Denied Entry

Being denied entry is the same as being accused of a crime, but not being allowed to face your acuser nor defend yourself in any way. It's infuriating in every way, even if it doesn't affect directly. Why? Because someone, somewhere - most likely without a shred of empirical proof - decided that it would be "safer" if people aren't told why they were denied, because otherwise the "bad guys" would be able to circumvent the system or some other equally moronic rationale. We all know the type of close minded, ignorant pinhead who made that decision, and it's infuriating they actually have any sort of control over our daily lives.

To be honest, I don't think San Francisco conferences being impacted would cause any movement in policy.

Assuming that conferences moving would even impact policy in the first place, I'd expect Las Vegas conferences to be the ones that trigger change. Just on the tech side, Black Hat/DefCon and CES immediately come to mind. Las Vegas relies very much on conferences, and at least one casino/resort owner (Sheldon Adelson) is a well-known Republican supporter.

Remember, though: This is still a low number of visitors being denied entry. It would take a sizable number of regular attendees—or a notable number of high-profile attendees—being denied entry to cause rumblings of change.

Someone asked me today when I was going to visit the US again. I told them never. That is, not until this madness stops. The US now treats citizens from allied countries as enemies and that's just plain rude and not called for. There isn't a shred of evidence that any of this has made America safer in any way and it would be pretty easy to argue that it has made America less safe on account of pissing off large numbers of people both inside and outside the USA.

Horrible though this is, it's (bizarrely) better than the pre-ESTA alternative. My brother was denied entry to the US in 2003 while traveling on a visa waiver. At this point he was detained (without access to counsel) until a suitable outbound flight was available, and deported. The red stamp in his passport renders him ineligible to apply for an entry visa until 2018. This is all on the discretion of one immigration official, with no recourse for appeal. The justification is that when you sign the visa waiver, you agree to all this.

Edit: my brother is not entirely innocent in all this, but knowing before you fly is an improvement

As someone who has been through this bureaucracy — DHS, consulate, TRIP, etc. — I can tell you that it's a huge pain.

It's a completely opaque system. There's no way to talk to anyone directly. You can only send letters, and hope for a reply. Even seasoned immigration lawyers will have to go through this infuriatingly slow and obtuse system of sending letters and then waiting a long time to get a vague, unhelpful reply in return for some nameless functionary.

In my case, there was an error in my records, and we tried to get them to expunge the offending information. But every time we clarified to them what had happened, we got a reply back basically summarizing the issue, with no solution. My lawyers had to keep doing this until they finally got a redress number and a notification that something may be happening. Meanwhile, the various government databases are not unified or even talking to each other, so all the information about the error was apparently held by the immigration office at JFK (or something like that), not centrally at DHS, which made everything a lot harder. Eventually we received a confirmation that something had been done to rectify the problem, but — in a kafkaesque twist — they refused to say what, and they could not guarantee that there would be no further problems.

To this day I am still being pulled into the immigrations office for some light interrogation every time I enter the US. Which is whenever I come back, since I now live in the US.

The visa application process is similarly kafkaesque and characteristically unfriendly. For example, while applying for a visa, there's absolutely no way to contact the consulate (or at least there wasn't in my home country). Forget about calling or visiting, there's no way to talk to anyone except by appointment, and appointments are only for getting an interview to submit your visa application. And what's hilarious about both the visa system and ESTA is that they don't even guarantee entry. Visas are issued by the consulate, but you can get a visa from them and still be denied entry by DHS. As a European used to my government being quite friendly and approachable, the cold-heartedness of the whole thing was quite shocking.