New Orleans A proposal being posted for comment now on the Federal Register for sixty days from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection would effectively build an almost impenetrable visa wall around the United States, more powerful, and likely more effective, than the physical wall Trump is continuing to construct along the Rio Grande border with Mexico. Let’s be honest, it’s not easy for foreign visitors, including friends, family, and business associates, to get visas to visit the United States now. The annual ACORN Canada Year End/ Year Begin meeting used to occasionally meet in US border cities in order to meet other groups and have a change of pace in places like Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit. In recent years, that’s been impossible since almost any interaction with the Canadian legal system, no matter how minor or how many years in the past, would block some staff participants from being able to attend.
The latest proposals are not targeting all of the many countries that Trump and his team constantly deride, but the countries that have been on the automatic “visa waiver” program, meaning essentially our national friends, partners and close allies. These new rules, unless rejected or amended, would include dozens of countries, including many “European nations, Australia, Britian, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Brunei, Singapore, Qatar, Israel and Chile,” according to a shocking early report in the Washington Post.
The proposal is draconian. First, it would make mandatory that every applicant provide five years of their social media history. I don’t even have a clue how someone would do that. Speaking personally, I’d have trouble. I don’t backup my WhatsApp messages. I haven’t been on X-Twitter for years, but that doesn’t mean that nothing is posted like my daily Chief Organizer Reports. How big a garbage can would any of us need to download five years of Facebook drivel moving back and forth on our various sites? Is that even possible? Would making all of this “public,” which is already required for immigrants be sufficient? Is this something that Facebook would gladly provide otherwise? What will this do to tourism from other countries to the United States that is already falling like a rock?
But, wait, that’s not all. That’s just the mandatory requirement that Customs wants for such visa applicants. Even worse is what they want the ability to request based on their discretion. As the Post continues:
Applicants would also have to provide additional information “when feasible,” according to the proposal. The list includes telephone numbers used in the last five years, email addresses used in the last 10 years, IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos, and biometrics, including facial, fingerprint, DNA and iris data. It would also require applicants to provide information about their family members, including names, telephone numbers, dates of birth, places of birth and residences.
Once again, how would anyone anywhere be able to provide that level of information? Telephone numbers over five years, really? Email over 10 years, wow! I’ve been using a broken down computer for the last two years, where the keyboard doesn’t work, but moving to the new one we bought my tech comrade says that it would take 2 or 3 days to transfer all of the emails to the new computer, and I haven’t been able to find the consecutive days where I would be able to be without a computer. Would Customs look through 140,000 email messages still on Thunderbird? Visa applicants would be submitting a hard drive, if they were able, to pull all of this together, and who in the world believes the federal government has the capacity to review all of that material without it taking months and months or being riddled with errors if they tried using AI or something to do the job?
Oh, and any right to privacy here or abroad? Forget about it! This isn’t about national security; that’s already way past the line. This purely and simply is about keeping people out of the United States for any reason or excuse.
Maybe the hospitality and tourism industries have enough clout to push this back. The tech and telecoms here and abroad won’t want any part of this mess, which will be an unfunded mandate for them. There will be a flood of comments during these 60 days, but anyone can see where they are going, and they will enact some of this, I would bet.
Anyone planning a meeting with folks from abroad needs to schedule it and get it done soon, because having multinational meetings here in the US could be nigh impossible soon, if the Trumpers have their way.