I don't understand the problem... There's a pandemic, so people in areas that are more affected shouldn't be traveling as much. The US has been heavily affected, therefore Americans shouldn't be traveling internationally without a really good reason. Americans are not experiencing what Sri Lankans experience, because Americans can't go anywhere, and mostly shouldn't be going anywhere; Sri Lankans (under normal circumstances) experience real pain because of visa issues.
The article doesn't bother to interview any Americans that these travel restrictions have caused actual problems for. That would have been more helpful than interviewing a European academic. An anecdote (or some actual data) would helpful describe the real problem instead of just saying, "Take that, America!"
> There's a pandemic, so people in areas that are more affected shouldn't be traveling as much.
Indeed, but people from places like Thailand are allowed to travel because their nation has the pandemic under control! Why should the US be so behind Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on? It's not for lack of money.
> Americans are not experiencing what Sri Lankans experience, because Americans can't go anywhere, and mostly shouldn't be going anywhere; Sri Lankans (under normal circumstances) experience real pain because of visa issues.
I'm someone who the travel restrictions have caused actual problems for. In March I accepted an offer for my first full-time job out of school at a company in Tokyo. I was scheduled to move in May, but the travel ban put a halt on my visa process.
In the meantime, I've started working remotely, but it has been extremely difficult due to being remote with the 13 hour time difference. This certainly isn't how I expected to start my first job.
Our reaction to the pandemic has been a huge disappointment. Since March, I've been watching closely as other countries see their first cases, make the tough decision to lock down, wait it out a few months, then finally reopen as cases fall.
Here, we never really committed to the lockdown. Where I live in Georgia, it was only a few weeks ago that the governor started recommending mask usage.
Needless to say, I don't plan ever to return to the United States once I leave. This country is hopeless.
More than half of the US population doesn't even have a passport [1]. And I suspect the half that does has a majority of people who read religiously the NYT and have no plan to travel during this pandemic anyway.
Many Americans held on to fantasies of escape to countries with functioning institutions in case of a collapse like this one. We never thought it would be us trapped in a country going down in flames. It's my friends with Taiwanese passports who have tickets to freedom and safety, and my US passport that commits me to die. This is at least an interesting and newsworthy inversion!
It's pretty infuriating seeing Americans say that there's nothing wrong with people being trapped in their own countries and unable to move around. Nobody should be trapped in a country, and nobody's movement should be restricted by their nationality.
The problem is the decadent conspiracy driven culture that makes a significant portion of the US population to fight initiatives that are in their best interest. That's why the US is now unable to contain the virus.
For every reasonable person there's a tin foil hat that thinks that Bill Gates wants to forcibly vaccinate them with a nanoscale identification chip under the guise of a coronavirus vaccine. Or that masks don't work and are against their freedom. Or that vaccines cause autism, or that the earth is flat, or that diversity is bad or Trump is not a racist. What a fucking circus. How could the country that sent men to the moon end up like this?
Plus, traveling to the US is not what it used to be. There are better destinations in the world with more historic richness and more beautiful architecture and scenery that do not require a stranger to check your social media activity, taking your shoes off and walking feet on a nasty airport carpet full of skin diseases or being yelled "Go back to your country" by a homeless junkie at a Starbucks (the latter happened to me).
As an American living (and trapped) abroad - I get looks of sympathy and shakes or the head when I mention I’m from the states.
One thing I have noticed is that countries want tourism but are now super careful about who they let in.
Recently I wanted to travel elsewhere, but was unable to enter most of the world with my American passport. So I got another extension instead for 2 more months.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that some countries now actually are beginning to realize that their economies are down, but can survive without the hordes of dirty foreigners coming to their country. So there is just no rush to reopen especially with the medium sized and fast growing countries.
Nationalism to some small degree is definitely in play in a lot of governments these days.
And with the resurgence of the virus, lockdowns are being expended and reestablished in many places.
The reopenings planned for August 1 are definitely not going to happen.
No passport is any good right now - except in its own region.
The European Union tourism rules don't exclude Americans by citizenship, despite a lot of misinformation in media reports and even certain more half-official web pages like that of the Paris airport (but these mistakes are not in the legally binding national documents nor the official European Commission recommendation text). It cares about residence officially, or as applied by some countries, where you're coming from or where you've been recently. The FAQ in the Netherlands even specifically addresses the hypothetical example of Americans living in Australia - yes such people are allowed in.
