Most people are generally aware that Trump doesn't have universal support, and unlike your own media apparently, we do get coverage of protests and so on. Getting back into your own country though, yeah that might be a problem. Sorry.
UK is its own kind of dump, and has the same anti-immigrant dumpster fire being stoked by the media to distract the populace while the politicians & their friends finish looting what little is left of the country. Would not recommend.
It has the same problems of having an ageing population as the rest of Europe. Brexit is bad but relatively small in comparison to the demographic challenges. I live in Germany and it's in a sorry state too, because there are so many old people.
The UK is much more run down and low-quality than the rest of Europe.
EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.
The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
I have lived in Germany for 5 years but am from the UK and I don't see much difference overall. The UK is just a bit more individualistic, much less racist, and has London, which has the highest wages in Europe. Germany has less income equality but far worse wealth inequality—most people in Germany will never own their own home because although Germany is rich, Germans are poor. Healthcare is better here, though. It's just a case of picking your poison I think. Also, believe it or not, Germany has its shithole cities too, I've visited a few of them.
But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
I've also lived in London for 8 years, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here. I made the difficult decision to leave and abandon everything I've built there because I could no longer sustain paying Switzerland-level prices for Eastern European level of quality.
> has London
Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.
> the highest wages in Europe
Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).
Where did you go to? Like I said for all the flaws of London and the UK (and I agree there are many), Europe is largely comparatively shit too. I live in Germany’s richest city and it’s also quite shit and everything is falling apart and nothing works.
i know europe is making it easier for grants/proposals to go through and lessening the overall time it takes for grants to be accepted, for people in academia leaving the US
A certain cohort of the population ignores logic and reason, and runs on vibes and tribalism. They will only understand economic pain, when it hurts them personally, based on the evidence. And so, the rest of the world must incur economic pain in the US so the electorate understands its place in the economic system.
Yep. It's only going to get worse before it gets better, but that's necessary to change the political situation — that's the real "medicine" that we're taking here.
People will only wake up when the economy really hurts. That's why they voted for 47 in the first place, so I hope they're even more awake now.
If non-US citizens can be deported to El Salvador without due process for having a tattoo that an ICE officer deems to be "gang-related", you're immediately going to alienate most of the World's population from wanting to visit for any purpose.
The lack of due process and the threat of extradition on a whim is one that feels less likely to happen to me as a caucasian with US citizens as family, but the impact of it would be life-changingly poor. I'd rather just not travel to the US, for tourism, family or business reasons.
I'm not sure anything done in the last 3 months is much of a surprise to people who listened to his campaign talking points. It seems to me that people just thought he was a lying politician who lies, and this was just more lying. What's caught people out is that he's doing it all, and believes SCOTUS will never condemn or find illegal a thing he has done so due process is an abstract concept only, and others consider themselves immune for actions covered by Exec Order.
When they'll deport innocent US citizens to El Salvador and then argue it's impossible to get them back I don't have any hope at all as a visitor. There's no way in hell I'm stepping foot in the United States right now.
Good point, the man I was thinking of isn't a citizen. But even though the administration has admitted it was an error, they still aren't interested in seeing him returned.
It has happened to permanent residents who have green cards, though. It's absolutely not the same as being a citizen, but it should be noted that most green card holders are eligible to become US citizens.
What I find terrifying and everyone else should as well: If all that stands between you and indefinite detention is an accusation without due process that you're foreign then literally anyone including citizens can be black bagged.
German tourists are being detained by ICE. British tourists have been detained by ICE. Permanent residents of the US have been detained by ICE. Graduate students, scientists, tourists, you name it... detained for prolonged periods of time by ICE. Not all of them had tattoos, that's just an example, and that's the point - ICE want to use fear and uncertainty, because that's their M.O.
Detainment is bad enough. It's only a matter of time before extradition to El Salvador is extended, but even if that didn't happen, what is happening right now is enough to put people off.
"A Pew Research Study conducted in 2023 shows that 32.0% of Americans have tattoos. 41.0% of individuals under 30 have at least one tattoo, as do 46.0% of individuals aged between 30 and 49."
That's not "most" in the sense, 50%+. It's still pretty significant.
Don't even count on being a U.S. citizen making a difference. If they don't have due process for non-citizens, they just have to claim you are not a citizen to send you to El Salvador. Without due process you cannot prove you are a citizen.
It matches my anecdotal experience here (from Germany). When talking about travelling to the US, previously the discussions of the drawbacks would circle around climate impact, expense or flight time. Recently, this has shifted to feeling unwelcome or unsafe. I talked to two different people last week who had gone to the US regularly in the past years, who have decided to not go this year (attending a wedding and the other for touristic reasons), due to the current political climate.
I mean it's not surprising. US Immigration seems to have been told to reject whoever they feel like, interrogate for hours in hopes of finding anything no matter how random to deny entry.
> Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we've compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadI make an effort to avoid and me mindful/critical or news/culture war stuff but at the same time.
I’ve got this instinctive vibe that now is not the best time to be visiting the US.
And then add all the other rethoric and actions, which don't make the contemporary U.S. the place it was once idealized to be.
If the "crazy" is gonna happen to you, yeah, that's an entirely different story.
Looking at the crazy New York city, with the crazy architecture and such or going othe replaces and seeing the crazy car centric structures, but also the crazy neighborhood between rich and poor or just the crazy landscape around Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls.
The positive crazy compared to negative crazy sums up less and less to a positive value, though.
But within the metaphor - elected leaders need to balance the short-term approval of voters who are angry/xenophobic, against the longer-term disapproval of voters who don't like losing "their" cuts of withering travel/tourism-related revenues ...and can figure out who is mostly to blame for that.
The latest month available is still February though.
It might be a better source in a month or two, but not now.
Huh, city centers in Europe are way nicer than anything I've seen in the US. But maybe you're more interested in other things.
This goes for most arrests, probably damn near all of them when it comes to nonviolent crimes.
> Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin
Sounds like all her paper work was good to go...
> she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.
Ok, that sucks but not too crazy...
> Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.
What?
> US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.
Ok, let's say that's actually the truth. Let's say she told them "yeah I'm gonna work here". Ok, she's in the wrong, worst case but being detained for A MONTH?!
> According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.
?!
> Lofving also said she tried to get help from the German consulate in Los Angeles.
