Daniel Stenberg, author of the ubiquitous URL fetcher cURL and the libcurl multiprotocol file transfer library, and recipient of the 2017 Polheim Prize, has been blocked again from attending a US-based conference. Daniel has written a post in his blog about his two-year odyssey through the byzantine US bureaucracy to try to get permission to attend a work-related conference in California. He has been in the US nine times previously but despite pages of paperwork, hundreds of dollars in fees, and personal visits to the embassy, no dice. As a result the conference will have to move outside the US and probably Canada too if it wants to stay open to the world's top talent.
Earlier on SN:
US Visa Applications May Soon Require Five Years of Social Media Info (2018)
Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl (2018)
cURL turns Seventeen Today (2015)
(Score: 5, Informative) by driverless on Monday July 30 2018, @01:27AM
I've been to all three. It is far, far, far easier to get a visa to Russia or China than the US. In my case for both it's been a pure formality, send in paperwork, pay a fee, and get your visa, and that was before the APEC business travel card, now I just walk in without needing paperwork. For the US it's so painful that we ended up cancelling the trip, since the pain of that was less than trying to get a visa to get in. The business ended up going to a European company instead of a US one.
I've heard many, many more stories like this one. What a way to run your trade policy!