So if you live in a safe country and haven't been elsewhere recently, you should be allowed in. I'm considering trying this next month (I'm an American in Canada), and I'm not looking forward to airline or border processing, but we'll see.
The CBC article that we're discussing gets it right and wrong at different points in the text. The headline says "citizens", the text correctly says "residents", but a lot of the focus is on the loss of value of the passport despite that not being the operative criterion. An Australian living in the US is barred from most European tourism right now, just like an American living in Australia isn't.
> Another thing I’ve noticed is that some countries now actually are beginning to realize that their economies are down, but can survive without the hordes of dirty foreigners coming to their country.
Are you sure? Travel and tourism account for 13% of the economy in Italy and 9% in France and Europe as a whole [1]. So maybe the pain will be tolerated only for a short while before these economies are compelled to open doors to Americans (and Chinese too).
Yeah, that last part is what really concerns me here. A lot of people seem to have overindexed on the US's failures to decide that their region has in comparison beaten the virus. Therefore things are safe now and there won't be a resurgence and the current state of free intra-European tourism will continue. This is, to put it delicately, not what any health official in the continent believes.
There are different kinds of tourists as well. Shuffling hoards of cruise ship passengers out on a day trip to snap their Instagram selfies with a few landmarks and buy some mass-produced tchotchkes from the gift shops before returning to the ship for dinner has a massive impact on quality of living for locals (and even other higher value, lower impact tourists) while doing very little for the local economy.
I really hope when this is over we see a global end to the bargain mass tourism that's been causing so much damage to cities around the world in recent years.
As an American living overseas I've come to this realization: If Americans cannot respect the rules of their homeland in the language they understand, how can they be expected to elsewhere?
Outside the USA, the opinion of the USA is not great [0] right now and it seems unlikely these bans will go away. It sucks for those of us who are doing our parts to flatten the curve and prevent overwhelming the medical systems.
I think it's a huge mistake to assume that the people that, say, refuse to believe in science and/or effectiveness of wearing masks are the same people that are traveling internationally. Only ~45% of Americans even have a passport and most will never leave their home state. I'm going to go out on a limb and say those who think the US is the greatest place on Earth and have no desire to step foot outside of it to test that theory don't have the best intentions.
The "opinion" of the USA has never been great, ever since our country was founded. And yet we're the only ones everyone talks about. And our culture and policies and businesses and finances permeate the world. And people are literally dying trying to get in. And then we need to save the world from one of their crazy dictators and the cycle restarts all over again.
What do you mean by "Respect the rules of their homeland?" You understand that rules regarding mask wearing are generally decided at the company/institution level. The local governments gives recommendations, but don't generally enforce them. There's no federal mandated law that everyone needs to adhere to.
Additionally, the majority of people in the US that travel overseas are likely to be much more cultured and concerned about how they are perceived in a foreign nation than our local Walmart population. An uneducated Karen wearing a Nazi mask ranting about her god given right to not wear a mask is not indicative of the type of person from the US that will be visiting culturally significant sites of Italy.
> Americans used to have one of the most prized passports in the world, considered a golden ticket to wealth, travel and opportunity.
What? This is not at all true. Maybe that's a belief that many Americans have, but the US passport is not one of the most prized passports in the world, there are about 30 other country's passport I'd rather have before having a US one, if you're talking about getting access to other countries with/without requiring a visa. A quick check of any of the "passport indexes" (Henley Passport Index, Arton Capital Passport Index) will show you that the US passport is fairly low ranked compared to the top ones.
Hard to take the rest of the article serious when it starts out with a serious flaw in the reasoning.
>but the US passport is not one of the most prized passports in the world
Henley Passport Index ranks the US at #7, by a reasonable definition of "one of the most prized", I'd say #7 counts.
#1 Japan only has access to 6 more countries visa free than the US does.
Edit: The US was ranked #1 in 2006, went down to #7 by 2010, and then was back up to #1 in 2014. We're talking swinging between 185 countries with visa free access and 191 countries here, so the top 10 positions change frequently.
I'm not American but you're off-base here. Sure, if you already have another western passport an American passport may not buy you much. But if you go to Asia or Africa, you'll find that an American passport is still the Holy Grail; certainly "one of the most prized" as the article says.
And, BTW, if you're poor (like most of the world!), the mobility offered by a passport matters little in the short term; it's the economic mobility a new nationality gives you.
Besides, those passport indexes are ridiculous -- they rank them by number of countries you can access. But let's be real -- would you prefer an Emerati passport to an American one because you get a visa-on-arrival in Liberia or similar places? Insane.