I wish they would have reached out to the Consulate to see if they'd supply any information about what's going on here. Maybe its policy for the consulate to not have any comment about cases though... not sure.
this is less of a defense of ICE than more of a push for transparency so we don't have to deal with low information appeals to emotion.
There's no backstory that justifies indefinite detention without due process.
Well, yes, because that's precisely what due process is?
If "everybody" doesn't get a trial before a judge, if _you_ happened to be taken by ICE[1], how would you manage not being deported?
By proving you're a legal citizen? But how do you do so if there's no due process?
[1] (for whatever reason; today it's on the suspicion to be an "illegal", based on whatever the guys smell; but tomorrow?)
However, if arrested within the borders, yes, it becomes a different matter where you _are_ going through a judicial process, to assess whatever should happen, and why exactly (and to document the process).
A sane border would just block illegal entrance. But pretending that ICE should be optimized for single person expedited deportation is just stupid. While in CBP you may not be allowed to contact your lawyer the 60 days she was in ice custody was completely fair game, but she didn't for some unknown reason.
First, do it for your own safety. A wrong form or the wrong answer to a verbal question after 18 hours of travel could land you in weeks of brutal detention.
Second, do it to help the cause. We here in America need to suffer the consequences of our actions. We need to see conferences canceled. We need to see imports stopped. We need to see people refusing to bring their knowledge and expertise here.
It is going to be a long, dark four years for the globe. It's going to take all of us working from within and without to have any hope of dismantling this evil empire.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/british-comic-creator-r-e-bu...
"While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. "I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me."
I can't understand how this is allowed to happen.
The simplest explanation is that this administration wants the US to be hated and sees atrocities as an important tool in that effort.
Why would they want that?
It's not like there is a ready drop in replacement for things people desire from the US.
Agreed mere deportation is not an atrocity. But that’s not what’s going on here.
Then it turns out that she was using Workaway, which is like AirBnB or Uber but for foreign labor on tourist visas. They don't tell you that you need a work visa to work in another country [1], but you almost certainly do anywhere you go, not just the US. The woman in the story was working in exchange for accommodation, which is legal for citizens but not for aliens: work permits and visas exist to deter illegal immigration. She didn't have intent to immigrate illegally, but the scheme under which she entered the country was illegal, and she confessed to it in her statement to the border guards.
The real bad actor in this story was Workaway, and I'm surprised they haven't been shut down yet. They offer an alien labor arrangement that is almost certain to get you detained if caught with the wrong visa, don't give you advice on visas, and aren't there to help if something does go wrong at the border. I doubt there are many countries who welcome their alien labor arrangements, either.
[1] "Workaway is a listing site that enables contact between members, we are unfortunately unable to arrange or advise on visas. There are so many countries with different regulations or laws for different types of volunteering activity, so we would suggest directly getting in touch with the relevant embassy of your destination. It is the responsibility of the host and/or volunteer to make sure they are within the law." https://www.workaway.info/en/stories/workaway-for-newbies-co...
This was a paperwork issue and should've been resolved with paperwork - refusal of entry and a plane ticket back.
If USAmericans got such a treatment anywhere in the world for similar reasons, it'd be broadcasted as a diplomatic incident in your news channels.
What does NOT usually happen in these cases is 1) having a full body cavity search 2) being shackled in the back of a van 3) having your phone confiscated 4) being forbidden from contacting any family or legal representation 5) having your clothing cut apart 6) being transported to a different city without being informed of what is happening 7) being cut off from access to your foreign funds 8) being detained for 19 days.
The notable thing isn't that she broke the law. The notable thing is the cruel and unusual severity of the punishment for a relatively minor visa violation. Typically, when countries punish tourists so severely for what should be a slap on the wrist, tourists stop wanting to go there.
The "kids in cages" Southern border immigration detention ran through both the previous Trump administration and the Biden administration. Some pretty horrific stories from then, especially during COVID.
small thing, but learned at work that often there's a weekly pattern (and I'd bet there is for airplane travel) so you ought use a rolling 7 day average instead of 30 because there are different numbers of weekends in each day's 30 day number.
This is why there's a slight zigzag in the line charts in the article.
[spoiler]
*
*
*
*
*
The dates of Chinese New Year move around across the year and they have such a big effect on the stats that it's easier just to lump the two months together.
[/spoiler]
So for Canadians still travelling to the U.S. it might actually increase their carbon footprint.
It's one thing to refuse entry to someone who doesn't have the right documents. The fear goes to a completely different level once people see tourists getting locked up.
As someone who lived in the US for 22 years legally and most of my social and business network there, I an not taking the risk of getting locked up in ICE jail any time soon, no matter how unlikely it is.
I won't be visiting the US for the foreseeable future (used to go several times per year for work), just not worth the risk.
Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
EU Eastern Europe, you might get funny looks but it's still not an extraordinary situation to have various shades of skin colour (e.g. Syrians, various Central Asians are migrant workers in a few of the countries in question; a lot of e.g. the Balkans are on a palette of skin colours).
Non-EU Eastern Europe (referring more to Belarus than Montenegro here), might get casual racism.
Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
As a person who matches the description above, and has traveled to Europe extensively and frequently, I can tell you that as much as Europeans like to believe this is this case, it is absolutely not true.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
Unless you're making some extremely critical assumptions about how much wear the word "indefinite" can bear, this is unfortunately not true either.
Now, officially the shengen zone means there's no need to show your documents between countries. But countries still don't want certain people coming in. And they don't want drugs smuggled in either.
It was really interesting who they decided to pull aside for a chat. It was almost always men who were travelling alone. Almost always men who were in the 25-45 age range. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some racial profiling going on as well. The police never questioned me - probably because I was with my girlfriend the whole time. If she wasn't there, I bet I would have been pulled aside every time too.
Anyway, I believe your experience in Europe. But if you were a man travelling alone, its possible it was partially or fully due to that. For about a decade, every time I went through security at an airport I was always "randomly selected" to have my bag swabbed for chemicals. It never happens any more, and I'm as white as they come. I assume it was a gender + age + travelling alone thing - but its still a mystery to me.
That is not what it means.
Checks became way more frequent.
I'm white, male. I travel to some lower-income countries for work. I can dress like a neat, well-paid software developer with the €2000 laptop and €1000 camera in my bag. I'll sail through security in Europe and at the destination, then have a horde of people hassling me for a taxi, sometimes pretty aggressively, and I feel I stand out as an easy target for robbery.
