The US asks if you have been to places like Iraq, Iran, Libya etc since 2011. If you do, you can’t ESTA, you need a visa.
Work would like me to go to Iraq, which is fine. They’ll pay for me to get a US Visa too.
Trouble is in 20 years time when I want to go to NY for my kids wedding or whatever, I’ll still have to answer “yes” to the “I visited Iraq” question, and I won’t be working for the company that sent me there, so I’d have to go for the long arduous process of prostrating myself at the US embassy to beg for a visa, incurring a large expense to do so. Just because the stamp isn’t in my active passport doesn’t mean I can answer “no” to the question
It’s not like Israel, where the stamp would cause problems but they don’t ask (or the other way round where an Israeli stamp would cause problems going to Iran).
Even when I apply for a visa and have to list every country (often in a comically small box with like 100 characters max length), like with India, it only asks “what could tries have you visited in the last 10 years”
I wonder how that works for people that went there because their country joined one neocon middle eastern venture or another. Does it count if you went there for invasion purposes?
I have two because I provided a letter from my organisation backing me having two as I travelled frequently and often had a passport away at an embassy waiting for a visa and need to be able to travel at short notice.
Since then I’ve reduced the number of visa based countries I’ve needed to go to (more have gone electronic), and countries have reduced stamps, throw in covid, and it’s to the point that I doubt I’ll fill my passports up before the 10 years has expired. It’s a shame really, the stamps in past passports are a great momento, but places like Hong Kong, Israel, Canada, Australia have all stopped stamping in the last few years.
Guess the lack of stamps means record holding has moved from the passport into the cloud. While the distributed record keeping was certainly more privacy friendly, the new method makes it certainly easier for nation states.
> Without prejudice to the provisions on travel documents applicable to national border controls, Member States shall grant Union citizens leave to enter their territory with a valid identity card or passport
Europe is composed by 44 countries, a subset of those countries are part of European Union, more precisely 27, which also makes the Schengen Area with agreementes with external EU countries like Switzerland.
It is an exercise in geography to track down down which 16 countries don't care you have an ID card.
Have you travelled to, or been present in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, North Korea or Yemen on or after March 1, 2011?
Using a second passport, fake passport, alias, fake glasses and moustache doesnt make a differnce to the answer to that question. Its not even a workaround.
I meant that it is not legal to use a second passport as a workaround to support a lie about your travel history. Lying to enter the US is illegal regardless of the number of passports you have.
That's true. This only affects those who have visited Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen on or after March 1, 2011, and they're still not disqualified, but I do understand the frustration at the inconvenience (although none of this will affect me since I am a US and EU citizen).
You can get a second US passport with limited validity. Great when you need to apply for visas but also have other international travel going on. And sometimes it's convenient for hiding visa stamps of one country from another country.
No. Foreign nationals from countries (including most of Europe) that normally have access to the US through the Visa Waiver Program and ESTA lose that access if they visit Iran or a few other countries. They thereafter need to go through the full US visa application process if they want to go to the US.
One of the cases where at least in Germany you can get a second passport without problems. Another example would be travel to Israel and Arabian countries.
The question at the border is "Have you ever visited Iran?", Not "Do you have a stamp for Iran in this passport?".
Since passenger lists on flights around the world are pretty much public information, the US immigration services will know exactly where you have visited in the past, and could totally put you in prison for lying when answering the question.
They ask that questions also during student or work visa issuance - and even during the greencard (adjustment of status) and naturalization processes. They don't ask it every time you enter with these visas or statuses however.
But as a US citizen you will never be asked. And better yet if you are a dual citizen like me. Then you can travel on your other passport to the places the US finds to be undesirable.
I think green card and naturalization ask about travel in the last few years. But they don't ask about travel prior to that, and they don't ask about Iran specifically.
Still requires you to lie on the ESTA form, which is not necessarily a good idea. (i.e. if you lie and get caught, that's worse than going through the visa process)
Sure, simple answer: don't carry both passports at the same time. Pretty sure Iran (an the other countries on the US blacklist) don't exchange travel information with the US.
Two different passports, only carry the right one: easy. And unless US border police is checking any, potential, Iranian travel data the NSA collected I don't see the problem. Confidently telling those border police officers you've never been to Iran seems to be the trickiest part. But hell, it works just perfectly fine for everyone travelling to Israel and any Arabian country, so...