Also – doesn’t the US passport mean you have to pay (or at least declare) taxes on your non-US income back to the IRS? That doesn’t seem desirable.
An EU passport would vastly outrank the US passport in terms of economic opportunity because it gives you the right to live and work anywhere in the EU without a visa or much paperwork.
I'd hardly call visa-free access to 6 fewer countries (185 vs 191) as "fairly low ranking".
I actually went through the list to see what the differences were in terms of access between Japan (the top ranking passport right now) and the US passport. These are ignoring any COVID related temporary closures.
A Japanese passport will get you into the following countries visa-free that the US passport won't:
- China
- India
- Myanmar
- Pakistan
- Vietnam
- Suriname
- Venezuela
- Azerbaijan
- Iran
- Turkey
A US passport will get you into the following countries visa-free that the Japanese passport won't:
- Burkina Faso
- Central African Republic
To be honest, nearly all of the above make sense
- US-China relations are bad
- The US middle-eastern wars have pissed off:
- Pakistan
- Azerbaijan
- Iran
- Turkey
- The US currently has sanctions against Venezuela
I am a little surprised about India, Myanmar, Suriname, and Vietnam. However, it doesn't appear that European passports will get you into India visa-free either.
"The most striking feature of the main migration corridors within and from the region (figure 22 is the dominance of the United States as the main country of destination. Most of the corridors in 2019 were to the United States,"
Most immigrants don't know or care about things like Henley Passport Index.
Access to all countries are weighted equally in these passport indexes. So I would say they are flawed.
I would prefer a passport that gives me access to say Switzerland rather than North Korea (but they will count same in all the passport indices).
These indices are vanity numbers (just like number of lines of code or number of papers published for an academic)
This is just a matter of time. Almost all countries actually want US citizens to come there, for tourism purposes, due to their high spend potential (relative to other countries).
Agree. Those don't think so haven't travelled to luxury destinations overseas. It's majority Americans and Chinese. There are whole industries depending on those two cohorts.
If this were the only criteria, then Chinese passports would be accepted visa-free in a lot more countries than they currently are. Not saying that travel bans will remain in place once the current pandemic ends (which might take a while still), but "high spend potential" is not the sole determinant for this kind of polices when outside of a worldwide health emergency.
> Almost all countries actually want US citizens to come there, for tourism purposes
Please do provide evidence of this. Most people I've seen being surveyed in Europe around tourists don't care where they come from, as long as they spend money and don't ruin stuff.
Americans, along with the British and the French, seems to be the groups that most people complained about when it comes to groups vacationing in Europe.
Edit: lot's of people replying, which is great. But none of providing evidence, which is explicitly requested in this comment. Would love to see some hard facts rather than people's anecdotes.
The cost of restarting a full blow epidemic in Europe is much higher than the lost tourism money. I doubt we'll see americans anywhere before they get their situation under control.
There are travel restrictions all over the world currently due to the COVID-19 situation. People are not allowed to travel from one city to another in the same country without proper documents. Lots of countries are not even allowing international flights at this point. To tie this in just with US passport is simply politically motivated.
There's a worldwide pandemic going on, no one currently has access to "most of the world". Not sure the point of spinning this as a U.S. citizen specific issue...I guess Canadian journalists just can't resist
I don't think losing access to most of the world is a permanent thing. It's purely because of the virus and nothing else which is self inflicted. The foreign policy and all around lack of empathy shown by the WH will all pass.
As a country though, the US has become the beacon of anti-science nut jobs starting from the president. For the leading tech country in the world, it's jarring how anti-science it is. The whole world seems to have gotten a grip on the situation except the US, which is still consumed with frivolous things like throwing the first pitch at the Yankees game , just because he is jealous of Dr.Fauci.
This type of news may go stale very quickly... Yes pandemic has instantly created myriad set of obstacles to travel and migration around the world.
Maybe some of these restrictions will take enough time to be lifted... But, does anyone believe that most of the world will suddenly reject American money (for business and leisure) for long term?
I mean, just look at the "in-fight" happening in Europe where southern countries want northern tourists despite pandemic status...
If it makes anyone feel better, most U.S. citizens have _never_ had access to any part of the world because they've been too busy barely making ends meet working dead-end jobs with no healthcare or vacations.
So, in the grand scheme of things, is it really so terrible if the middle echelons feel a little squeeze as well as a result of political malfeasance from the people that they (collectively, not individually) put into power?
