The West Is Closing Its Doors – To Westerners Themselves

A great trend reversal is taking place.  The latest evidence is that of the 27-year wife of a Briton and mother of two being jailed and facing deportation to her native Singapore after having cared for her dying parents, as well as that of a well-known Australian author being detained for nearly two hours and treated as a suspect upon entry to the U.S.

For nearly a generation, doors and markets alike were increasingly open to citizens of Western countries.  But governments are now not only slamming the doors shut to tourists and immigrants, but are in increasingly casual fashion even using the mobility of their own citizens as political bargaining chips.

Multiple citizenship, once maligned as a sign of divided loyalty and targeted for elimination in a 1963 treaty, was instead gradually legalized in most countries, including the U.S. in 1992.  A second or third passport even became sought-after by those with significant financial wealth seeking to diversify holdings and create tax-efficient investment plans.

Visa-free travel expanded broadly; a German passport now entitles the holder to enter a whopping 177 countries without filling out invasive, self-contradictory forms and paying onerous fees to various middlemen for the privilege of merely asking permission to cross a border.

Tourism revenue tripled since the fall of the Iron Curtain and dozens of countries flung open their borders, hungry for middle-class visitors and the increasing discretionary income they brought with them.

But not since the World War I-era nativist progressive Republican panic over Italians, Irish and German immigrants resulted in renamed foods, language bans, and the 1924 quota act imposing immigration quotas; not since Mexicans were deported en masse during the Great Depression; not since wartime panic over Italian, Japanese and German immigrants led to the institution of registration requirements in 1939 that threatened all immigrants with deportation; not since thousands of Japanese-Americans were indefinitely imprisoned without trial in 1942; and not since a 1978 law made passports mandatory for travel in peacetime has the U.S. government made such a stark reversal in its attitude towards travel and trade as since the year 2001 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

And other Western countries are following the U.S. example and making sharp course corrections of their own in the direction of increasing state surveillance, control, and discretion over the movement of the middle class.  Both Canada and the UK have  enacted schemes in which passports can be canceled unilaterally without a court hearing, and the EU is using the threat of ending visa-free travel as a bargaining chip with the US government.

Given that the risk of being killed by a law enforcement officer is nearly an order of magnitude greater than that of succumbing to a terrorist attack, it is time to rethink the policy of placing guns and arbitrary authority in between people and the places they want to go.

 

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What an Engineer Looks Like

“A finalist in the U.S. State Department’s Science & Technology competition and the first software developer at Konga, Nigeria’s largest e-commerce site, Celestine was flying to New York from Lagos to work with one of Andela’s partner companies.  While it had been a long trip, things had gone fairly smoothly. When Celestine got to customs, however, that all changed. Although he had complied with all visa and immigration protocols, he was brought into a small room where he was told he didn’t look like a software engineer and was asked to take a coding exam — after 23 hours of travel — to prove it. Upon his release three hours later, Celestine tweeted about his ordeal of trying to enter the U.S. as an African engineer.”

Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-engineer-looks-like-jeremy-johnson

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Justin Raimondo: What the Oregon Standoff Is Really About

“While the focus among vaunted ‘civil libertarians’ is the resentencing and mandatory minimums, the fact is that the Hammonds should never have been prosecuted to begin with. Their long agony is a clear case of government persecution motivated by avarice and politics—for this is a warning to anyone who opposes the federal government’s campaign to retain and expand its ownership of huge swathes of Western land. They currently control more than 80 percent of Nevada; approximately half of California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico; 42 percent of Wyoming; 36 percent of Colorado; and 30 percent of Washington and Montana.  And they want more.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-is-the-oregon-standoff-really-about/

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This Group May Stop the NSA From Tapping the Internet’s Backbone

