Don't you restrict everyone who doesn't meet current visa requirements?

Yes, we try to, but the question is about Muslims.

It's frustrating that despite all of the 'spying' our government does in the name of keeping us safe, that they really don't have any idea who present's a threat.

I really wish they'd stop pretending they can protect us from this kind of thing.

Honestly, as callous as it sounds, if I thought 'banning all muslims' would help, I'd support that cause. But it won't, so why bother?

The only thing I think would stop Islamic terrorism is if you took every Muslim from certain countries and relocated them to a large island like Madagascar. Then monitor the island to make sure nobody leaves. The other option is to kill them all. Neither is practical and both would be bad for many reasons (although possibly good for the environment). So the terrorism will just continue indefinitely. I don't think surveillance or current visa systems are effective enough to put an end to it, although maybe the situation would be worse without them.

I am pretty sure that the nuclear strike I described that would be necessary to kill off the vast majority of the middle eastern muslim world would NOT be good for the environment, and that was just to put the suirvivors back into a nomadic state in a radioactive wasteland - not literally kill them all, and it didn't even bother with muslims not part of the middle east so I think we can safely say there would be no environmental benefits whatsoever to that course of action - or if there are, they would be vastly outweighed by the downsides.

Radiation levels remain far too high for human habitation but the abandoned town is filled with birdsong and the gurgling of streams forged by melting snow. Nobody thought it possible at the time but 20 years after the reactor exploded on 26 April 1986, during an ill-conceived "routine" Soviet experiment, Chernobyl's radiation-soaked "dead zone" is not looking so dead after all.

...

"On the surface," she says, "radiation is very good for wildlife because it forces people to leave the contaminated area. They removed 135,000 people from an area twice the size of Luxembourg. The people there now carry out very localised activities and in vast regions of the zone there are no people. It is a radioactive wilderness and it is thriving."

Well even a nuclear strike would be bad in the short term for the environment, but once the radioactive particles decay over 20-100 years then plants and wildlife would return. Assuming the area isn't repopulated by people. Taking out all the Muslim populations, even with nukes, could be a very good thing for the Earth if those areas were kept as nature preserves afterwards. Now I'm not advocating it for humanitarian reasons, but it's good to have a full perspective on it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 72842.html
"20 years after meltdown, life returns to Chernobyl"

No. We let them in anyway.

The current visa requirements are kind of ridiculous. 100,000 legal immigrants a year for a country of >300 million people is just stupid, but that's about how many permanent immigrants we'd be allowed to take if the laws were strictly enforced.

European migrants claim to be refugees because EU countries are party to a refugee treaty that makes it illegal to send them back unless they can prove they're not refugees. The US isn't party to this treaty.

It's actually arguable that a strict interpretation of the immigration laws in the US means no immigration is allowed at all other than the green card lottery. E and H visas are technically nonimmigrant visas and you have to swear you have no intent to immigrate in order to get one. The fact that you can immediately turn around and file for a change of status with an H visa and start the green card process is really questionable. The legal fiction that let's you pursue a green card under an E visa is even worse, as you're not even allowed to file change of status with this visa.

That's because peoples' status do indeed change sometimes. However, since fraud in order to get into a legalized immigrant status is, in fact, a thing by all means lets eliminate any possibility for change in status of nonimmigrant visas. While we're at it we can abolish the fiancée version of the 'K" visas.

it's pretty much impossible to immigrate here without acting unethically illegally.

That is not the point. The vast majority of legal immigrants that immigrated here based on employment have committed fraud, it's part and parcel to the process.

Remember, there are actually no quotas for green cards. If you can get an employer to sponsor you, you can get one. The issue is that the green card application takes years to process, and it's pretty much a given that no employer is going to spend five figures today in order to have a chance of getting an employee five years from now.

In order to get sponsored, you first have to get a temporary worker, nonimmigrant visa (which are the visas that have the quotas) in order to work for the employer, the granting of which is contingent upon you swearing under oath that you have no intent to immigrate. Of course, you took the job in the first place with the understanding that your employer would sponsor you for permanent residency as soon as you began working. So you were pretty much flat out lying when you swore you had no intent to immigrate, you were already planning on doing permanent residency before you even took the job.

