Torvalds Becomes an American Citizen 654
netbuzz writes "Having brought his open-source work and family to the United States from Finland some time ago, Linus Torvalds has marked an important personal milestone by attaining US citizenship. A casual remark on the Linux kernel mailing list about registering to vote led to the community being in on the news. Torvalds has acknowledged being a bit of a procrastinator on this move, writing in a 2008 blog post: 'Yeah, yeah, we should probably have done the citizenship thing a long time ago, since we've been here long enough (and two of the kids are US citizens by virtue of being born here), but anybody who has had dealings with the INS will likely want to avoid any more of them, and maybe things have gotten better with a new name and changes, but nothing has really made me feel like I really need that paperwork headache again.' In that post he also expresses dislike for the American style of politics in which he will now be able to participate directly."
immigration category (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm more interested what his immigration category was? Mine was EB-2 (Person with advanced degree: Master or Ph.D). I suspect his was EB-1 (Person of national interest).
OTOH, there's jury duty... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I'm not sure the whole 'WooHoo, I can now vote in the US' is worth it - which seems to be the only other *practical* difference between a GC-holder, and a citizen.
Plus, IIRC, the US insist that I'd have to give up my UK citizenship/passport (although, from various friends, I've heard that the UK just send your passport back to you with a "you appear to have misplaced your passport" note
So, whatever floats your boat, Linus, but I don't think it's for me.
Simon.
Re:Welcome Aboard (Score:2, Interesting)
You're confused because you think socialism is designed to benefit you instead of the oligarchs.
The government uses a variety of methods to redistribute wealth from the population to the corporations and throws the peasants just enough to chain them to the system so that they don't revolt.
Re:OTOH, there's jury duty... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, jury duty is important.
Smart people are smart enough to get out of jury duty if they want to, but ask yourself: if falsely accused of a crime, wouldn't I want someone on the jury to be at least as smart as me?
Re:Welcome Aboard (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the degradation of income for 99% of the population [slate.com].
Re:Oh stop (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WOAH WOAH WOAH (Score:1, Interesting)
The INS has gotten loads better now that it is part of DHS but the transition was much much worse than anything.
I don't find it hard to excuse those who snuck over, I know of a lawyer who graduated suma cum laude and who still needed a specialist lawyer to help with the paperwork. If there is that much paperwork and that complicated who really can blame poor undereducated workers from just sneaking across? getting in leggaly will cost upwards of 15'000$, or roughly a years wages after taxes for these people.
Fix the imigration system, and give it some reasonable quotas (increasing them by merly and order of magnitude would not address the current flow of people, which gives you an idea for how out of date they are.), then you can complain about people crossing illegally.
Re:The Real American System (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike most of Europe where citizens 18-20 have to go into the army or other duty for two years
I call bullshit. Please enumerate this list that encompasses "most of Europe" that has such a requirement.
Re:OTOH, there's jury duty... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, he left to go to the United States, land of companies willing to pay him for working on things related to his hobby, because large segments of the economy have become dependent on him. Last I heard, wasn't he living in Oregon? You sounds like your judging the entire country based on Kansas.
moron. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ [undp.org]
ignorant people like you are easy to keep in servitude by getting fed the bullshit that is 'greatest nation on earth'. good going !!
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. Although on the plus side it is probably a good thing that people who actually contribute to society and progress are being talked about with such interest. Pity such attention is usually focused on people who sing songs and abuse substances but still manage to get paid huge sums for their dubious efforts.
Immigration. (Score:3, Interesting)
I married my wife overseas. Barely a month later we started preparing paperwork for her green card. It was a relatively effortless process. Going from green card to citizen was just as trivial, although it wasn't cheap and got even more expensive shortly after we applied. Often times it comes down to the individual you're dealing with. We have friends who were in a similar situation, but were married longer, and they had to deal with a jerk who gave them a hard time, partly due to them having a baby. But the process was generally the same otherwise. But this is probably one of the easier ways to immigrate.
On the other hand, an uncle of mine wanted to come to the US with his family and had to wait 7 years before he got the papers. There was a ton of paperwork, some expense and having to deal with lotteries to get a place in line. Part of the reason for this is because of people who come here illegally. Illegals aren't only coming from Mexico. It's relatively trivial to get a visitor's visa and just not go back. In certain communities it's not that difficult to get fake paperwork.
From what I've seen it's actually a lot easier to immigrate to the US than it is to immigrate to most countries. And, the US is far, far less restrictive about what you can do when you're here. In some countries, on a work visa you can't even get a mobile phone. You have to purchase one under a citizen's name. Good luck trying to buy a car and getting it registered, or owning property.
But too many people, Americans ironically, are intent on perpetuating this notion that America is hostile to foreigners. Foreign immigration, unlike anywhere else in the world comprises the backbone of the country. That said, I have no sympathy for illegal immigration. Countless people have made the effort to go through the process legally. And we have this huge group of people who have decided they don't want to deal with those hassles. So instead, they open themselves up to exploitation, both from those helping them across the border and those who ultimately decide to employee them in the States.