Instead, I wear some old, faded clothes for the journey. Then I get the "random" drug swab check in Europe, border control at the destination might ask to see my hotel booking, but the taxi drivers and street kids will ignore me as another cheakskate backpacker.
Since EU has problems with the illegal immigration, there are some checks and they happen more frequently.
Most EU country police don’t need probable cause to detain you. It does happen to be detained for no reason outside of profiling. For example, in France, you can be sent to jail for up to 24h with no probable cause.
And as you describe in the EU it's "up to 24 hours". And in the lawless authoritarian regime? That Canadian girl was detained for 11 days and was told to prepare to be held for months: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jasmine-moon...
A friend's family flew into a EU country with a letter, they thought this letter was their visa but it turned out to be a rejection from the EU country's consulate (maybe it was a request for more information for their visa application). They were denied entry, but there was no indefinite detention, they were just told to get on the next plane out of the country and had to wait in the "international area" of the airport until said flight.
There must be a probable cause : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14837
In the US you need probable cause to get pull over or temporary detain you. In France, you don't need probably cause for temporary detaining you, but if they suspect you of something they can also send you to jail. You can't be sent to jail in the US just on them just suspecting something.
All the people sitting in an Salvadorian prison for having a shitty tatoo would strongly disagree.
When I traveled last time, I have witnessed an European denied entry for a reason I don't know, and a white male without any beard has been escorted into the immigration office.
Said office had a giant window. The officers were just chatting with him while checking his documents, and also drinking some coffee and eating some cake. I didn't look that long to see whether they have offered the same to him (because it's rude).
Also, I don't have an EU/UK/US passport, and I just pass fine.
For some EU perspective: last summer we traveled with a group of social dancers from Berlin to Pula in Croatia, going to an event at the coast.
Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023.
We had one couple in the group that where not "white". She is German but her parents are Vietnamese and he is from Syria. They're married, they have German citizenship.
They were the only ones from our group of ~20 people who got singled out and had their papers and luggage (!) checked. She looks Asian, he looks Middle-Eastern (oh, and he has a beard!).
That said, they just took 10mins longer to make it through the arrivals hall. They didn't get incarcerated.
However, the year before they were traveling to a dance event in Belgrade. That was was before they got married so he didn't have a German passport yet. He only had a Syrian passport and a residence permit for Germany/Schengen.
Serbia is not part of the EU. Usually such a mistake means they just send you back on the next flight. Happened to two friends of mine, both "white US citizens, who didn't also know this and were traveling to Belgrade from Switzerland two years before.
My Syrian friend however spent three days in a jail in cell with a dozen criminals before they let him fly back to Germany. Mind you, the event they went to was four days and he had a return ticket that could have been easily changed to the arrival day.
Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
Some countries are more "famous" for it, but that's really just a matter of perception and how it fits into an existing narrative, not based on actual evidence.
It's not like there's data showing that racial profiling is lower in France, Germany, and Sweden than it is in Eastern Europe.
> Serbia is not part of the EU
> Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Serbia_to_the_Eur...
Though my point was that as someone who's moved into a EU country, it might not be entirely clear that it's not inside EU, given it's proximity and that they might have read about it in an EU context given its status.
Heck I'm in Norway and had to check to make sure I was right.
Of course, second time around there's no excuse.
I didn't want to imply this was anyhow tied to Brussels.
With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
With an Iranian passport? Probably more problems.
First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.
But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.
Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.
> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.
I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
That's not relevant when, as I said, they detain you without knowing what passport you even hold.
> You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
Being a citizen does not, in fact, exempt you from being profiles and detained at border crossings, either in the US or in Europe.
Now I am not saying we are uniform half a billion, not at all, wear burka in eastern EU in some small backwardish village and you will raise eyebrows and maybe more. Try that in US and its the same, to put it mildly.
But this admin highly disagrees with that notion. Really hope the courts start throwing heads sooner rather than later.
I can answer that! It is pretty uneventful. My experience with the border checks in airports was always very pleasant (despite the lines, depending on the airport they can be pretty long)
We discriminate based on what country you're from. =)
[0] I am well aware there is racism in Europe, it's just ... different here.
I'd be interested in alternate viewpoints since I may be in a bleeding-heart, empathetic, progressive, consequence-considering news bubble.
My reasoning is that a family member who lives in the US said that they feel protected / insulated because they're in a deep blue state. I don't feel this is representative of reality, or at least they should be more alarmed than they sounded.
Exactly.
Americans generally don't understand the degree to which the rest of the world gets the CNN 5min recap of what's going on in the US, and it's very much the CNN recap and not the Fox one.
"Tourists locked up, school children shot, government defunded, California on fire, tune in at 11 for more".
The fact that ~half the country doesn't think ICE should be locking up tourists without good reason and the other ~half doesn't think ICE should be locking up anyone gets skipped.
Edit: Just to head off the nitpickers, by "good reason" I mean stuff that border guards of any nation would lock anyone up for if they found, regardless of visa type, status or nation or origin.
You would think that a country with a whole department devoted to government efficiency could work that out.
No, it's a small-ish minority of them. Most are government owned and run.
That said, there's a huge incentive to piss away money holding people so you can justify your budget and use poor conditions to justify increases in budget. And on top of that the contractors that supply government jails are pretty evil too.
So it's really a distinction without a difference at the end of the day, it's all a pretty rotten system.
But yes, there are incentives that do reward cells and even individuals for number of imprisonments. And no, they do not check nor punish "administrative errors".
Taxpayers are paying the private companies, but they're very much for profit.
About that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/01/29/billi...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/private-prison-...
https://afsc.org/newsroom/ice-signs-massive-contract-profit-...
As has been a rising sentiment as of late: "The cruelty is the point"
You're right that it isn't efficient in any sense. But the kinds of people who go into and are chosen for "law enforcement" tend to be the very people that should never be given a weapon. It's just a large scale Stanford Experiment in that regard.
Or maybe in both cases the point is deterrence.
You want foreign readers to read news about how half of the US wants you, the foreign tourist, be locked up in a jail cell? The news is already out there. Everyone assumes it's so wanted, because well... it does actually happen
"ICE goes crazy looking for crimes, hapless tourists caught up in the boondoggle"
and
"ICE detaining tourists for no good reason"
Are both 100% true ways to headline the same events. Which framing is Europe getting?
This is something to watch out for on all issues, not just immigration/foreign affairs.
