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Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

arunraghavan.net

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Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#201

Post by yencabulator »

registeredcorn wrote: post #131
i_no_can_eat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting to know, thanks. Let me then ask: if getting a tourist visa is simpler, is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference?

In addition to the legality issues that others have brought up, I have been asked questions about the details of my trip, which might be intended to weed out people doing the sort of thing you're asking about. "Which hotel are you staying at?" "Do you have an itinerary? Can I see it?" "Why are you coming here ?" (With a weird intonation of something like, why would anyone come here to vacation? It's so boring here!")…

For what it's worth, a common technique in those sorts of scenarios is that the questions asked don't really matter, what they are looking for is nervousness and evasive behavior. Don't read too much into why are they asking a specific question; they mostly want you to talk to gauge your mental state, with the idea that many people get nervous if they're committing a crime and made to talk to authority.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#202

Post by patrakov »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #119
xenophonf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is there any problem in asking for a tourist visa even if your intention is attending a conference? In the U.S.A., lying on a government form is illegal, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001 . I can't imagine other countries treating that differently.

Is it necessarily lying? If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

> If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

That's exactly what I was told (as a statement, not as a question) by an official a few years ago when applying for a visa for a trip to Germany.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#203

Post by yencabulator »

domh wrote: post #9
ido wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought EU citizens no longer need a visa to the US ahead of time at all[0]? [0] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...

It's not technically a visa, but you must have an ESTA which is like a pre-approval for a visa and is required for all flights to USA from participating countries. Then on arrival it's up to the border patrol to determine you're validity for entry and issue you with a 90 day "visa". From your link: > Travelers must have a valid Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) approval prior to travel and meet all re…

The ESTA is not a visa and when using the Visa Waiver Program you do not have a visa. The Visa Waiver Program existed before ESTA.

Think of ESTA as an opportunity to search for you in terrorist & crime databases ahead of time, as doing it at the time of the entry is logistically hard.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#205

Post by 2143 »

reisse wrote: post #197
2143 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you moved to some country in Europe is is _harder_ for you to travel to US, and vice versa. No it's not. Anecdata: plenty of Indian citizens in Europe go troublefree to the US. I personally know a few people. > Second, as you've already taken the immigration route once, you're seen as a potential immigrant with a risk of no return. You make it sound like they would illegally-immigrate to America. Why would someo…

> No it's not. > Anecdata: plenty of Indian citizens in Europe go troublefree to the US. > I personally know a few people. I have my anecdata too, I know a few people who are travelling to Europe and they're getting single entry fixed dates visas every time. Sure they "go troublefree" by some definition, but in their home country they'd most certainly get long-term multivisas. And that's not even mentioning queue tim…

> I know a few people who are travelling to Europe and they're getting single entry fixed dates visas every time

I thought you were talking about visas to the US. How is people "travelling to Europe" relevant?

> Have you ever been on a visa interview in US embassy?

Yes I have. Twice. For two different visa categories at separate points in time.

In both cases my interview with the consular officer was very pleasant and took less than 5 minutes, and the first time he even said "enjoy your trip!”.

Now, I know a lot of people's US visas get rejected for whatever reason. I don't know why that is. Nor do I know why it was easy for me and difficult for others.

> Higher salaries, better job market, better living conditions, you name it.

> US immigration system is so fucked up there is no proper way easier than crossing Mexican border and legalizing as a refugee. Or "disappearing" on tourist visa.

My previous post was about whether or not it's harder for non-Americans to apply for a US visa from Europe. I was not talking about the general immigration situation in the US.

Rhetorical question — if a non-American non-European were to sneak into America via Mexico, why would they go to the trouble of settling into Europe first?

This is borderline flamewar, for no good reason. I wouldn't be replying further. Have a good day.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#206

Post by pandaman »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #195
pandaman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like someone processing your next visa application getting automatically collected data on your previous visits from all kinds of sources public and private and seeing that you lied about your visit the last time.

What sources would keep track of foreigners doing private business meetings and conferences?

Social media posts (not just from yourself but other attendees), credit card purchases, license plate scanners, the conference itself publishing the list of attendees etc. If someone you have not told knows where you had been then the government can know too. It's not guaranteed but the risk is unacceptable to some.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#207

Post by youngtaff »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #186
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Visiting for 2-3 days // Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes. Can you not go to a conference when in holiday? Isn't the difference who is paying - if you pay then it's a holiday, if work pays then it's business. Could work just give you a bonus to cover the amount at some later point? What's the rationale for not allowing business travel but allowing the same people to travel f…

> Long weekend "city breaks" are pretty common amongst the UK middle classes. In Europe with a 1-3 hour time difference and a 1-4 hour flight, yes. In New York with a 5-hour time difference and an 8-hour flight, not so common. I'm sure that it happens, but it's not at all common. Jetlag alone would make that an athletic event, if your "leaving front door, returning back to front door" time is under 72 hours.

Long weekends in NY aren’t that uncommon from the UK

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#208

Post by youngtaff »

distant_hat wrote: post #185
vient wrote: post #16

There is also a specific subset of this problem named "USA conferences on themes from Technology Alert List" with common examples being information security conferences like DEFCON or BlackHat. Just mentioning such conference during visa application may already give you headache, and usually you work in this field if you go to such conference - working in critical field automatically gets you an administrative proces…

As an Indian the UK visa is way more work than US and the other part is US often gives you a 10 year visa whereas the UK gives 6 month visas so you have to go through the whole process every so often. EU is also more work. You often need to show hotel bookings, flights both ways and so on and if it gets rejected it is a lot of effort down the drain.

Yeh but it’s the same the other way around… as a UK citizen applying for an Indian visa was painful even though I was visiting a supplier in India

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#209

Post by ghaff »

patrakov wrote: post #202
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it necessarily lying? If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

> If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right? That's exactly what I was told (as a statement, not as a question) by an official a few years ago when applying for a visa for a trip to Germany.

I know governments aren't always commonsensical but it would seem odd if someone (not in the business) would need a business visa to attend Comic-Con or similar.

Re: Conferences are inadvertently excluding many attendees from foreign countries

#210

Post by aranke »

csomar wrote: post #128

Here is something conferences can do: run the conference in a visa-easy country. These usually happen to be: 1. Cheap and 2. Welcoming because they need the conference economic activity. Of course this is unlikely to happen because the companies running these conferences are mostly based in the EU/USA/UK and would not bother with the inconvenience.

I think we'll see a lot more conferences hosted in Dubai/Qatar for exactly this reason.
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