EFF-awards-Apple-Google-perfect-privacy-scores-300x2071

“This current iteration of the case, filed against the NSA itself, was thrown out by a lower court twice. The most recent rejection came earlier this year, when a California judge ruled that, in order to prove the case, the EFF would have to rely on classified material that cannot be made public, and therefore couldn’t be used in the case.  The EFF, however, says that because the NSA has essentially admitted much of what the case alleges, there’s no need to dip into those classified records.  ‘The biggest change is that the government has admitted a lot of things that it was previously saying were secret, and it’s a direct result of the Snowden documents,’ Andrew Crocker, EFF staff attorney, said.”

https://news.vice.com/article/this-group-may-stop-the-nsa-from-tapping-the-internets-backbone

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What It’s Like to Be Declared Dead by the Government

“It is estimated that every year, some 12,200 very much alive U.S. citizens are declared dead by the Social Security Administration due to ‘keystroke errors.’ Those affected quite literally become a walking dead, unable to secure a job, make financial transactions, file taxes, or visit the doctor — and for months on end, must endure the nightmare of convincing a large bureaucracy that they haven’t yet bit the dust. An 83-year-old woman whose SSA checks were discontinued, and who was unable to purchase vital medications; A man who was fired from his job after a medical thief ‘left drug addiction and narcotic medications in his records’.”

http://priceonomics.com/what-its-like-to-be-declared-dead-by-the/

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FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades; 14 prisoners already dead

“The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison.  The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html

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Getting U.S. Visa Took Longer Than Building Instagram: Co-Founder

“Instagram almost didn’t happen, and the U.S.’s convoluted immigration system would have been to blame. Before Mike Krieger created the wildly popular photo-sharing app with business partner Kevin Systrom, he was living in Silicon Valley on a temporary work visa. If not for some lucky breaks navigating the country’s immigration process, our world of artfully filtered, boxy photographs might look very different today. While tech companies want to free up more H-1B visas, others in the U.S. are pushing for restrictions, saying foreign workers take American jobs and lower wages.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/getting-a-visa-took-longer-than-building-instagram-says-immigrant-co-founder

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The US government can brand you a terrorist based on a Facebook post

It was confirmed earlier this month that the FBI shares its master watchlist, the Terrorist Screening Database, with at least 22 foreign governments, countless federal agencies, state and local law enforcement, plus private contractors.  The standards are so low that the US government’s guidelines specifically allow for a single, uncorroborated source of information – including a Facebook or Twitter post – to serve as the basis for placing you on its master watchlist.  Of the 680,000 individuals on that FBI master list, roughly 40% have ‘no recognized terrorist group affiliation’, according to the Intercept, but they are still branded as suspected terrorists.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/30/terrorist-watch-list-rules-innocent-people

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Another California man fined for brown grass during water restrictions

“‘I got a warning that says to provide adequate maintenance to (my) lawn or garden by watering, mowing or re-seeding,’ Martin Padilla said.  ‘I got everything done — nothing else to complain about except for watering the grass because the grass is not completely green,’ Padilla said.  But Padilla was still fined, and learned he owes more than $420.  Padilla said he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.  ‘To make that lawn green, I need to use a lot of water, but the water company says if we don’t cut water usage by 20 percent, (we) get a $500 ticket,’ Padilla told KCRA 3. ‘But I’m paying a $429 ticket for not using enough water, so what should I do?'”

http://www.kcra.com/news/stockton-man-fined-for-brown-grass/27255796

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California death penalty ruled unconstitutional

“A federal judge declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional Wednesday, saying delays of 25 years or more in deciding appeals and carrying out occasional executions have created an arbitrary and irrational system that serves no legitimate purpose.  The ruling by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney of Santa Ana was limited to a single case and had no immediate impact on executions statewide, which have been halted by federal courts since 2006 because of multiple problems in lethal injection procedures.  The state has the nation’s largest Death Row, with 748 inmates, and its lowest execution rate, with 13 inmates put to death since 1992.”

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Federal-judge-rules-California-s-death-penalty-5625926.php

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