If you're worried, though, that "ICE goes crazy" is an underrepresented perspective in the rest of the world, I can reassure you on that count...
So ...?
... not that these things would make it safer to travel to the US. In the short run.
The status quo of power is that it is less safe to be a foreigner in the US than it has been in a long time. Possibly at any point in time the US wasn't actively at war with another nation.
That is not remotely a good faith representation of the controversy.
For me, Coke tastes like acid, and Dr. Pepper is sweet and spicy.
But... uh... that doesn't translate well when applied to sources for "news".
Also, I'd like to emphasize what someone said elsewhere in this comments section: the rest of the world doesn't see the US through the "CNN vs Fox" lens, that's almost exclusively an American phenomenon.
Ubiquitous (distribution) versus relatively limited (distribution).
I think the crime rate is a major concern for every tourist.
Doesn't Florida have a much lower crime rate than California? As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
> Doesn't the crime rate go down when Republicans hold the power?
Does it? And what about police brutality? As a tourist, I'd rather go to a country where I'm less likely to be treated badly by the police.
> As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I think this in general has very little to do with crime rates. There are confounding factors. I'd rather not visit Florida regardless of crime rate.
Why would the police treat you bad? I you don't commit any crime it's most likely you have nothing to do with the police.
It's not true, in general, that police won't treat you badly as long as you don't commit a crime. (As an aside, you also have to interact with police officers if you've been the victim of a crime, and again, there's no guarantee they'll treat you well in this situation either).
Same with border officers.
I don't think that's true—or at least, not a strong correlation. Crime rates were going significantly down since the early 90s, regardless who is in power. There was a smaller spike during COVID years, which has I believe returned to normal.
> I think the crime rate is a major concern for every tourist.
It is, but it isn't the only concern, and ICE sending tourists to prison is by definition not a crime, but is just as relevant to potential tourists.
> As a tourist, I rather visit Florida than California.
I really don't think you really want to look at the state level crime rates, you should look at the crime rate for the place you're going to visit. For instance, the violent crime rate in Florida was 260 per 100k people in 2022 (according to Wikipedia)... but if you're going to Walt Disney World, specifically: it's a whole lot less.
Federally? There's no reason to think the federal government changing hands would impact local crime rates. Overall violent crime has seen steady decline from the 1970s to the present day. [1] That period has seen both Democratic and Republican administrations.
At the state level it's a different picture. 8 of the top 10, and 17 of the top 25 states for homicide rate are "red" states.[2] I think poverty and per-capita income rates in a state are a better predictor of crime rates than which party is specifically in power.
> Doesn't Florida have a much lower crime rate than California?
If you consume exclusively right-wing news media (or your favorite social media ragebait) you'd have that impression. Depending on your source they're either about equal (FBI stats) over the past 2 decades or Florida's murder rate is higher (CDC).[2] Either way it is not "much lower". For "much" lower I'd go to states like Massachusetts, Utah, or Hawaii which have murder rates closer to Western Europe.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Cri...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Of course most Americans don't want random people detained. But still, this is happening in the US.
And one thing that I believe is absolutely clear outside the US (whether it's true or not), is that most Americans are perfectly fine with "America First". Americans don't really care about the impact of Trump on the rest of the world; they care about the impact on themselves. Boycotting US products is a way to impact the American people, in the hope that the American people will eventually realise that what's best for them is also better for the others.
Something that I found interesting: when Canadians started booing the US anthem in NHL games, Americans started booing the Canadian anthem. Why? Canada didn't do anything to the US. Does it sound that most Americans are against what's happening, when they defend it? There is this kind of American patriotism where people seem to be like "Yes, my government, is bullying you, but I won't admit it and I will fight against you if you say it. But I'm a good guy, I don't want my government to bully you. I'll just support it because it's my country".
So yeah... pretty sure that it feels a lot different from the outside than from the inside.
Doesn‘t look much different from Russian, Israeli or Chinese patriotism. When outsiders criticize your tribe for doing bad things, many are standing in support of the tribe, not the values, and they are the most visible.
I agree with everything you said, except this. Sub “many” and I’d go with it. But at least here, in blue state / more-sane land, there is widespread horror and outrage. We’re only at the “tens of thousands of people protesting” stage and I’ll be the first to say Americans need to do more, but I think it’s going to far to say most Americans don’t care about the impact elsewhere.
Indeed.
Recently in Palo Alto for a few months. Saw lots of people protesting Tesla dealerships, lots of interesting and creative anti-Trump and Elon signs.
Not one word of Canada, of Greenland. Trumps stated goal of destroying Canada's economy to force annexation, or to outright just take Greenland seem not protest worthy.
Most people I spoke to seemed barely conscious of the issue.
To be fair, other matters may be higher pri in their minds, so if other events were not happening in parallel, it may be different.
But when 65 billion dollar defence hardware purchases are being dropped (they are), when future military purchases are not going to happen, when police cars, municipal vehicles are not going to be from US companies any more, when natural resources are going to be sold to the EU and China instead (sadly), the US is going to feel this for a very long time.
Because these are choices for decades. And it's not only Canada making them.
You don't have to deeply care about Canada to oppose annexation threats.
> Don't tell me Canadians lose sleep thinking about the well being of US.
A Canadian prime minister said Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.[1]
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau#1969
A partnership goes both ways. Caring about a partner is caring about yourself.
Granted I don't blame foreigners for not risking ICE abuse. And Hockey fans can just be dumb sometimes. A lot of Americans have severe recency bias, the right is saying "the same people telling you this will be catastrophic were the same ones who locked down schools over a cold and told you inflation would be transitory". These people are going to have to touch the stove to learn it's hot, and then they'll admit that it's hot but deny that it's burning them, and then enough at the margins will start to defect such that they start losing elections, leaving a hard-core to endlessly complain about how if they'd only held on until 3rd degree burns the stove would have turned itself off.
I haven't. I am just telling how I believe it is perceived from outside the US. It seems like Americans here find it a bit excessive for tourists to choose not to come to the US "just because of a mistake at the border". I'm trying to say that from the outside, the US is behaving at least like a big bully, sometimes like an enemy. You don't go on vacation in a country that threatens to attack you militarily.
I don't know if that's strictly accurate. United States citizens are some of the most heavily disenfranchised in the western world. Our oligarchs have spent decades making it more difficult to vote, especially for people of color, who overwhelmingly disapprove of the current administration. In some urban areas, it can take hours of standing in line to vote, and we don't get time off from work to do so. We've also had a decades long propaganda campaign telling us our vote doesn't matter.