No it doesn’t. Israel doesn’t routinely ask you if you’ve been to Iran, if they did, you answer tru fully if you know what’s good for you. Same if you go to Saudi.
The US specifically asks you if you have travelled to those countries. You can either lie, and that’s a serious risk at being jailed, deported, banned from ever going again, and having issues going to other countries, or you can tell the truth.
The same is in Norway, although one have to justify it. For example one cannot get a visa to China if one has a stamp from Taiwan. So if one needs to travel to both often, then one can apply for the second passport.
I don’t remember China asking if I’ve been to Taiwan. I’d be surprised too - there’s direct flights between the two. That said I normally visit China on a 168 hour transit visa and fly via Hong Kong, Tokyo or Seoul rather than the hassle of applying for a visa.
If you have an Iranian passport stamp, I would expect very pointed questions at US immigration. I can't find a specific citation that says you need a visa if you've been to Iran, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
> If you have an Iranian passport stamp, I would expect very pointed questions at US immigration
Or any number of things. I know of multiple French citizens born in "suspect" for the Americans places like Algiers and Beirut who have had extensive questioning on arrival at the US, including the mindbogglingly stupid " why were you born there?".
That honestly doesn’t sound like a dumb question to me. People don’t just get randomly born abroad for no reason, it’s typically because their families were doing something there.
It kind of is though, because Algeria was a part of France until 1962, and there are millions of people of Algerian descent who have French citizenship.
Potentially. But, families can also travel to places where they don't live. They can also engage in activities that are of interest to customs officials, regardless of their residency status.
Rather than guessing, it's prudent to simply ask the question, no?
That’s fine for visiting Israel (which rarely stamps nowadays) and Iran.
The US specifically asks “have you ever been to Iran”. You can lie, then get arrested in the US, or you can say “yes”, and have to go through the time and expense to get a US visa. Forever.
I read crazy theory conspiracy this is about destabilising EU and our energy policy. US can not put sanctions on closest allies directly (NS2), so there has to be war. Just crazy conspiracy theory though...
I was one of those who took an SSRI and had a change in my sex drive. I took escitalopram and it killed my sex drive, doc switched me to trazodone and things returned to normal.
If your SSRI is causing you problems, talk to your doctor, they can switch it up. Everyone responds differently, you should be able to find one that won't mess with it.
"Recycling" a coal power plant by turning it on again is one of the more tortured uses of that word I've seen recently.
It's similarly not a "CO2 offset": the offset is latent in the plant remaining dormant, or possibly being scrapped. By turning the plant back on, these miners have converted a CO2 offset into an ongoing source of CO2 emissions.
Renewables have been cheaper (in monetary and carbon) than running existing coal plants for a while. Even more so if you reuse the sites grid connection. So it still doesn't add up to me.
Clearly the couldn't sell energy before if they were about to shutdown, so there must be something different about the miners compared with their usual market, can't just be cheaper.
In the article they seem to be suggesting they couldn't buy renewable power in 2020 which seems odd, but no follow up detail on it, apparently they're phasing coal out in a year so it may just have been a short term thing.
Pretty sure the only way to have produced zero emissions was to not mine the bitcoin at all. Old or new plant, or consumption of power from the existing grid would have produced some level of emissions, although Montana tends to have pretty high renewable energy from hydroelectric.
Yes, he is leading the reader to the conclusion he drew by illustrating first his otherness and then his high performance.
I don't see how this would serve as a counter-example to the claim "merit doesn't matter as much as <being in the in-group>" or whatever he claims supplants merit.
It could be argued that doing all of that despite being a member of an oppressed group would be more meritorious than not. Swimming a mile is one thing, swimming a mile upstream is another.
Is this really a good faith question? Like all other Hispanics in white dominated environments they face everything from casual racism to outright discrimination.
Yes, being a Hispanic at MIT is soooo tough. After all, when he got a meeting with the president:
"We had our conversation in Spanish, and I think that afforded some candor that would not have been there otherwise."
Being able to talk to the Hispanic President of MIT in his own native language and getting benefits from that is not exactly screaming discrimination, is it.
Imagine if anti-racist activists weren't themselves horribly racist. Their entire creed prizes skin colour above the individual, and treats them as members of groups first, people second.
