Obligatory Starship Troopers reference IN!
Ha, well not the only path, obviously. But, seriously, Guy was a marine for 20 years. Who the fuck thought that denying his passport was a good idea?
I just think that, if you are willing to work for and sacrifice for, a nation, the least that can be offered in return is citizenship. So if making it a possible pathway to citizenship for people who are not and do not have a means towards, then that’s fine by me.
Damn, beaten to it!
I agree. And that actually was the deal until Trump decided it wasn’t iirc?
Not that it matter since apparently the State Department hates veterans or something.
Seriously everyone at State that caused or supports this needs to be fired and outed.
They are blanket denials from what I understand. I’m in so much agreement with you that I want to hop up on the soap box and scream it in harmony.
Serve our government in any capacity for a term (2-4 years) and you should be a citizen. Full stop. At 20 years, he has retired, gets VA healthcare, and could request burial at Arlington.
To deny him a passport is such a slap in the face that the people in charge of the decision should be jailed for incompetence.
“Our service members are heroes! Except the dirty foreigners. They’re only slightly better than illegals. Really, they owe us for feeding and housing them. Plus, they’re taking good soldier spots from real Americans!”
I’ll drink to this, cheers!
Oh I absolutely agree, I just think it is funny that Heinlein preached it for many many years, and instead we appear to be moving in the opposite direction right now.
Imagined conversation (I understand there wasn’t any individual review, in reality):
“But he was willing to die for his country for 20 years”
“Great! Go ahead and die, already; we’re done with him!”
It seems like about as uncontroversial position as you can imagine. I know McCain spent pretty much every 4th of July this century going oversea to do re-enlistment ceremonies. (The re-enlistment bonus was tax free if you got while deployed). There was almost always few folks who also got their citizenship at the same time. The CNN talking heads would all say isn’t that wonderful, before they started arguing about the political argument du-jour.
It makes no sense, politically, military or morally not to do this, and yet is clear that what use to be routine is now being consistently denied in the administration. I’m not sure that if even incompetence explains the change. The only thing that makes sense is Trump is Russia agent, and he is appointed other Russian agents in the State dept. which sounds like a bat shit crazy conspiracy theory.
Occam’s Razor — Racism. The desire to kick Brown people out of the country blinds them to every other consideration, rational, moral, political, etc
Alternative explanation: Stephen Miller. When a white supremacist has as much power as he does, things like this are inevitable.
Agreed, it makes no sense at all. And as much as I dont want to attribute it to what @Rightbug and @Oghier are saying, I know deep down, that explains exactly what is happening.
And is it all Stephen Miller, or is the direction (or approval) coming from higher up?
No question that’s racism is huge part of it, but some of the folks aren’t brown or Muslim they are European, so it is also xenophobic, which would definitely include Stephen Miller. On the other hand the Putin’s goals are to destroy trust in American institutions. So I haven’t given up that Trump and team are Russian agents.
Yup, this latest thing by the Trump and his Trumppalos is just gross.
It’s the result of a blanket anti-immigration platform. It’s the same blinkered thinking that has us involved in an abysmally stupid trade war with China. Even if you are a hardliner about immigration, the smart take is that immigration policy is complex and far-reaching, with many ancillary effects on issues ranging from economics to diplomacy to the legal system to etc etc. What causes policy blunders like this is the idea these folks have that you can apply a simple principle to this complex system without considering any follow-on implications. They are a collection of morons and naifs who have no idea what they’re doing, and don’t care to learn. They have a black-and-white (no pun intended) view of things and aren’t exhibiting any care with how they design and implement policy. This is why it’s good to have technocrats and not ideologues running the White House.
Has Miller drafted or implemented policies which explicitly affect a lot of white immigrants? Or are those white immigrants affected these policies just outliers inadvertently affected by policies crafted to keep out non-white people?
For example, the Muslim ban. It’s a de facto Muslim ban because of what Trump said during his campaign and the countries he targeted to implement it, but it wouldn’t stop some non-white people from also getting caught up by those plans.
Yep. The entire point of racist regime is to guarantee that a good-for-nothing-fuckup of the preferred background gets treated better than the best of the best of the Other. A racist regime will have no qualms about blatantly punishing accomplished minorities for their accomplishments. In their eyes that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Miller et al view this not as a PR misstep, but as a PR success.
How quickly we forget. They’re quite explicit about what they want. From January:
https://twitter.com/christinawilkie/status/951572639528701952
I absolutely didn’t forget that, but I thought I may have missed something based on what Strollen was saying in his post I replied to.
I don’t have a link or anything, but I’ve seen several of these issues with Vet having immigration issues (although sometimes it is their family) in a least a couple of case there weren’t any of the obvious suspects, Muslim, Hispanic involved. But maybe it was white dude, who married an Hispanic wife who got deported.
Edit: This sheds some light on the subject
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/20/uscis-director-lee-francis-cissna-profile-220141