More people didn't vote in the last election than voted for Trump. That's not to say they all would have voted against him, but it's not really the will of the American people.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-approval-rating-now-...
As a Canadian who normally travels to the US 3-4 times a year, that tells me everything I need to know about what "most Americans" think.
Try to remember our weird Electoral College, and that ultimately the vote came down to ~230,000 votes in swing states. (I'm in one of them, and I voted against the felon.)
Also hate that "mainstream news" like ABC and CBS covered Saturday's protests with the phrase "tens of thousand" while the protest organizations reported MILLIONS of protesters (about 1% of the population.)
That state of affairs is utterly unacceptable, and signals that overwhelmingly the country doesn't get it yet. Look at how many Greenlanders like Trump— those are the numbers you need to be pulling at home. Once 80-90% of the US population agrees that he's not only a bad president but a threat to democracy and a criminal, then we can talk about feeling safe to travel there again.
And zero judgement of anyone's wise decision to avoid or boycott our country, or arm themselves against us.
Also don't know what to think of polls, but anything above 0% approving of Trump is stupid. It's still not "most", which is my only contention. But whether or not it's most doesn't matter as long as all of our checks and balances have disintegrated, and there's one person in charge and making horrible decisions that hurt many Americans, threaten tourists, and are currently wreaking havoc on the stability of the global economy.
No, Americans generally don't understand that the rest of the world, and the rest of the world's news, genuinely don't see things in this dual "us vs them", "CNN vs Fox", "Democrats vs Republicans" lens.
When Trump does shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
When Biden or Obama before him did shit, media from around the world say what he did and why it's bad.
Fox are genuinely deranged hypocrites who themselves claimed in court that nobody sane would believe them. Very few of the world's media reflect their point of views, because they are absurd. CNN is all over the place, so sometimes their point of view matches with e.g. BBC or Guardian or Süddeutsche Zeitung, sometimes it doesn't.
I am from Europe. I don't think I look different than an American.
Still wishing citzens manage to get control of the country back, before the administration adopts even stronger control mechanisms.
As opposed to... a news organisation/channel?
I think the consensus is that if the rest of the world grows a spine it will emerge far stronger and the US a weaker state to before - akin to change the British Empire post ww2 compared with before, probably with the same glee they saw the British Empire falling.
What worries me is which side the US (government, not people) would choose to support if EU states send troops to Ukraine's front lines, which would absolutely instigate a Russian response.
(Trump wouldn't like that the little EU states are messing with his negotiations for the shrinking and pillaging of Ukraine, and Trump is, if nothing else, vengeful).
My 2 cents - wanted to take family on a trip to western US, parks and maybe SF, not in fucking hell now or in next 2 decades. I know its just some tiny drop in the bucket, but that ~10k spent locally in those few weeks will be spent elsewhere and if enough people will do the same (which they will do), tourism will suffer a bit. Maybe US folks will go there more, who knows (US tourists are still very welcome in Europe, we just hate the people you vote in because they clearly hate us).
> What's wrong with El Salvador? Isn't it a diverse country with wonderful people?
You are also incorrect in your last 2 sentences but no point breaking it down, that much I've learned in past few years with various versions of maga supporters (yes, we have them in Europe too, they usually vote ultra right pro russian and/or obviously corrupt populists).
Last time Europe tried to do something to reduce reliance on America in 2019, America threatened Europe with sanctions
https://www.dw.com/en/us-warns-eu-over-13-billion-defense-sp...
> The United States has decried "poison pills" embedded in proposed rules which could shut third country allies such as the United States out of European defense projects.
> US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland emphasized the point in a letter and warned of possible US sanctions: "I hope we can avoid contemplating similar courses of action," he said. The EU has been asked to respond to the letter by June 10.
This is of course despite the fact most EU defence spending has always gone straight into the US economy.
> "The EU is actually at the moment much more open than the US procurement market is for the European Union companies and equipment," Mogherini said in Brussels. "In the EU there is no 'buy European' act and around 81% of international contracts go to the US firms in Europe today."
Even the Biden administration was going out of its way to not push Russia too far. None of The Powers That Be in the US are interested in stumbling into WW3 with Russia, over Ukraine. Stumbling into WW3 with China, over Taiwan? Maybe. So I'd say Europe should approach such a decision from the assumption that you will receive no support from the US if you go down that road. If Europe wants to send its men to the killing fields of the Ostfront, it's on its own.
Assuming Europe, collectively, can even change the balance of power on the ground is also a stretch. Even some of the larger established militaries in Europe don't have the bodies to move the needle in this fight. The British Army, for example, has woefully understrength infantry battalions and is struggling with enlistment.[1][2] France claims they can put a division into the field [3] but I doubt that, probably more like a reinforced brigade (~5,000). I really don't get the impression European civil society is ready for hundreds or thousands of bodies to start coming back home either, but I could be wrong on that.
Meanwhile Russia inducted ~440,000 men last year, beating recruiting goals courtesy of MASSIVE cash enlistment bonuses, and still expects to grow their end strength this year as well.[4]
[1] https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1908330593005322480
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2025/02/27/can-the-british-military...
[3] https://www.ausa.org/articles/french-army-transforms-close-c...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-beating-military-recr...
They don't have a meaningful military but they have very big mouths. I don't think they are so stupid to enter a war they will surely lose.
Of course it is. Because the chance of a global recession is about 50% now.
Which means millions of people are going to lose their jobs, businesses will collapse, governments will go into deficit and cut services and there will be needless suffering only a few years after COVID.
It’s funny how quickly you realize the bad guys are both sides.
I say this because often when trying to interpret media i feel the language and accent of the presenter influences me. “They sound like me” therefore i start with an assumption they think like me. Rarely anyone in fox thinks like me.
(I retrospectively put the high point of recent West-China relations some time around the release of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin , which is an obvious propaganda war film with Americans on the "enemy" side .. that was shown in Western cinemas. Certainly in the UK, I think in America as well. Very odd. BTW, MOSFILM is on Youtube if you need some classic Russian cinema)
They're in a bubble.
Bubbles are great till they pop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21179524
Finnish has always been gender-neutral: https://finland.fi/han/article/
Chinese and Japanese also do not have grammatical gender. Chinese imported gendered pronouns about a century ago for ease of translating Western gendered languages, but both languages tend to either refer to people by name or have no word at all and infer from sentence structure.
