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Comment by unishark | Hacker News Reader

> It ceases to be reciprocal if you distinguish groups at an only slightly higher resolution: Chinese businesses like TikTok and WeChat and American businesses like Google and Facebook in addition to the Chinese and American governments.

This is pretty much exactly how reciprocity works in other areas like travel and immigration. We treat their nationals as they treat ours. You can see examples worldwide right now with travel restrictions.

And these Chinese companies benefit from the lack of US-based competition at home. Would WeChat ever have gotten that big without China's restrictions on US companies? It's not arbitrary to counter that benefit with a loss of access to the US.

Congress specifically gives the president the power to counter unfair trade practices by foreign governments. The president executes the laws, he doesn't dictate them.

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> This is pretty much exactly how reciprocity works in other areas like travel and immigration. We treat their nationals as they treat ours.

What? Which part of our immigration system is reciprocal?

Visa free travel usually, and special work visas like the deals between US and Canada or US and Australia. It's also used for retaliation in other ways, like when China revoked visa free travel for Norwegian citizens after Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace prize, or Brazil photographing and fingerprinting only US citizens on arrival.

although the Australian visa deemed to match the US work visa for Australians is available without regard for nationality. I think reciprocity is common, but many states work in their own self interest first.

For certain countries like Cuba and Iran, where relations are colder, there are "reciprocity tables" which give fees and restrictions for immigrants from there based on making comparable requirements to what their country requires of Americans.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/Visa-Rec...

Many countries are reciprocal to the US—ie, US citizens are made to face the same restrictions/difficulty entering country X as country X's citizens face entering the US.

The visa fees certainly are: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/Visa-Rec...

It's also a fundamental principle of the EU's visa policy: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

As an example from my personal experience, up until last year, Brazil required Americans to get a tourist visa. They also charged identical visa fees based on what Brazilians have to pay to visit the US as a tourist. On their website they made it plain that the whole motivation for the visa and fees was reciprocity. It stood out in my mind as funny because it seemed so petty.

I suspect one less petty motivation is to encourage the US to reduce visa restrictions for Brazilians. It wasn't actually reciprocal in practice because as far as I know the process of paying the fee as a USC visiting Brazil was far less involved than the process of applying for a US tourist visa (correct me if I'm wrong), not to mention an argument can be made that the fee on average has a lower impact on people from a higher-income country.

I think it is fairly onerous for both parties speaking as a US citizen who visited Brazil a number of years ago. Until recently you had to visit a Brazilian embassy and bring a postal money order as well as printed passport style photos and conduct a financial interview (to make sure you had enough money to leave).

Now it seems that you can do this all online, so ignoring the monetary component it was not any easier than a Brazilian person in my experience as a USC with many Brazilian friends.

10 year visitor visas for Americans were introduced in China after American granted 10 year visitor visas to Chinese. They also keep the fees similar.

> What? Which part of our immigration system is reciprocal?

China and the US reciprocally offer certain kinds of 10-year visas to each other's citizens.

>Congress specifically gives the president the power to counter unfair trade practices by foreign governments. The president executes the laws, he doesn't dictate them.

The Congress has increasingly delegated rulemaking to the Executive through various forms of Authorization Act that empower the Executive to arbitrarily dictate Administrative Law.

I wouldn't exactly rank Congress highly in being the rulemaker here. There's been no great change, upset, or active reaffirmation of the process in years.

There are no Chinese restriction on U.S. companies. Why do you think iMessage and Skype are popular in China? If FB/Google doesn't want to operate in China because they don't want to comply to the same law that applies to everyone, then good for them. There are no explicit bans on Facebook and Google.

>It's not arbitrary to counter that benefit with a loss of access to the US.

Xiaomi and Huawei competes against Samsung and Apple within the Chinese market. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, etc are just some of the big tech companies that enjoy a ton of revenue from China.

>The president executes the laws

The law specifically says he cannot use it to restrict any personal communication to foreign entities. So yeah, he has no right to do this.

> There are no Chinese restriction on U.S. companies.

Try accessing Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Google, etc...

Oh that meaning of ban. Like how the EU bans access to the Boston Globe and LA News because they don't comply with GDPR.

> The law specifically says he cannot use it to restrict any personal communication to foreign entities. So yeah, he has no right to do this.

According to the article he is planning to restrict transactions with the companies, not personal communication.

>Congress specifically gives the president the power to counter unfair trade practices by foreign governments. The president executes the laws, he doesn't dictate them. //

Those two sentences are mutually contradictory. Who has the power, the President or Congress. If it's the former, then he does dictate them; if the later then they don't give the power to the President. Pick one?

It is not contradictory at all. The parent comment stated that Congress has the power to pass the laws, which give the president the power to counter unfair trade practices. It is how the U.S. government (and most forms of democratic government) is structured, with separate legislative branch and executive branch.

So the president in your idea of democracy is given power to act outside of the law?

He is acting within the law, which is called the IEEPA and was passed by the legislative branch.

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