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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I spent three months traveling through Central America and the stories I heard of the difficulties people face trying to just visit America are absurd.

It’s just ridiculous that Americans can show up basically anywhere on earth and get waved in and we don’t extend that courtesy to others.

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I think most countries would prefer to do it reciprocally as a matter of pride (for example Brazil started fingerprinting US travellers after the US was the first to start doing that to all foreigners), but in some cases they can't afford to put up barriers to tourism dollar inflows, so they make a difficult choice. Plenty of countries won't let Westerners waltz in without a visa -- for example India and China.

It ultimately comes down to balancing priorities - bringing in tourist money vs keeping up diplomatically.

Both India and China have realized this - India allows an eVisa and China allows you to transit visa-free for upto 144 hours.

> China

You can just waltz in to the Shenzhen economic zone (if you have a privileged passport).

A day trip if you stopover in Hong Kong - highly recommended to all electronics nerds.

Not true; US citizens can't get into any of the BRIC countries without a visa. China and Russia require traditional visas, India and Brazil require eVisas. In any case, you can't just show up in these countries like you can in the EU.

US/EU citizens can visit some cities in China for 3-5 days without a visa if you then proceed to a third country and only have 1 stop in china.

When it comes to tourist visas, its really all about how likely is a person from X going to overstay their visa in Y. This is why many places conduct interviews and ask for travel details. I know a few wealthy people from countries like Myanmar who have no issue getting visas.

Americans aren't at a very high risk of staying. That's the bottom line for visas.

True for Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Brazil... all of Europe mostly...

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