Hell, a lot of those activists trying to get merit-based admissions out of schools? It's to get schools to be less Asian. San Fran just recalled a bunch of activist types from school boards, and I'd bet money that vote was in good part driven by the Asian population realizing the activist faculty were out to screw them over.
Does "casual racism" include believing that people of specific ethnicities are swimming upstream if they get involved in academics? Are Chinese, Japanese, and Indian academics swimming upstream too?
Minor nitpick: Hispanic is really not a race, even in the American world where Caucasian (which is always hilarious to me because, you know, the Caucasus is a real place) and "black" are ( and they aren't).
Sure, race and ethnicity refer to heritage. But "hispanic" apparently means only... Well, les'see: A heritage from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Countries which contain different races and ethnicities. So that leaves only a heritage of... the Spanish language, AFAICS. A linguistic heritage, not a racial or ethnic one.
Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
>Hispanic is just a bad name for the category as it is not a race as a descendent of portuguese or spanish, or any other european people, with no intermixture with native americans, or vice-versa, are both hispanics.
How is it any less meaningful than "black" that comprises ethnicities and mixes of ethnicities that vary far more than all(!) people outside of sub-Saharan Africa (in pre-globalization sense) taken together.
>Hence why Americans have to distinguish between white or non-white hispanics.
They also distinguish brown from black, African-American from black and god knows what else.
What, I thought that was just South Africa (under Apartheid)?
> African-American from black
I thought those were synonyms?
> and god knows what else.
Yeah, for a country ostensibly attempting to get away from its old racist ways, the USA seems remarkably fixated on the minutiae of distinguishing and registering "race".
No, despite what the staff of my then-college’s newspaper apparently were thinking when writing about a visit by Winnie Mandela to the US, “African-American” and “black” are not synonyms.
Duh, true, of course. I've seen (and laughed at) the same thing, "African-American" being used about immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa in Sweden, people who had never been near America.
But what I (must have) meant to write was, "African-American" is pretty much the mandatory term to use for American Blacks, right? (<-- And should "Blacks" really be capitalised there?)
Scientifically, "Black" is probably less of a race than "Hispanic" in a global context, possibly that's reversed if you focus just on USA though.
And neither are really races as science says were all the human race, just if you were going to say genetic similarity is 'race' that would be the case because of the vast diversity in African genetics that happen to have dark skin (which isnt even necessary to be 'black' in the usa.)
Race is a social construct invented by colonizers (whites) as a way to categorize and other-ize everyone else. It has no biological or ethnic or cultural meaning. Race is not an inherent thing, but a complex relationship between groups of people with unequal power and privileges.
Put in a scientific context, it's correct to say that people whose genetic history is derived entirely from african ancestors are biologically distinct from people whose ancestor left africa a long time ago and then evolved in the regions they resided for long periods. We see this from genomic sequences as well as visible phenotypes (which is what most racial classifications are based on).
It's a race as much as "person from English speaking coubtry" is a race. It encompasses white Spaniards, black Dominicans, and indigenous people from Central and South America who don't necessarily speak Spanish themselves.
There are two dictionary definitions of race: people sharing common biological features, and people in the same ethnic group. The biological features one clearly doesn't work.
An ethnic group is a group of people who share a common cultural background or descent, but the cultures and descents of these people are very different.
There are no human races. The very practice of talking about human races as if they exist is itself already racist. It always boggles my mind how talking about race seems to be completely normal and acceptable in the US...
Does it not depend on the intent? The word "racism" implies some kind of bad intent if I am not mistaken. You might have a useless or uninformed piece of conversation around race (whatever the word "race" is supposed to mean; I really do not exactly know nor do I care) but this does not imply that there is racism involved.
The problem is that using the term “race“ affirmatively legitimizes the concept of human race. Not only does it have no basis in reality, it can be extremely harmful, as history has shown.
And why can't an arbitrary set of genetic and cultural traits have a name? Everything else in this universe can be broken down to an arbitrary set of something. Why for e.g. call somebody an American when it's only a person living withing arbitrary lines on map?
I'm sorry but that is a really weird argument. Who are those groups of people who want us to pretend there are no similarities or differences between them and other groups of people?
Calling it "pretend" is both dismissive and begs the question. The people you want to call "Hispanics" are ethnically rather diverse, far from homogeneous. The similarities you see originate in ignorance. Mexicans aren't Columbians, Brazillians aren't Portuguese and all of these countries are home to many different ethnic groups with their own histories, languages, cultures and genetics.