Even more offensive is the suggestion by many that we should accept illegal immigration and that we're bigots by not doing so. We can't deport those already here. We have to give them green cards. But, it should have a few conditions. First, they have to have clean records and they have to be able to find work. Secondly, depending on age, they have to learn a reasonable level of English within a few years. I don't think that's unreasonably at all. But also important, and this should happen first, the borders have to be closed. Build a proper wall and put national guard troops along the border. And the Mexican border isn't the sole problem. Employers who hire illegals need to be dealt with harshly. Not just fined, they should be put out of business. Period. We need to deter illegal immigration as much as possible while embracing legal immigration.
Torvalds did it the right way.
Re:OTOH, there's jury duty... (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart? I want someone who can look at the facts and recognize outside bias when it presents itself.
Smart doesn't cut it alone.
And yes, Jury duty is critical to the system. I think there should be a tax right off for Jury duty.
Re:ahaha ahaha (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More importantly (Score:4, Interesting)
It's because most of Slashdot works for a living. Right is for the owning class, left is for the working class. Unfortunately the left in most countries seems to be willing to work with the right for the latter's benefit, so I think I'll have to vote for Communists in the next election to retain at least a bit of my rights and freedoms.
And no, the irony doesn't escape me.
Re:immigration category (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL.
Seriously, though, the idea is to filter in those who are likely to be a net benefit to those already here, and filter out the rest.
So, you don't want to displace existing workers, or depress the wage base. The sad part is that too many immigrants "cheat" giving the rest of us a bad reputation, and the process, even if you meet the criteria, is excruciatingly slow.
It used to be that to get an employment-based green card, you generally had to be here on an H1B visa, which had strict limits to how long one could stay, and the processing times for the green card could easily exceed those limits. Once your time was up you had to leave, and leaving abandoned your green card petition. There were cases of people waiting years for a green card, only to have to leave the day before their status was adjusted, abandoning everything.
One of the things Bush Jr. did was eliminate that nonsense: if you were in the final adjustment of status stage, you could extend your H1B on a year over year basis until your status was adjusted.
It was rather like winning a foot race, and losing because they took too long to give you your medal.
The other thing Bush Jr. did was make H1Bs more portable. One problem that non-immigrants faced was the propensity toward horrible working conditions because they could not get another job in their line of work if fired, and some unscrupulous employers knew this and paid slave wages. This was illegal (foreign workers had to be paid the prevailing wage so as to not depress it), but fear kept many from speaking up. With the new rules, they could just leave. The benefits to American workers were that wages were not being illegally depressed with no way to find out without much sleuthing,
Re:WOAH WOAH WOAH (Score:3, Interesting)
I dated a Brazilian girl a few years ago who was here illegally, and it certainly gave me a lot more sympathy for the situation our immigration laws put some people in. She came here legally (I believe on a student visa - she was a journalist back in Minas Gerais, and was here for some sort of communications program at a college near Boston), got a job to cover expenses while she was here, and ended up pregnant by an American guy. When the visa expired, she stayed. I never inquired too closely how she was able to keep her job after the visa expired, as it seemed to me the corporation she worked for should have had the resources to track these sorts of things.
So now, she's sort of stuck between staying illegally and going home and leaving her child behind. The baby's father told her that he would never allow her to move back to Brazil with the baby, putting her in the position where she could choose to obey the law, or abandon her child. If she left the country to go back to Brazil even to visit, she would be denied re-entry because her visa had expired - meaning she couldn't even go home for her mother's funeral when her mother passed away.
That our laws are putting people in this sort of a situation is fairly disturbing. I'm sure it's an unintended consequence, but it points to a problem that needs to be fixed.
My opinion on what I'd consider a 'generally fair' system:
1) Fine companies that hire illegals out of existence. Make it so painful to do so that no employer would ever consider it, and *enforce* that law, vigorously. It should be considered the next thing to human trafficking to hire somebody here, treat them like livestock, and pay them criminally low wages. The management chain from line manager all the way up to CEO should be held personally, criminally, responsible for failing to secure adequate documentation.
2) Allow companies to sponsor workers from foreign countries to come here and work for them, under the following conditions:
a) Prove that the job has been posted for some amount of time in the local markets, and that you've failed to find a qualified candidate;
b) Pay prevailing market wages to anybody you hire, immigrant or local, for that job.
3) Allow people to come here as long as they can demonstrate:
a) They are being sponsored for a job by a company here, or have a job already here;
b) -- OR -- they are a dependent of someone who is being sponsored or has a job already here;
4) People entering on this jobs program must hold a job & be paying taxes (or be a dependent) in order to access public services - healthcare, education, driver's license, etc.etc.
5) Break the law in a serious fashion (or multiple less-serious offenses), risk losing your job and being deported.
