I consider getting a visa for a short-term tourist stay to be a hassle. You can't just buy your plane ticket and show up, instead you have to fill out paperwork, fax copies of your passport around, etc.
(Personal story: I transited Shanghai a few weeks ago. If I didn't need a visa to visit the city, I would have added a stopover or picked a longer connection so that I could go into town. But since this would have involved money and paperwork, I decided to skip it.
I did get to see the Great Firewall in action, though, which was kind of neat. I felt like I was Sticking It To The Man when I had to ssh to my server at home and use w3m to read blogs.)
Er BTW many people need a visa for a short-term visit to the US. Now even people who previously could visit short-term either have to jump through hoops or have to apply for a visa. A significant amount more post-bush need visas than did pre-bush.
Because of decent negotiating on the British part, most Britons still apply for the visa-waving program (mostly because the British government said if the UK loses its Visa-waving program to the US, the US will lose its to the UK). This happened only a couple of years after the whole mandatory machine readable passport thing (which the British government again said that US citizens have to do it too).
Ironically the US was trying to ban British Pakistani's from entering the US, however the US never even attempted to prevent the entry of the IRA when they were purchasing weaponry from the US for terrorist purposes. I suppose the US's whole anti-terrorist stance is hugely different when they terrorists are helping your economy, not trying to destroy it.
No offense, but US immigration restrictions have very little to do with terrorism. It is more about "protecting" our jobs, or something.
We have plenty of natural-born citizens that like killing people (Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, etc.), and the 9/11 hijackers all had valid visas. INS (DHS now) is not in a position to prevent terrorism.
Now, why anyone would want to come to the US illegally, with our lack of health care, crumbling school system, horrendous prisons, and so on, is beyond me. Someone should tell the illegal immigrants that there are many better places to immigrate to.
I wasn't talking about immigrating, I was talking about visitors visas. Big difference, the US was planning to remove the visa-waver program because of the British Pakistani community.
However, I understand what you mean about illegal immigration. Although I completely understand why people work illegally when they do go to a different country. I'm immigrating legally to Canada and it's been almost 6 months without a single response, but I can't work for risk of voiding the application process. I'll be lucky if I hear anything before the new year.
However 1 year of unemployment is a better option than the potential 5 years my wife could face trying to work legally in the UK. Plus, you know, Canada actually has vegetation in the places they call 'cities', which by far beats the UK's desolate wastelands (personally I don't count many British people on the streets as alive, at least from the city I came from, I think 90% would probably pass a test for P-Zombieism).
Big difference, the US was planning to remove the visa-waver program because of the British Pakistani community.
I doubt this. One crackpot unelected official does not "the US was planning" make. If we kill our visa-waiver program, everyone else in the world will remove the US from theirs. That is simply not going to happen.
Also, if you feel that the US is discriminating against you because of your ethnicity, you have full access to the courts. The Constitution protects all "people", not just citizens.
(Personal story: I transited Shanghai a few weeks ago. If I didn't need a visa to visit the city, I would have added a stopover or picked a longer connection so that I could go into town. But since this would have involved money and paperwork, I decided to skip it.
I did get to see the Great Firewall in action, though, which was kind of neat. I felt like I was Sticking It To The Man when I had to ssh to my server at home and use w3m to read blogs.)