For H visas, this is permitted under the legal fiction of, well, you didn't want to immigrate when you applied for the temporary visa, but after actually arriving here, you became so enthralled with the freedom and culture and whatever that you changed your mind. We'll just overlook the fact that the majority of H-1B visa holders started the permanent residency process within two weeks of arriving, surely this is the reason. For E visas, you're not even allowed to apply for a change in status this way, but you can still be sponsored for permanent residency and USCIS just kind of ignores what you swore to when you got your temporary permit.

First, you haven't established that the vast majority of petitions are fraudulent. Second, people exploiting loopholes in the process doesn't make it "part of the process"; if it was it wouldn't be a loophole.

So you contend that there are entire classes of visas that go entirely unused. Show your work, including the "5 figures" part.

No, you actually don't. There is nothing stopping an employer from sponsoring you without a temporary visa.

No, actually it isn't. At no point in the immigration progress is "enthralled with the culture and freedom" a criteria.

As for E visas, you do realize that these visas require significant investment of capital that the applicant will be controlling? Furthermore, they can be renewed 2 years at a time, an unlimited number of times so why would you even bother with a change in status? It contains no barriers to work for adult children or spouses either. The sort of person that applies for an E visa is generally quite well off in their home country.

It's not a loophole when it's used by the vast majority of people immigrating via employment. We wouldn't have people complaining about immigration quotas if it was actually a reasonable option to get green card sponsorship without getting a temporary work permit first, because there is no green card quota.

What? I have no idea what you mean, here. The 5 figures is what it costs for the company to do a job search and prove to USCIS that they can't find a suitable US worker. Yes I realize companies get away with doing little here today, but we were assuming that the requirements were actually going to be strictly enforced.

That's technically true, but it's not realistic. The company needs to hire someone today, not spend a bunch of money on an application so they can then wait five years and hope the application is accepted so they can get a worker five years down the line. Surely you can see this is not a reasonable way to hire workers.

I was referring to the treaty trader E visa, which is given to foreign employees of foreign corporations with a presence in the US, if they need to bring in people from home to run their US operations. This is the visa my family used to immigrate to and eventually become permanent residents of the US, so I'm well familiar with the process of "swear up and down that you don't want to immigrate, then immediately do the exact opposite."

For H visas, you need to change your status because it's a nonimmigrant visa. You're not supposed to be trying to immigrate with one. The change of status is there to change your status from "not trying to immigrate" to "trying to immigrate." The fraud part comes in because its blatantly obvious that the majority of status changers were already planning to do so when they swore they weren't going to try to immigrate.

With the E visa, since you can't change status to "trying to immigrate," you're technically not supposed to be able to get a green card at all while here under such a visa. However, USCIS simply does not care and lets you do it anyway.

How does any of this have anything to do with it NOT being a loophole?

They don't have to do the job search every single time which greatly reduces those costs - assuming it actually DOES cost 5 figures to do it; I have no idea where that number comes from. Furthermore, maybe you missed the article about companies actively discouraging and getting rid of American workers?

Surely you can see that it does not actually take that long, since we do not, in fact, have wide varieties of Visas going totally unused? You also may not be aware of it but there's such a thing as "long-range planning" and "forecasting".

Aside from the fact that you keep trying to explain to me how visas work despite the fact that I was required to learn all of them - and still have the manuals at hand - what you don't seem to understand is that E visas don't prevent you getting a green card by any and all means; it's just that there is no means that pertains to the E visa.

A "change in status" means that some external factor has come into play. For example, if you were to come here as a single adult on an E visa, meet a girl, and get married you could petition for a change in status because now you're the spouse of a US citizen. The E visa never enters into it.

The reason USCIS does not take much action on those obviously-fraudulent oaths by the way is because it's very hard to actually prove what your intent was at the time of the oath beyond a reasonable doubt.

In any case, all you're demonstrating is that our entire system is set up to not be to the benefit of the country.