It's not a mobster way, more like a weasel way. The reason it is a weasel's move is because decisions at the consulate are made by consular officers who are career public workers and won't deny visas for arbitrary reasons. That is bad for the political leadership because they just don't want to issue visas. So they need to invent evasive moves to throttle the pipeline by adding trainings, background checks, and other bogus bureaucratic hurdles.
> The reason it is a weasel's move is because decisions at the consulate are made by consular officers who are career public workers and won't deny visas for arbitrary reasons.
No? Visa can be denied for arbitrary reasons based on what executive branch of US. there have been multiple cases where it has been clear that visas are a privilige not a right. Visa needs a reason to be granted, by default it is denied.
Isn’t that the whole definition of “executive branch”? They are given (by we the people) the power to choose how to execute the laws. And we elect them.
The alternatives I can think of are for laws to be executed at the whim of an algorithm, a king, a more local executive like the governors of each state, or a more distant foreign executive like the UN
No, the executive branch has a responsibility to execute the law. It's not a privilege. We elected them to perform a duty on our behalf. Do you understand the difference?
Article 2, Section 3 of the US Constitution: "[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"
The judiciary doesn't have discretion as in it has been "granted" discretion. It de facto has a high degree of discretion because the act of judging a case necessarily entails a judgment of the laws.
Judicial review is a functional necessity. It's a necessary downstream consequence of simply having a Constitution as the supreme law.
The analog to the executive is that the executive naturally has finite resources to enforce law, and so as a matter of functional necessity it has some degree of discretion. That is not discretion to say "I disagree with this law and so am choosing not to enforce it," but the discretion to say "there are other priorities that are more important."
I was thinking about it more like if cops didn't have discretion, they would have to arrest for every minor offense and let the courts sort it out. After more reading it seems there are differing interpretations of the "Take Care" clause. Thank you for taking the time to explain.
> Beyond these constraints, the Clause raises several vexing questions. For instance, must the President enforce those laws she believes are unconstitutional? Some scholars argue that Presidents must enforce all congressional laws, without regard to his or her own constitutional opinions. Yet modern Presidents occasionally exercise a power to ignore such enactments on the grounds they are not true “laws” subject to the faithful execution duty. In so doing, they somewhat mimic the arguments and practice of President Thomas Jefferson, who refused to enforce the Sedition Act on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
The executive only has discretion if the law says they do. If the law says they must or shall do something, they must do that thing. If it says they MAY do something or otherwise explicitly gives them discretion in making a decision, then yeah, they have that discretion
But it's not a given that they can just decide what laws they will or will not enforce or follow
Expanded rights for some at the direct expense of others. That's not the same as simply expanding rights, unless you count other people being 'offended' in the same category as someone being physically assaulted or killed.
> That's not the same as simply expanding rights, unless you count other people being 'offended' in the same category as someone being physically assaulted or killed.
Yes, they are the same category.
In US$10,000 property damage, nobody is physically harmed.
Here’s another example, expanded rights:
Anyone holding a 401k, IRA, or pension can purchase single family homes and apartments inside the account, and pay zero capital gains tax and zero rental income tax.
We expanded rights!
Take a guess what this does to the homeless population.
> Anyone holding a 401k, IRA, or pension can purchase single family homes and apartments inside the account, and pay zero capital gains tax and zero rental income tax.
I am not sure on pensions, but this is not true for a 401k. Only an IRA can be used without paying capital gains taxes for a home purchase. Including first time home buyers. Speaking from experience, I learned the hard way the benefit you are describing applies only to an IRA.
To be clear, you are saying that theft of <10k is not a crime..? If you steal an iPad in an airport, you are charged with theft. I don't know where you got that idea. People are charged with theft for much less than 10k daily.
Honoring it, no doubt, by restricting firearms to duly registered militia personnel as written in the plain text for all to see? What about the 14th Amendment section 3, also written plainly?