You seem to be focusing on what's obviously not the focus of the commentary. Which is an interesting data point in and of itself.
But. The mechanical processes can include indefinite detention in facilities that look and function exactly like jails.
So... what you CALL it is almost certainly something different than what it is.
Trump can't even keep track of who started the war in Ukraine...
People don't realize how much good will is being toss aside.
All of it is being tossed aside.
In Australia, we just had someone [1] who was detained for 8 hours with their phone/laptop searched all because they stopped over in Hong Kong rather than flying direct to the US.
It's that kind of irrational, unpredictable behaviour that makes travellers stay away and instead choose from one of the hundreds of other desirable travel destinations who want you to visit.
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
For this Summer we wanted to visit my sister, so we bought tickets last December. I've always been pretty vocal about my dislike for Trump too. Well, for the first time, I'm worried that, when traveling to the US, some overzealous TSA agent could ask me to get access to my social media accounts, and that I could be refused entry, or even get sent to one of those wonderful privately owned jails; you know, for lèse-majesté. I reckon that the risk is too little to warrant us canceling our trip, but honestly, if I didn't have my tickets already, I would probably not have bought them now.
This is the craziest timeline.
Having said that, weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of scrubbing your social media accounts to minimise that particular concern?
I don't have any, so I don't know what I'd be losing, but I can say that I feel sorry for some family members of mine who have been sucked in to the social media dopamine addiction farm. They'd be better off without it and having more time to be their own selves and live their own lives rather than other people's.
/rant (sorry)
(A similar service exists for Cayman Island holding companies IIRC)
I've been a vocal Trump supporter on social media. By this measure they should give me a green card if I'll ever plan to visit US.
The reverse scenario is happening too. There are americans that refuse to go to europe because of the examples they seen of immigrants committing crimes and ruining neighborhoods.
As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare, and can logically overcome the emotional response after seeing examples online. But for people who don't travel much I understand.
As much as the scenarios can be rare, there is an undeniable sense of everything hanging by a thin thread when traveling around the USA, which I've only experienced in Latin American countries in all my trips.
Giving that I'm originally from Brazil even though with Swedish citizenship, I won't be traveling to the USA anytime in the near future. I have no idea what could happen, might be a completely rare occurrence to be profiled at the border, jailed for no cause, etc., but there's nothing in the USA worth enough to make me even more paranoid at crossing its borders. It's more like the straw that finally broke the camel's back, it's been brewing for a while, I've been stopped by CBP for holding both a B-1/B-2 visa on my Brazilian passport as well as an ESTA on my Swedish one, I do not want the potential issues that another interrogation by CBP at present times could create, like being sent to some jail for 20 days instead of just being refused entry and put on a plane to get back to the EU.
You can claim it's rare, but it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden. Therefore, I will never travel back to Sweden. It's just not worth it and I have no idea what could happen (stabbing? murder?). Nothing in Sweden is worth the absolute fear this country provokes.
It's not rare, it will happen to you. Do not come.
How do you know? It doesn't look like OP specified how much they've traveled.
> I only got robbed twice...in Johannesburg, South Africa and Stockholm, Sweden...it happened on 100% of my trips to Sweden
That sucks, I'm sorry that happened. It sounds like it happened once, and so that "100%" is just one trip by one person? Unfortunately, that result is within the realm of randomness, though I'd understand if, to you, it felt bigger than that.
That said, I don't think it compares to arbitrary (or worse, politically- and personally-motivated) government detainment (or otherwise harming) of innocent people.
That's actually the nature of bayesian probability: if something is happening a higher proportion of the time vs. before, it's more likely to happen now vs. before. If that something is bad, that means higher risk. It's expected that a rational actor would act to minimize risk to them.
> As someone who spends a lot of time on both locations, I know that both scenarios are rare
Precisely how rare is it, over the last couple months, for US immigration officials to detain someone (perhaps "for further questioning", perhaps to a prison) who hasn't violated any laws? Claiming "it's rare" isn't very useful. Remember, the expected probability is ~0.
From my point of view, if POTUS blathers about annexing Canada, then the US doesn't deserve my tourist dollars, neither my Netflix subscription, neither my Amazon prime subscription. I've cut back on purchases/subscriptions from US companies as much as it was possible for me and my family. Also cancelled a trip to south east US. Purely out of spite.
(another one to watch out for: opiate painkillers in your hand luggage into Middle Eastern states, including Dubai.)
They just view America itself as the problem and are deciding to detach from it as a whole.
If there's the slightest possibility that what he says is not bullshit, then Canada needs to take it very seriously and the entire northern hemisphere security architecture needs to permanently change.
At this point it's also about standing with our countrymen and spending our tourist dollars at home.
I wouldn't take any risks either.
This means if you're going to be denied entry it will probably be in Dublin which will make it a preferred airport of origin within the EU -- this is massively more convenient than getting stuck in JFK.
I've turned down a 7-day-all paid-trip my company was offering me to San Francisco for this (and I had in the past a bad experience at Puerto Rico's border).
Basically: behaviour at US borders has been iffy for a lot longer than some folks might think.
Non-citizens at US points of entry have very limited constitutional protection. SCOTUS has consistently held that the federal government has broad authority over immigration and border control. Basically nobody has a 1st or 2nd amendment protection at a border crossing, and non-citizens have further-restricted 4th and 5th amendment protections among others.
Border agents do not need any level of suspicion or probably cause to search your person or your effects. Failing to answer questions can result in entry being denied. US v. Ramsey held that everyone, citizen or not, has no inherent right to enter the US at a particular point of entry on a particular date and time and that basically any search is "reasonable" due to national security and law enforcement needs. That ruling was half a century ago.
Shaughnessy v. US ex rel. Mezei (1953) held that even a lawful resident who is re-entering the country after an absence can be denied re-entry without a hearing as long as that denial is lawful. Mezei lived in the US as a lawful immigrant from 1923 to 1948 then went back to Hungary for just over a year and a half. A 1924 law classified him as an "excludable alien" when he returned in 1950 he was permanently barred from re-entry. This was before LPR status was codified so I imagine there is more relevant case law to that classification specifically.
