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I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

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Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't realise it was that easy. Why don't all the illegal immigrants just do that?

It doesn't have to be easy to be factual. You simply are not owed entry into any country if you are not a citizen of that country, that is a fundamental part of what things like "citizenship" and "sovereign state" mean in the modern world.

Ah so this is basically a meaningless platitude?

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. For example, I do not have an obligation to let people into my house. I can choose to let them in or decline them entry. But there are certain preconditions I cannot apply. I cannot, for example, say "you may come into my house only if you murder my neighbour". That's because I'm legally bound not to induce people to commit murder. It would obviously be disingenuous to say this means I have an "obligati…

> But there are certain preconditions I cannot apply. I cannot, for example, say "you may come into my house only if you murder my neighbour". How is that a relevant argument?

Because the thing we're arguing about is whether it's ethical to apply certain preconditions to entering the US. What's unclear about that?

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#283
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. For example, I do not have an obligation to let people into my house. I can choose to let them in or decline them entry. But there are certain preconditions I cannot apply. I cannot, for example, say "you may come into my house only if you murder my neighbour". That's because I'm legally bound not to induce people to commit murder. It would obviously be disingenuous to say this means I have an "obligati…

You're confusing yourself with irrelevant analogies. You can say, "you may come into my house only if you give me your unlocked phone," and an immigration official can't assault you because there are certain protections granted to foreigners against being randomly assaulted. It's also not hard to imagine them NOT being legally bound not to search people's phones, and if you're trying to say someone's breaking the law…

I am not confused :-)

Of course I can say that. I can say "you can't come into my house if you're black" too. The point is that it's unethical. It would be unethical for me to search your phone before you entered my house, too. This is not complicated, I'm not sure why you're having trouble understanding it.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all free market transactions are reasonable. Selling yourself into slavery is a "free market transaction" I hope you would not consider legitimate.

Being offered something unreasonable, given free reign to decline that offer, does not cause harm.

Yes, it does. That's why job offers that state "do not apply if you're a woman" are illegal. You just don't care about this particular harm.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is absurd. If someone comes up to me and asks for food, I am not obliged to give it to them. If I say to them, "I will give you food, on the condition that I can punch you in the face", and they decline to be punched in the face, do you really believe "nothing wrong has happened"? That I, applying an unethical condition, did nothing wrong? If someone else says "You must not make punching someone in the…

> If I say to them, "I will give you food, on the condition that I can punch you in the face", and they decline to be punched in the face, do you really believe "nothing wrong has happened"? That I, applying an unethical condition, did nothing wrong? Yes, of course nothing wrong has happened. The other party decided that the food was not worth a punch in the face. The other party is no worse off than if you had made…

> "I will give you food, on the condition that you change your immutable characteristics" is incoherent.

This is a very strange failure of reading comprehension. I think you're trying to write "I will only give you food if you're white." Are you trying to say this sentence is incoherent? I admit that if you say this sentence to a black person, it is logically equivalent to "I will give you food if you change your immutable characteristics". But they are not logically equivalent in general, so your gotcha doesn't apply to my argument.

About your actual argument: a) it is obvious they don't have constitutional protections, I am not arguing about the law, this is an ethical point; b) identity-group prejudice is not the only kind of unethical behaviour. Since you mention prejudice, I think you proved my point - if the ethical standard was "nobody is materially worse off" then this kind of prejudice would just be irrelevant. If the US had a "whites only" immigration policy that would be A-OK with you, they have no obligation to let people in. If that's your ethical standard, I have nothing more to say.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#286
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sorry, I don't know any LLMs that would argue politics without using their own heavy bias and getting caught up in trying to not harm people, I'm afraid you just hate my writing style. Maybe you don't like the inline quotes? idk. Also I can't imagine wasting the effort to have a bot debate people online if I don't care enough to do it myself. The whole reason we have those types of employment and public accommodation…

It was the whole "Yes! 100%, totally agree" thing. I think you were just doing a rhetorical device, sorry.

> why don't we also have laws criminalizing things like refusing to be friends with $SKIN_COLOR people?

Some combination of "it would be impossible to enforce" and "laws about who can be friends with who sounds kind of crazy".

> There is no right of foreigners without a green card to enter in the first place

There is no right of black people (or any people) to get a job, either. It simply does not follow that "no counteroffer ... could be inappropriate". This is sort of my point - all the law says is "if you would offer this job to person X, only on the condition that they were white rather than black, then you must offer them the job anyway". Please note that I am not arguing about what the law says - I am arguing that the law is unethical.

Now, you say getting a job is somehow more "necessary" than, say, being friends with someone. I would argue also it's more "objective" in the sense that a job is a job, it would be silly for someone to try to argue "well, I can choose not to be friends with black people, so why can't I choose not to hire them?". This would be disingenuous - hiring people is not similar to being friends with them. So, given you agree this kind of law is ok for jobs and not ok for people's friendships, which one do you think is more similar to immigration?

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#287
post #218

I am a native citizen currently watching my first child grow up without me while my wife waits in line for her nearly 2-year-long immigration process. Every attempt to expedite her processing has been denied, even during Typhoons where she loses power and access to hospitals. I feel forgotten, and cast aside by the system - like my family situation is inconsequential and undeserving. Is there really nothing native ci…

Shocked and curious to know why anyone would downvote a story like this.

I'm more shocked about and curious as to why anyone would take time out of their day to press a button that does nothing other than to serve as a poor man's "read receipt" to indicate to the trolls that you read their message, thus incentivizing even more trolling.

But I assume nobody actually purposefully presses the button; only sometimes doing so by accident.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I overstated, but it's murky. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/12/05/despite-medias-claims-ic... Why would ICE leave the number as low as "70%" if they could be higher? Every illegal alien is a criminal as far as the law is concerned. Every illegal alien arrested is "charged with a crime". Otherwise ICE is openly stating to its supporters that they arrest illegal aliens and then release them, something their supporters…

I mean, you didn't just overstate, you flat out just made it up. The opposite of "illegal alien" is not "citizen".

Instead of citizens, we would say People who are legally authorized to remain in the United States? Is there a word for that?

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Border Patrol can wait longer than you want to wait at the airport, you should not bring your personal phone if you don't want them going through all the contents, they can hold your device for an inconvenient amount of time if you are an American citizen. If you say no and are not an American citizen you can be denied entry at the airport and sent home.

> you should not bring your personal phone if you don't want them going through all the contents isn't the right move here: wipe your phone, travel to destination, then restore from cloud backup? in the middle, you can let them inspect your wiped phone.

For non-citizens, there's not really any law against them installing malware on your phone which could persist through a factory reset. Though I've not heard of such malware for flagship phones.

Re: I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Border Patrol can wait longer than you want to wait at the airport, you should not bring your personal phone if you don't want them going through all the contents, they can hold your device for an inconvenient amount of time if you are an American citizen. If you say no and are not an American citizen you can be denied entry at the airport and sent home.

> you should not bring your personal phone if you don't want them going through all the contents isn't the right move here: wipe your phone, travel to destination, then restore from cloud backup? in the middle, you can let them inspect your wiped phone.

Probably more convinient to get a cheap, 2nd hand phone with the travel essentials and use that instead.
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