US Citizenship may have once been a prestigous thing, but now it's met with a sort of elitism that suggests Americans are inferior (stupid, boorish, backward etc). In my experience living here the differences between Canada & the US are grossly exaggerated and many countries respect Canada much more.
I think the well calibrated view would give America more credit for the role it's played/playing globally.
I'm currently trapped in the U.S. waiting for my passport renewal, which currently takes 3-4 months. Since you have to mail in your existing passport to get your passport renewed, I literally have no passport until the new one arrives in the mail. People who applied for their new passports in March are only now getting their new passports in the mail today.
I know someone will say "oh you shouldn't be traveling anyways". I don't live in the U.S. anymore, I live abroad. I only returned to the U.S. because I had hit my visa limit abroad, and thought I could get my passport renewed within a reasonable time frame in the U.S. (max 1 month). How stupid of me to assume my country took passport processing seriously and with any sense of urgency.
What is a theoretical maximum time frame for Europe to ban visitors from the US? It seems like the allure of tourists dollars will likely trump public health concerns at some point. Does anyone see this lasting for another year or longer?
IMO it's temporary. (IMHO!) The population of America is very large, and it's hard for the government to control all the idiots(a good percentage of the population?) who live in it, and also it's hard for the government to be organized themselves because they're busy fighting for power and blaming each other. Great country, but COVID exposed some of the weaknesses.
How difficult is it for a Sri Lankan citizen to get a temporary visa to come to a developed nation (e.g. for vacation or a business trip)?
What is the reasoning for this situation? Other than edge cases where a nation is a security risk or where illegal immigration is a concern what does democratic a country gain by keeping visitors out?
It's so weird for me personally because while I have absolutely zero interest in boarding a plane to go anywhere at the moment, there is a weird small feeling of being trapped so to speak. like losing the option (that i wasn't going to use anyway) to pick up and go anywhere i could theoretically want to.
not complaining, just observing a feeling because there are more pressing things for this country and myself at the moment and as the article points out we're now experiencing what it's like for a fairly sizable portion of the world. I guess we are in the middle of reaping what we've sown.
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
The article doesn't bother to interview any Americans that these travel restrictions have caused actual problems for. That would have been more helpful than interviewing a European academic. An anecdote (or some actual data) would helpful describe the real problem instead of just saying, "Take that, America!"
[+] [-] vmchale|5 years ago|reply
Indeed, but people from places like Thailand are allowed to travel because their nation has the pandemic under control! Why should the US be so behind Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on? It's not for lack of money.
> Americans are not experiencing what Sri Lankans experience, because Americans can't go anywhere, and mostly shouldn't be going anywhere; Sri Lankans (under normal circumstances) experience real pain because of visa issues.
I agree. We are still highly privileged.
[+] [-] benrbray|5 years ago|reply
In the meantime, I've started working remotely, but it has been extremely difficult due to being remote with the 13 hour time difference. This certainly isn't how I expected to start my first job.
Our reaction to the pandemic has been a huge disappointment. Since March, I've been watching closely as other countries see their first cases, make the tough decision to lock down, wait it out a few months, then finally reopen as cases fall.
Here, we never really committed to the lockdown. Where I live in Georgia, it was only a few weeks ago that the governor started recommending mask usage.
Needless to say, I don't plan ever to return to the United States once I leave. This country is hopeless.
[+] [-] jjcon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/804627/us-passports-in-c...
[+] [-] look_lookatme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JSavageOne|5 years ago|reply
It's pretty infuriating seeing Americans say that there's nothing wrong with people being trapped in their own countries and unable to move around. Nobody should be trapped in a country, and nobody's movement should be restricted by their nationality.
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
For every reasonable person there's a tin foil hat that thinks that Bill Gates wants to forcibly vaccinate them with a nanoscale identification chip under the guise of a coronavirus vaccine. Or that masks don't work and are against their freedom. Or that vaccines cause autism, or that the earth is flat, or that diversity is bad or Trump is not a racist. What a fucking circus. How could the country that sent men to the moon end up like this?
Plus, traveling to the US is not what it used to be. There are better destinations in the world with more historic richness and more beautiful architecture and scenery that do not require a stranger to check your social media activity, taking your shoes off and walking feet on a nasty airport carpet full of skin diseases or being yelled "Go back to your country" by a homeless junkie at a Starbucks (the latter happened to me).
[+] [-] eric4smith|5 years ago|reply
One thing I have noticed is that countries want tourism but are now super careful about who they let in.