No, you are confusing discretion with whims of the executive branch. Consular officers have discretion to adjudicate the applications and they can deny them for reasons prescribed in the INA. Those decisions are not reviewable. They are still supposed to follow their training, the FAM, and the INA in making the decisions. If Rubio sends an email to the consulates that says, "deny all visas", that would be illegal as a matter of policy and will be overturned by the courts under the APA. Note that 212(f) (aka Muslim ban from Trump v. Hawaii) gives discretion to the president to bar entry into the country, not visa adjudications. Visa adjudications require individualized determination by the consular officer.
Does the United States owe immigration to the world, somehow? Does it owe it so much that there must be an avenue to immigration so large that you casually refer to that as a "pipeline"?
Some of us have friends overseas who we think are deserving of residency and citizenship. You used to be able to just show up on a ship and they would make you a citizen if you were healthy. That's how my ancestors got here.
"You used to be able to just show up on a ship and they would make you a citizen if you were healthy."
Unless you were Chinese. Let's not romanticize that period, the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted precisely over fears of too many people of a different culture and race moving into the US at once. It was only repealed in 1943, as Imperial Japan became the common enemy of both China and the US.
And the Jews who were seeking shelter from Nazi Germany weren't particularly welcome either. There was an entire conference in Evian in 1938, ironically organized by none other than FDR, that sought a solution to increasing Jewish emigration from Germany. The end result was that no one was willing to increase or waive any quotas.
History tends to repeat with some variations. Few political things are totally new under the sun.
>Some of us have friends overseas who we think are deserving of residency and citizenship.
Sure, I have friends. But I'm not about to give my friends 50% of my house's equity just because we're friends. I'll invite them over temporarily, often even. But this doesn't entitle them to owning the property. I don't want to give them voting rights in my household budget.
And it's very bizarre that you can't make the distinction here. I doubt that the thought has crossed your mind that this is equivalent.
>You used to be able to just show up on a ship
True. That was then. But I don't want 2 billion people showing up off a ship and getting automatically put into the formal partnership with the rest of us. We have a right to decide who can come, who can't, and we don't even have to justify why. And there's enough of us deciding they can't now to make things better.
What a weird analogy. That has nothing to do with allowing immigration.
> We have a right to decide who can come, who can't, and we don't even have to justify why.
"We" is a funny concept here. As a US citizen, I am a part of that "we", and I want lots more immigration, and much easier paths to citizenship. Why don't I get what I want here?
At the very least, the current situation is inhumane, and treats non-citizens like an underclass. It's disgusting, and an embarrassment. Even if "we" decide we want fewer people living here or becoming citizens, there are better ways to do that.
What analogy? It's the same exact thing, scaled up from family to nation-state. These things aren't like each other, they are the same thing just smaller/larger. You were mal-educated in public schools.
>and I want lots more immigration
If we were talking about your equity in some startup and that the major holders were diluting that stock, you'd be apoplectic. Would call it cheating. I don't care what you want. One way or another, you must be defeated and never allowed to hold political influence again. Or educational influence, come to that.
>At the very least, the current situation is inhumane,
"Inhumane"? That word means something like "you're needlessly causing physical agony to livestock". So I'm sort of smirking that you would apply a word to people that is reserved for animals... maybe that's how the left really thinks of immigrants. They're just some sort of vote cattle that you can farm for election wins. But it's also bizarre. Seems like something you'd accuse me of, not the other way around.
>and treats non-citizens like an underclass
It does no such thing. It treats them like they should stay home and live there. Which is all anyone's asking for.
>Even if "we" decide we want fewer people living here or becoming citizens, there are better ways to do that.
There were! But those ways are disallowed. You blame people like me for the detention centers... we'd be deporting them the very first day, there wouldn't be time or need for them to be detained. That's the left doing that.
Start implementing those better ways. No one will stop you.
> That is bad for the political leadership because they just don't want to issue visas
America welcomes the most people in by percentage and by numbers in the world. If they don't want to issue visas, and they do it the most by political design, then no one does.
The US has the lowest percentage of it's population being immigrants in the Western Anglosphere. Like it's beaten by all of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. Germany and France too, plus a while host of smaller European countries.
There's an argument that the US is the least immigrant friendly large Western nation. Maybe the medium sized ones too.
France’s foreign-born population is roughly 13% to 14%, which puts it about tied with or slightly lower than the U.S., depending on the specific year and census criteria used.