I'm not calling anyone anything. The GP of this post claims to be of Hispanic race. You claim he is not entitled to call himself that. Are you the the arbiter of what he is allowed to call him self? I'm must admit I do find it ironic when you simultaneously claim groups of people don't want to be named and then at the same time are trying to prevent somebody from such a group to call himself that.
It seems like you just want to be argumentative for the sake of it. If you review our comments, you'll find where you called it pretending and you'll not find where I said he couldn't call himself whatever he wants.
In the meantime, consider why many people don't want to be lumped in with people they have nothing in common with. If you take that thought seriously, you might learn to see the world somewhat differently.
Maybe I would learn something if you could actually provide some evidence besides being needlessly patronizing. Who are those people? What do their feelings have to do with a fact that there exist a set of traits which which could be used to subdivide us into groups?
At the very least, representation in government. People who share my ethnicity have unique social problems that don't apply to any other "race". I don't need a race, but the people who share my background need to be discernible on a census.
But you just said "people who share my ethnicity", which has nothing to do with race. People of any race can share your ethnicity. Is a black Mexican closer in culture to a Nigerian or to a Mexican?
I'm not sure you understand how governments work. That's ok. On a census, there's no box to check off every strain that makes up my ethnicity. There's a box that says "Hispanic". I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive.
You're right. My comment was uncharitable and US-centric. Sorry. I found it hard to not react because of the personal stake I feel I have in this sort of conversation. I'll try to do better.
That's mostly down to a weird quirk of English, which uses the word "race" for both ~"breed" and "species", so you can say "There are no 'races', we're all just the Human Race!". In most other languages, where "race" means only ~"breed" and not "species", that's as silly as saying "There are no 'breeds', all dogs are just the Dog Species!" Yeah, sure, but a Dachshund is quite different from a Great Dane in many ways (and, yes, of course quite similar in many more), so the statement is nonsense. They're both the Dog species, but different breeds.
Limit the word to mean only ~"breed" and it does kind of make sense for humans, too: There are definitely sub-groups of us, the members of which share many similar physical characteristics within the group and differ in these characteristics between the groups, because of long genetic isolation. If you look at it calmly you realise that's not a big problem in and of itself -- the problems come when you start claiming some of these groups are inherently superior or inferior to each other: One can admit that an African differs from an Asian, while still realising that a blanket statement saying an African is "better" than an Asian or vice versa is as silly as a blanket statement saying a Dachshund is "better" than a Great Dane or vice versa.
I'm not sure, but it often feels like this linguistic oddity makes the whole subject so much more inflamed and harder to discuss in the English-speaking world.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History (77–79 AD) derives the name of the Caucasus from Scythian kroy-khasis ("ice-shining, white with snow").[9] German linguist Paul Kretschmer notes that the Latvian word Kruvesis also means "ice".[10][11]
In the Tale of Past Years (1113 AD), it is stated that Old East Slavic Кавкасийскыѣ горы (Kavkasijskyě gory) came from Ancient Greek Καύκασος (Kaúkasos; later Greek pronunciation Káfkasos)),[12] which, according to M. A. Yuyukin, is a compound word that can be interpreted as the "Seagull's Mountain" (καύ-: καύαξ, καύηξ, ηκος ο, κήξ, κηϋξ "a kind of seagull" + the reconstructed \*κάσος η "mountain" or "rock" richly attested both in place and personal names).[13]
In Georgian tradition, the term Caucasus is derived from Caucas (Georgian: კავკასოსი Kawḳasosi), the son of the Biblical Togarmah and legendary forefather of Nakh peoples.[14][15]
According to German philologists Otto Schrader and Alfons A. Nehring, the Ancient Greek word Καύκασος (Kaukasos) is connected to Gothic Hauhs ("high") as well as Lithuanian Kaũkas ("hillock") and Kaukarà ("hill, top").[12][16] British linguist Adrian Room points out that Kau- also means "mountain" in Pelasgian.[17]
It’s actually a very funny term if you are from Russia. Because in Russia Caucasian means someone from Caucasian mountains and they are often considered “black” as opposed to Europeans and Asians by the general xenophobic wisdom.
Appropriately for your pun, the guy who came up with the term caucasian did so because he thought the perfect specimens of young male beauty came from the caucauses.