Recently I wanted to travel elsewhere, but was unable to enter most of the world with my American passport. So I got another extension instead for 2 more months.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that some countries now actually are beginning to realize that their economies are down, but can survive without the hordes of dirty foreigners coming to their country. So there is just no rush to reopen especially with the medium sized and fast growing countries.
Nationalism to some small degree is definitely in play in a lot of governments these days.
And with the resurgence of the virus, lockdowns are being expended and reestablished in many places.
The reopenings planned for August 1 are definitely not going to happen.
No passport is any good right now - except in its own region.
[+] [-] jkaplowitz|5 years ago|reply
So if you live in a safe country and haven't been elsewhere recently, you should be allowed in. I'm considering trying this next month (I'm an American in Canada), and I'm not looking forward to airline or border processing, but we'll see.
The CBC article that we're discussing gets it right and wrong at different points in the text. The headline says "citizens", the text correctly says "residents", but a lot of the focus is on the loss of value of the passport despite that not being the operative criterion. An Australian living in the US is barred from most European tourism right now, just like an American living in Australia isn't.
[+] [-] RestlessMind|5 years ago|reply
Are you sure? Travel and tourism account for 13% of the economy in Italy and 9% in France and Europe as a whole [1]. So maybe the pain will be tolerated only for a short while before these economies are compelled to open doors to Americans (and Chinese too).
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-tourist-hot-spots-suffe...
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatchnyc|5 years ago|reply
I really hope when this is over we see a global end to the bargain mass tourism that's been causing so much damage to cities around the world in recent years.
[+] [-] intsunny|5 years ago|reply
Outside the USA, the opinion of the USA is not great [0] right now and it seems unlikely these bans will go away. It sucks for those of us who are doing our parts to flatten the curve and prevent overwhelming the medical systems.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/world/europe/Ireland-amer...
[+] [-] pb7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb775|5 years ago|reply
The "opinion" of the USA has never been great, ever since our country was founded. And yet we're the only ones everyone talks about. And our culture and policies and businesses and finances permeate the world. And people are literally dying trying to get in. And then we need to save the world from one of their crazy dictators and the cycle restarts all over again.
[+] [-] jcims|5 years ago|reply
>If Americans cannot respect...
>It sucks for those of us...
Who are you talking about here? You?
[+] [-] fastball|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|5 years ago|reply
I don't think the problem is refusing to follow the rules, so much as electing people who won't even make them.
[+] [-] bstar77|5 years ago|reply
Additionally, the majority of people in the US that travel overseas are likely to be much more cultured and concerned about how they are perceived in a foreign nation than our local Walmart population. An uneducated Karen wearing a Nazi mask ranting about her god given right to not wear a mask is not indicative of the type of person from the US that will be visiting culturally significant sites of Italy.
[+] [-] capableweb|5 years ago|reply
What? This is not at all true. Maybe that's a belief that many Americans have, but the US passport is not one of the most prized passports in the world, there are about 30 other country's passport I'd rather have before having a US one, if you're talking about getting access to other countries with/without requiring a visa. A quick check of any of the "passport indexes" (Henley Passport Index, Arton Capital Passport Index) will show you that the US passport is fairly low ranked compared to the top ones.
Hard to take the rest of the article serious when it starts out with a serious flaw in the reasoning.
[+] [-] learc83|5 years ago|reply
Henley Passport Index ranks the US at #7, by a reasonable definition of "one of the most prized", I'd say #7 counts.
#1 Japan only has access to 6 more countries visa free than the US does.
Edit: The US was ranked #1 in 2006, went down to #7 by 2010, and then was back up to #1 in 2014. We're talking swinging between 185 countries with visa free access and 191 countries here, so the top 10 positions change frequently.
[+] [-] mcrae|5 years ago|reply
And, BTW, if you're poor (like most of the world!), the mobility offered by a passport matters little in the short term; it's the economic mobility a new nationality gives you.
Besides, those passport indexes are ridiculous -- they rank them by number of countries you can access. But let's be real -- would you prefer an Emerati passport to an American one because you get a visa-on-arrival in Liberia or similar places? Insane.
[+] [-] Cenk|5 years ago|reply
An EU passport would vastly outrank the US passport in terms of economic opportunity because it gives you the right to live and work anywhere in the EU without a visa or much paperwork.
[+] [-] Teknoman117|5 years ago|reply
I actually went through the list to see what the differences were in terms of access between Japan (the top ranking passport right now) and the US passport. These are ignoring any COVID related temporary closures.