SCOTUS has consistently held multiple distinctions between citizens and non-citizens at the border: Citizens have an absolute right to enter the country, non-citizens (including LPRs) do not. Everyone loses most 4A protections at points of entry, but citizens have a reasonableness bar that non-citizens do not (US v. Montoya de Hernandez 1985, US v. Flores-Montano 2004). Citizens still enjoy due process while non-citizens do not (Shaughnessy again, Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding 1953). Citizenship ensures someone is not in a legal limbo status of being detained unreasonably or indefinitely (Boumediene v. Bush 2008), a non-citizen denied entry without the means to leave is basically stuck there. Citizens are presumed able to enter the country and have faster processing, all non-citizens including LPRs must prove admissibility every time.
So there's a century (or more) of case law supporting what some might call extreme power on the part of the federal government to deny non-citizens entry at any port of entry, for any or no reason. But what it boils down to is whether there are any countries in the world that don't have this policy? There is no country in the world where as a non-citizen I enjoy the same rights and legal recourse as a citizen if I am denied entry, and no country where it is not on me to affirmatively prove to the border agent(s) that I am legally permitted entry. It is always a privilege to enter a country other than your own.
Edit: At the risk of breaking guidelines and making for boring reading, I have to question the odds of someone being able to read this comment in ~30 seconds, process the argument, and decide its worth a downvote vs. "oh I don't like this first sentence."
Specifically, "disappeared for a few days" is not at all what basically every country on the planet does.
The GP frames this as the US doing something nobody else does, which is objectively false, and even if his specific example is an egregious violation of someone's rights I'm sure if we looked through the last 25 years of immigration detentions for other countries we could pick out something equally upsetting from each one.
Also, things can be legal and iffy at the same time (indeed, such wide-ranging powers basically invite that, since they give wide latitude to go overboard in cases that do not deserve it).
And they shouldn't. As far as I know, those cases of German getting locked up media coverage was intense, but the stories didn't check out. Those were cases of Germans entering by foot via Tijuana, making condracting claims to the ICE officer - raising suspicions with those officers. In case of entering the US by plane, I haven't seen and credible articles that resulted in detention.
(It’s not clear to me if he has been released. The last media reports are from two weeks ago)
"Schmidt’s green card was allegedly tagged for him failing to attend a hearing because the invitation was sent to his old address, according to the family’s fundraiser to cover Schmidt’s legal costs and loss of earnings.
“To compound this error, he had just recently been provided with a new replacement Green Card since he had lost the original one,” the fundraising page says. “Even then U.S. Immigration failed to let him know that there was an outstanding hearing which he had missed and that his card would be tagged.”"
Source: https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/21/family-of-...
A system that demands absolute perfection from me is still not one I’d want to encounter.
Now that it's a political issue, rather than a logistical matter, so it's no longer professional or civilised, no thanks. I have one US customer and thankfully Google Meet is enough, because I'm not getting anywhere near the US for them. I can find other customers if I have to, but I don't think legal fees for navigating the oh-we-totally-had-good-reason-to-think-he-was-a-terrorist-your-honour jail are as easily deductible. As for leisure, haha, no, there are plenty of things to see all over the world where the chances of getting jailed because you said the wrong thing about the wrong president are much smaller. My visa expires this year, I'm not planning to renew it any time soon.
I would certainly no longer do US travel for a conference on a tourist visa in case that's deemed "work". (pop quiz to Americans: what visa do I need for that situation, and how difficult is it to get?)
I think that the risk of being imprisoned without due process is very low, but still substantially higher than in any other Western country, and certainly high enough not to justify the risk.
I also think that the risk of being temporarily imprisoned with due process, until they figure out that I haven't broken any law anywhere, is also very low, but still substantially higher than in most Western countries. And certainly high enough that it's not worth the risk.
I don't have an issue with border controls being a thing. I'm not a free travel idealist. I get why border controls exist, I think the premise of not letting people in unless they provably meet the host country's requirement is perfectly reasonable, and I certainly think that, even if someone did nothing wrong and just doesn't have their documentation in order, sending them back home on the first flight is an entirely reasonable thing to do. I just think that, in the current political climate, both the chances of being the victim of good old abuse and the chances of well-meaning ICE personnel screwing up are too high to be worth crossing the Atlantic for.
None of that happens at the border.
At this stage it doesn't even matter whether you have broken any U.S. law or not.
I do not think most people can conceive just how common and deranged the situation is, and that not only that the documentation is so poor and that most of the people this happens to will not speak up, either because no one will believe them or because they are not a citizen and are afraid it will result in reprisal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/chinese-woman-detained...
That's because in most publicized cases it turns out there is something more to it.
We read about it, too. It just seems absolutely nobody close to power is willing to do anything to even tap the brakes.
They appear to be testing the boundaries by going after easy targets.
For what it's worth, we're also starting to have similar (though so far less pronounced) reactions to domestic travel. There's a number of states that are unsafe to travel to if you or someone in your family has a gender identity that's not on the approved list--and that has an outsize effect. I won't go to those places since they don't deserve my tax dollars, and am just jumping on a bandwagon of plenty of other people in making that decision.
It's just a 4 days trip, but I have an entire family that needs me to come back and not sent for a decade to a random overseas prison.
Why would someone end up in a jail if he doesn't break any law?
Sending them to foreign prison camps instead is in fact a crime against humanity.
They don't know or don't think canadians takes this seriously and it's not fucking funny.
With so many fewer people coming the ratio of fliers to immigration people is going to be lower, chance of getting hassled is going to be that much higher.
Personally I'm unlikely to return while these stories of bad things happening to people at the border continue
(this isn't a new thing, in particular because the US has no exit processing infrastructure - people get tagged as overstaying even though they've left, get popped into detention when they return - always keep your boarding passes when you leave).
For European visitors, they can see the fascism miles away. A lot of Europe was occupied by Hitler while the US wasn't. The extraordinary claim that Musk's salute wasn't a Nazi salute is mind boggling. Even when people have seen it side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Zwiv8erk0
Can you post the plain text of these "travel warnings"?
In it you’ll find several direct links to the official warnings
Oh my god it's like Nazi Germany!
Germany also added a warning that minor criminal history can be a reason for imprisonment and deportation, as well as a reminder that an American visa or ESTA document are meaningless against an unwilling border patrol agent:
Denmark has added this to their VISA page: Germany added this: The Finnish travel advice has something similar:https://www.newsweek.com/portugal-issues-travel-warning-us-2...