A system like this would probably neuter about 80% of the "illegal immigrant" problem today. If there is no way to get a job other than through these methods, and the job is required to take advantage of public services, that will eliminate the lazy do-nothings from the queue. The remaining people who would want to come in illegally and undocumented would *probably* largely be the criminal element & security concerns - so you focus your attention on finding & stopping those people, rather than looking through a 30-million-person haystack for the 1 or 2 needles, or looking at rounding up the entire immigrant population and deporting them all.
Re:More importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, no. It's just because you're caught up in 12 billion being a really big number, which it is. For some perspective, it's around 1%[1] of the budget just for the federal Department of Education and about one third of one percent of the total federal budget. For comparison, illegal immigrants would be somewhere in the vicinity of 3.5% of the population and about 6.8% of the school population[2], so it seems to me that they're even under-represented in your sample. Most education funding does not come from the federal level, so its impact is actually even smaller than that.
Illegal immigrants in total are estimated to number about 11 million[3]. Even if they don't pay taxes (which I'm not defending, merely removing from the calculation for ease) do you really believe that they don't spend $1000 per person per year on average into our economy? Because if they do, they've already paid more in economic gains than we've lost in tax dollars spent educating their children. Children who are not responsible for the immigration status of their parents or themselves, by the way. It may be "leftist" of me to consider what effect these things may have on the lives of innocent children who will, in all probability, grow up to be tax-paying American adults and further work to repay their education costs, but I'm perfectly okay with that.
Of course, unless you're claiming that they are all thieves they are also paying other taxes even if they're not paying income taxes. If they're living somewhere other than under a bridge, they're either paying property taxes or rent that goes, in part, toward paying property taxes -- the main source of funding for schools. They're paying sales taxes and fuel taxes and buying things from those stores and restaurants that employ all those nice white people.
I'm not claiming that there aren't other expenses other than educating illegal immigrants. There will be health care costs and economic opportunity costs, among other things. I am stating that even if they create a deficit in terms of taxes paid versus burdens imposed on government, they may very well still be a net positive economic factor, even without factoring in the children of illegal immigrants who are now American citizens and will contribute positively in their lives to a very similar or identical extent as other Americans. Especially if we give them things like education so they're not forced to live the same conditions as their illegal immigrant parents.
Honestly, if I asked you how much illegal immigrants contributed economically would you know? Could you even give me an educated guess? Isn't it the exact opposite of your argument that they're an economic drain on society? Facts are great, but if you're claiming to make your decisions based solely on the facts you should have all of them -- including the ones that go against your own argument. Otherwise it's nothing more than emotion concealed as facts.
For what it's worth, I reject your implied argument that the only proper way of evaluating the situation is economics even though I think "lefties" could make a really strong case on that basis as well. Emotions and humanity may not be quantifiable, but they're certainly logical. In fact so much so that taking care of one another is practically hard-coded in our DNA; it's why we form societies and have instincts to take care of the weak to begin with. You're begging the question that they're one in the same or that anything that can't be measured is without (logical) value.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org] (the exact source you got your table from, it se
Re:More importantly (Score:3, Interesting)
Glenn Beck puts forward some good concepts, like truth, integrity, hard work, and believing in America. Unfortunately, he is also a liar and a hypocrite who uses most of the immoral smear tactics that he accuses his enemies of using.
I don't read HuffPo or Media Matters, and I don't watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. I actually listen to Beck's radio show so that I know what appalling stuff he's saying. Occasionally I see parts of his TV show (although I really don't like having his face on display in my house), and I'm usually pretty shocked at what he gets away with saying.
I listened to his astonishment at what a racist Shirley Sherrod is, and how no human should treat people like she was treating those poor white farmers, then for two weeks after that, he and his buddies talked about how she should thank him for defending her, and how ungrateful she was, while he rode his high horse all over TV claiming that he "happens to believe that context matters".
Have you ever watched his show on Net Neutrality? He doesn't actually talk about Net Neutrality, he strings together a bunch of "Marxist" plots with little to no basis in reality, and says they're what Net Neutrality is all about.
A few weeks ago I was flipping through channels and saw him talk about a patent that Fannie Mae supposedly has for an outlet cover that can only be removed with a special tool, and how that's a part of the cap & trade agenda and this progressive administration wants to put them in your house. I literally felt dumber for having seen it, because it makes so little sense in the real world -- but that was part of how he provokes outrage: "Can you believe they're trying to do this?" Then, after doing further research, I found out that patent expired in 2007 and was never renewed. Also, it was developed by an in-house electrician based on work he had done to protect the computers in the offices of Fannie Mae. The patent makes no mention whatsoever of residential applications.
Your Doctor is a quack. Better get a second opinion (and not from someone educated by Glenn Beck University), before he gets you seriously sick. We'd probably all be better off with Bovine University.
Re:More importantly (Score:1, Interesting)
That isn't racism. It's common sense.
Typical white conservative comment.
I am a Black man and I approve of this comment. I also approve of your "grandmother comment". Not only is the comment a racist comment but it also hilites the present spirit of a lot of white people. I call on Commander Taco to create a -1 Racist moderation so we can keep such biggotry out of these forums and have clean ontopic-discussion and RESPECTFUL for a change.