A Japanese passport will get you into the following countries visa-free that the US passport won't:
- China
- India
- Myanmar
- Pakistan
- Vietnam
- Suriname
- Venezuela
- Azerbaijan
- Iran
- Turkey
A US passport will get you into the following countries visa-free that the Japanese passport won't:
- Burkina Faso
- Central African Republic
To be honest, nearly all of the above make sense
- US-China relations are bad
- The US middle-eastern wars have pissed off:
- The US currently has sanctions against VenezuelaI am a little surprised about India, Myanmar, Suriname, and Vietnam. However, it doesn't appear that European passports will get you into India visa-free either.
[+] [-] juskrey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cscurmudgeon|5 years ago|reply
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf
"The most striking feature of the main migration corridors within and from the region (figure 22 is the dominance of the United States as the main country of destination. Most of the corridors in 2019 were to the United States,"
Most immigrants don't know or care about things like Henley Passport Index.
Access to all countries are weighted equally in these passport indexes. So I would say they are flawed.
I would prefer a passport that gives me access to say Switzerland rather than North Korea (but they will count same in all the passport indices).
These indices are vanity numbers (just like number of lines of code or number of papers published for an academic)
[+] [-] product50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iammru|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazaroclapp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capableweb|5 years ago|reply
Please do provide evidence of this. Most people I've seen being surveyed in Europe around tourists don't care where they come from, as long as they spend money and don't ruin stuff.
Americans, along with the British and the French, seems to be the groups that most people complained about when it comes to groups vacationing in Europe.
Edit: lot's of people replying, which is great. But none of providing evidence, which is explicitly requested in this comment. Would love to see some hard facts rather than people's anecdotes.
[+] [-] lm28469|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrScientist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeemaniac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g123g|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb775|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yalogin|5 years ago|reply
As a country though, the US has become the beacon of anti-science nut jobs starting from the president. For the leading tech country in the world, it's jarring how anti-science it is. The whole world seems to have gotten a grip on the situation except the US, which is still consumed with frivolous things like throwing the first pitch at the Yankees game , just because he is jealous of Dr.Fauci.
[+] [-] pdog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|5 years ago|reply
Maybe some of these restrictions will take enough time to be lifted... But, does anyone believe that most of the world will suddenly reject American money (for business and leisure) for long term?
I mean, just look at the "in-fight" happening in Europe where southern countries want northern tourists despite pandemic status...
[+] [-] ebg13|5 years ago|reply
So, in the grand scheme of things, is it really so terrible if the middle echelons feel a little squeeze as well as a result of political malfeasance from the people that they (collectively, not individually) put into power?
[+] [-] maerF0x0|5 years ago|reply
I think the well calibrated view would give America more credit for the role it's played/playing globally.
[+] [-] JSavageOne|5 years ago|reply
I know someone will say "oh you shouldn't be traveling anyways". I don't live in the U.S. anymore, I live abroad. I only returned to the U.S. because I had hit my visa limit abroad, and thought I could get my passport renewed within a reasonable time frame in the U.S. (max 1 month). How stupid of me to assume my country took passport processing seriously and with any sense of urgency.
[+] [-] tmountain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jommi|5 years ago|reply
So somebody who has visited a Schengen country even with under 10 covid cases a week (like most Nordics) can't travel directly to the US.
They have to fly to a country like Mexico or Canada (which are both still battling covid) and then enter the border after 14 days.
Oh BUT if you're a US citizen or with a resident visa, you can enter from wherever.
Oh AND if you're a student with in person classes, you can enter.
But me with a house and a job and a visa, can't enter.
How the fuck can this happen?
[+] [-] phyzome|5 years ago|reply
"U.S. citizens no longer have access to most of the world — the global South never had it"
[+] [-] m1117|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harimau777|5 years ago|reply
How difficult is it for a Sri Lankan citizen to get a temporary visa to come to a developed nation (e.g. for vacation or a business trip)?
What is the reasoning for this situation? Other than edge cases where a nation is a security risk or where illegal immigration is a concern what does democratic a country gain by keeping visitors out?
[+] [-] derg|5 years ago|reply
not complaining, just observing a feeling because there are more pressing things for this country and myself at the moment and as the article points out we're now experiencing what it's like for a fairly sizable portion of the world. I guess we are in the middle of reaping what we've sown.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
The limits on travel are interesting but overstatements like that really trickle into absurdity.
The US's role in the world is changing, but to demonstrate it folks seem to adopt a lot of wonky ideas of what it was.