Last I checked, Germany's advice was similar (i.e., not a general warning); and from the article, it doesn't look like Portugal's advice is a Travel Warning either. There's a difference between making information available, and providing warnings.
What changed is that they made the text clearer, that ESTA approval doesn't guarantee entry and decision is made by the border officer and adding a note that wrong information may lead to incarceration.
Those notes weren't "needed" before as that was rare, while theoretically the rules were the same, but seem to be handled stricter now.
This is still far from a "proper" travel warning.
https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/service/laender/usa-node/...
It's absolute lunacy that western governments are giving out negative travel advice against the US at all, but I've noticed Newsweek seems to have an agenda on this topic.
We've had multiple examples in the last few weeks of Australians being detained and having phones/laptops searched for no legitimate reason e.g.
https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
For example, Australia issued a new update "warning" people that they maybe inadmissible for any reason.
https://www.smartraveller.gov.au/destinations/americas/unite...
Current affairs
When traveling to the United States, it is important to note that a valid ESTA or visa does not necessarily entitle you to enter the United States. Overstaying your stay or providing incorrect information about the purpose of your stay may result in arrest or deportation.
The United States has also issued an executive order (25 STATE 11402) on February 24, 2025, according to which applicants for a US ESTA or visa must in future indicate their gender as either “male” or “female”. According to the order, applicants must indicate their gender as determined at birth in their application.
If the applicant’s current gender as recorded in their passport differs from their gender as determined at birth, the US authorities may refuse entry. It is recommended to check the entry requirements in advance with the US authorities.
There is no gender marking X in the Finnish passport. If, for example, a dual citizen has a passport with an X marking, the entry requirements can be checked in advance with the US authorities.
Political demonstrations may occur in major cities, which may turn violent. Avoid large gatherings or demonstrations.
Edit: source https://um.fi/matkustustiedote/-/c/US
News of tourists getting imprisoned for weeks or longer have been all over the news, but so far Europe doesn't seem to have actually brought out a general warning for that kind of danger.
That said, the people I've spoken to (most of which aren't LGBT+) are hesitant to go to the US now. There's a stark difference between the "haha, what the fuck, US" sentiment I used to sense and the "what the fuck, US" we're getting now.
The travel warnings for Germany in the 1930s were specific groups targeted by the Nazi government, such as Jewish people
Unlike what the right-wing media may make it seem, the amount of trans/nonbinary people is absolutely minute. The warnings apply to at most a percentage of the population, and even then it only affects the people that have come out of the closet and jumped through the hoops necessary to get their passport altered.
That obviously doesn't make the political trend _right_, but the geopolitical and economic implications are very different.
These warnings don't include advice against entering the country as a tourist, despite the recent reports of tourists getting arrested and locked away at the border. Such a warning would set a much more grim tone for the future of the western bloc.
Agreed, and this is a nice way of putting it. There's a sense that shit is really hitting the fan this time.
Who's there?
Me, can I come in?
I don't know, come in and we'll find out.
...ok
WHAT THE HELL WHY DID YOU COME IN YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE
...sorry but you said-
I DON'T CARE WHAT I SAID.
...OK fine I'll just be leaving.
OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST LEAVE? YOU CANT LEAVE! You'll be locked in my dank basement for the next five days while I fill out the paperwork for you to be dragged out of the house!
But I just said I'm willing to leave voluntarily!
They can deny you entry, but you're not going to be locked up in some sex dungeon for a week in Toronto
Can someone state the obvious for me please?
The two thoughts in my head were "this is because tourism is down" and "this is because migrants/asylum seekers aren't crossing the border at the moment".
I would think you'd draw different conclusions if it's one or the other, but, regarding the latter, I don't know how many of them cross the border at the border and how many typically do it with a plane ticket.
Another one being accused of selling drugs in LA (never been there, detained for 2 days, banned and put on a flight back home, 5y ago)
* The US has repeatedly threatened military invasion of a country (Denmark) near mine.
* The US has basically given Russia the green light to invade the rest of EU when ready.
* Mentioned elsewhere in this thread: The many reports of travellers being detained for weeks.
* The US has recently started an economic war on the entire world, except Russia.
Why would I want to visit?
Tourism is not down in other countries. Migrants/asylum seekers don't typically fly in by plane to the top 8 airports in the US, and those that do, do not do so in numbers anywhere near large enough to account for the change in numbers.
I thought the problem the US had was people crossing the land border from Mexico?
And such a large number that it dwarfs temporary visitors?
Its days are counted now that they know about its existence.
EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.
The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
> has London
Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.
> the highest wages in Europe
Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).
French universities offering to adopt US academics
I’m American and this administration has set this country back decades. The only way people will rise up here is if their pockets are hurting.
401K accounts are down bad.
Imports of American goods down significantly.
Industries that relied on global trade partners (agriculture?) are getting decimated.
Folks have effectively self owned themselves.
People will only wake up when the economy really hurts. That's why they voted for 47 in the first place, so I hope they're even more awake now.
The lack of due process and the threat of extradition on a whim is one that feels less likely to happen to me as a caucasian with US citizens as family, but the impact of it would be life-changingly poor. I'd rather just not travel to the US, for tourism, family or business reasons.
I'm not sure anything done in the last 3 months is much of a surprise to people who listened to his campaign talking points. It seems to me that people just thought he was a lying politician who lies, and this was just more lying. What's caught people out is that he's doing it all, and believes SCOTUS will never condemn or find illegal a thing he has done so due process is an abstract concept only, and others consider themselves immune for actions covered by Exec Order.
It's all quite sad and worrying.
Well, so far, that belief seems to be correct.
Detainment is bad enough. It's only a matter of time before extradition to El Salvador is extended, but even if that didn't happen, what is happening right now is enough to put people off.
What about some data, then?
> I don't even think most world population has a tattoo.
Tattoo is a booming business (around 9% growth in 2024). There are stats.
Quoting https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/tattoo-arti...
"A Pew Research Study conducted in 2023 shows that 32.0% of Americans have tattoos. 41.0% of individuals under 30 have at least one tattoo, as do 46.0% of individuals aged between 30 and 49."
That's not "most" in the sense, 50%+. It's still pretty significant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center
https://www.smh.com.au/traveller/travel-news/an-australian-w...
> Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we've compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.
* https://www.oag.com/blog/canada-us-airline-capacity-aviation...
* https://thehill.com/business/5218113-us-canada-airline-booki...