I assure you it can arise entirely out of negligence, ignorance, and the mindless application of poorly thought-out rules. The impulse to look for the hidden "powerful entities" behind the curtain is an understandable but unfortunate form of conspiracy thinking, and it's unlikely to guide you to the truth of situations like the author's.
We did after all just experience a national episode of confusion by a seemingly organic process (fake news) which turned out to be orchestrated by a foreign power for its own benefit. It's not unthinkable to me that (purely as an example) Russia also tilts public discourse in such a way as to make it politically untenable to dismantle, or even let stagnate, these self-destructive security apparatuses.
It's entirely possible the answer is very simply, "the xenophobic voter block really is so committed and influential." No conspiracy there, and that's a very useful answer. It tells us exactly where we need to focus our energy to fight these policies. I personally doubt that xenophobes are so educated about international travel as to pay sufficient attention to the workings of the visa system that it matters to them in the voting booth that Swedes need visas for nerd conferences, but I could very well just be biased.
American voters. American paranoia causes things like "Extreme vetting" to be totally acceptable. The consequence is global businesses need to move things out of the country.
In other words, they don't want to hire workers who want high pay but not be world class. Global businesses want people who are exposed globally, are sensitive to global markets and people and are worth the global salary they command.
Why would a "global" company hire an entitled person of any nationality who just wants higher salary while looking down on people of other countries?
Global competition among labor for work is one of the driving forces behind the erosion of the middle class.
Erosion of the _American_ middle class, creation of the middle class in developing countries. I fail to see why an American deserves better compensation for their work than e.g. a Chinese doing similar work, just because of the luck of where they were born.
Have you ever considered questions such as:
- The program itself might be flawed? US needs to improve its processes (ties to the original post)
- Why are Americans letting companies do that? Have you asked for something different from your government or are you just blasting a system from the last century?
- Why are CEOs allowed to gain the riches of global profits while being taxed lesser than middle class?
Globalization wasn't just "job stealing". It brought ungodly profits into corporate America. So many American companies have revenues more than GDP of entire nations. That goes into your 401k. So you have a share of work done in other countries.
Ever asked why middle class Americans are not getting a larger share of it from American rich people? Why isn't the money trickling down as promised?
At the end, you vote for your representatives. Your representatives seem to make the rich richer and create inhuman systems like H-1B instead of merit based systems. If you just elect someone who shuts the whole system down without an adequate replacement, forget about talented people, like OP, coming into the US.
Billions of people want to come to the US. Many more than want to go to, say, Argentina. So our immigration laws need to be a bit more strict to restrict what could be a flood of immigrants to a more manageable flow. This is necessary for cultural and economic reasons, to promote unity and stability, which make America great.
Second, we are understandably paranoid about security, which also leads us to more restrictive immigration laws.
That said, nearly a million people immigrate into the US each year. Most Americans like legal immigrants contrary to what propoganda you may read or hear, considering we are a nation of immigrants.
I disagree with this statement. The immigration laws of the United States need not be more strict; if anything, they should simply be more fair. The biggest problem with our laws is that they leave far too much up to discretion. If you turn in this stack of paperwork and if the person reviewing the application finds that you have met the requirements and if the person reviewing the application doesn't simply say "denied," then you may receive a visa.
Decisions of immigration, visa, and consular officers are not reviewable by any court or administrative body. You are not even entitled to know why you were denied. The reviewing individual may simply deny you for no reason at all.
That's not fair.
> Second, we are understandably paranoid about security
I also disagree that our paranoia about security is "understandable." I don't believe that it is. Virtually every action we have taken since That One Big Attack By Terrorists That Everyone Cites has shown that we're less paranoid about security and more paranoid about looking secure. Those are two almost totally different things. This means that our government takes wild actions that make us look secure--like simply banning all nationals of several countries, even people who happen to be dual-nationals of those countries--while accomplishing little.
That's unwise.
Not to mention rape victims... I know a few, and all of them attended or were wildly supportive of both the Women's March and the demonstrations against the travel bans. I don't think they'd appreciate their role in your analogy.
That said, my analogy is completely appropriate - and necessary - as there seems to be many who are unable to empathize with people who are scared for their safety, whether justly or unjustly paranoid.
Second, your analogy is not apt because you cannot equate the fear felt by an individual with the fear felt by a populace. Only one person has input into the former; many have input into the latter and they all, as individuals, exercise it in different ways.
Third, you did not respond to my point. I was not dismissing the fear; I was dismissing our paranoid response to it. Fear of an attack is reasonable. Fear of "looking insecure" is not. They are different. The former would have done things like streamlined intelligence gathering and looked into the myriad causes of attacks intended to create a terror response. The latter bans nationals of a handful of countries--but not the one whose nationals were responsible for the Big Attack we so fear--as a knee-jerk response.
On the gripping hand, we won't do the former because we may just find that the terrorists look a lot different from who we think they look like.
"Unity" and "culture" don't "make America great". (Nor does the US even have a single culture. There are dozens within a mile radius of where I sit.) Greatness is only bestowed by others, and, non-Americans have really started looking down on America thanks to its antagonistic travel policies that strain friendships, families, and business ties.
But 4 billion people live in nations where the average standard of living is significantly worse than in Sweden.