General existing world immigration/border notes

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
temporal1
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General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by temporal1 »

General existing-current-impending world immigration notes.
(Just facts about how-things-are.)

This is a spin-off thread from mike's topic -
"The ideal immigration/border policy"
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=331

mike's thread, page 1:
lesterb wrote:Okay, in light of the last several posts, here are the feelings of a Canadian.

We live about 45 minutes from the US border. I have, over the years, been asked various times to attend meetings in the US. Sometimes this involved speaking there. Often it meant that my expenses were paid, and sometimes even my time.

Crossing the border was always an issue, until all of a sudden I started just getting waved through, almost.

I had been called in for secondary inspection at the airport. Did the supervisor put a note on my profile? I don't know.

But now I have no idea what to expect.
What are the chances of getting turned back?
According to what I've been reading it could be a good possibility.
in the past, i crossed the Canadian border a few times, before and after 9-11-2001, and the resulting U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Also, the Mexican border, but, not for many years; we had one flight to Europe in 1989-ish.) never on business. Our son traveled to Brazil once, 2010-ish.

No question, 9-11-2001 changed international travel.
possibly most on this forum know more than i do about crossing borders/international travel, some know a lot.

one "fact" i recall about leaving the U.S. always was:
it's easy to leave, possibly not so easy to re-enter.

for neophytes, this can be quite shocking.
i believe it's mostly about having required inoculations (these vary, depending on the itinerary) - and, having proper documentation, passports, papers to document inoculations, and so on.
the U.S. being a "nation of laws." :)

Canada and Mexico and all other countries are also: nations of laws.
when crossing borders, it's important to know ahead of time what to expect, leaving+returning.


these days, the U.S. Department of State has lots of online travel information, including travel warnings .. frequent travelers are well aware? .. this page was helpful when our son traveled to Brazil, he was naive, he had a lot to learn to prepare. we studied this gov page (and much more.)
https://www.state.gov/travel/

lester, regarding your question about current potential problems at the U.S./Canadian border,
in recent years, i've had similar misgivings from this side, having read a few reports like this one, below, about U.S. citizens detained in Canada; these, pro-life activists, another, possibly a traditional family proponent:
LaBarbera in Canada - 2014
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/break ... -in-canada

will my internet opinions on pro-life and traditional marriage, parents' rights, and so on, cause me trouble if i happen to visit Canada? i read, Canada protects and defends her borders (as countries do.)

or, are we both subject to political hype? maybe some of both? :?

laws change, governments change, we can't expect to cross borders "as we always did," just because we did. we don't enjoy losing personal freedoms, but, we can.

This thread isn't about what we want immigration/border policies to be,
but, simply, what are policies?
:)
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Most or all of this drama, humiliation, wasted taxpayer money could be spared -
with even modest attempt at presenting balanced facts from the start.


”We’re all just walking each other home.”
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Bootstrap
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

I finally found out what happens when you check the box that says you have been on a farm in Nicaragua walking around in places where you may have stepped on manure.

The guy took me aside, took a sample of the bottom of my shoes for scientific tracking purposes, and washed my shoes off really well with a rag and some alcohol. Took about 5 minutes. No big deal.
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Neto
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Neto »

I have been in & out of the USA & Brazil on many occasions, & crossed into & back between Brazil & Bolivia two times. The most delayed time was once leaving the USA for Brazil, when I had a well pump cylinder in my checked luggage. I suppose it looked like a bomb, and they were very concerned that they could not see all the way through it. Next time I would disassemble it (pulling the piston out of the cylinder, which requires tools). It may have been the same time, but they were also once very puzzled when I had a solid rubber tire in my suitcase (for a 3-point mower). I told them what it was when it showed up as a huge mass in their scan, and they looked like they didn't believe me. When the lady opened the suit case & saw that it was, indeed, a solid rubber tire, she just looked at me in puzzlement and said, "It's a tire....". Yes, I thought, That's what I told you. (Missionaries take the strangest things in their luggage. I wasn't questioned about it, but I also once took one of those hand-crank drill presses from the 1800's. It's made of massive cast iron, so was really heavy, but was a great improvement to my shop in the village, where we had no electricity. It is still there, mounted to the back wall of the palm & thatch hut where the mower is stored.)
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Wade »

My father-in-law got pulled aside recently flying from the US into Canada.
They showed him a picture of the X-ray from his luggage and asked him about the pipe bomb in his luggage... :shock:
He was puzzled? :oops:
He told them he is a plumber and it looked like some pieces of pipe put together that maybe his son slipped into his luggage?
They asked more questions and prodded and then hesitatingly pulled out a couple pieces of pipe threaded together with some couplings... Laughed and then let him go. :lol:
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

Wade wrote:My father-in-law got pulled aside recently flying from the US into Canada.
They showed him a picture of the X-ray from his luggage and asked him about the pipe bomb in his luggage... :shock:
He was puzzled? :oops:
He told them he is a plumber and it looked like some pieces of pipe put together that maybe his son slipped into his luggage?
They asked more questions and prodded and then hesitatingly pulled out a couple pieces of pipe threaded together with some couplings... Laughed and then let him go. :lol:
I had a similar experience because I have a wooden flute head that I keep in a sock in a piece of PVC plumbing with caps on each end. I put my bag into the X-ray machine, and they stopped the machine as personnel gathered around it. Eventually, I realized something was going on as more and more people gathered. I looked up where I had come from and saw a line of guards. I looked down where I would walk out toward the airport, and there was another line of guards. Then I heard a soft voice near the machine say, "code red".

After a few minutes, someone looking very senior showed up, talked to the people behind the machine, and asked me, "is there anything that could look like a pipe bomb in your luggage? I said, "Could it be a wooden flute head in a piece of PVC pipe"? He said it couldn't be a flute head. Then he asked if he could open my luggage. "Of course." He opened it, reached down, and picked up the flute head in the length of pipe. He asked if he could open it. I said sure, but I'd like to tell him how, because it's fragile and I didn't want him to break it. That really alarmed them. But he agreed to let me tell him how to open it, followed my instructions, and produced .... voila ... a wooden flute head. And a large crowd of airport personnel sighed a collective sigh of relief.

I don't put that in my carry-on anymore.
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by ohio jones »

Only once have I had a delay entering Canada at a land border, but that time they asked me to park and go inside, where they asked a bunch of questions and called ahead to make sure I really did have a hotel reservation. Meanwhile the car was searched by the K9 unit. No idea what they were looking for, but they overlooked the one thing that might have tipped them off I was giving truthful-but-incomplete answers.

Now that I have Global Entry, flying back to the US is much easier. No more long lines for passport control; most times (without checked luggage) it takes 10-15 minutes from the door of the plane to the door of the terminal, or the security line for a connecting flight, and most of that is walking.
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

For a darker story - this one during the Obama Administration - see this story of families driving from the States to a wedding in Toronto:

My Detainment Story or: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate Border Agents

Things really can get out of hand. The US Customs and Border Protection agency does not have the same level of protection for people's rights as other law enforcement agencies, and they sometimes do things to citizens that seem unmotivated and scary.
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Josh »

Bootstrap wrote:For a darker story - this one during the Obama Administration - see this story of families driving from the States to a wedding in Toronto:

My Detainment Story or: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate Border Agents

Things really can get out of hand. The US Customs and Border Protection agency does not have the same level of protection for people's rights as other law enforcement agencies, and they sometimes do things to citizens that seem unmotivated and scary.
I suspect she got detained because of her past involvement with various rebel groups in Libya.
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

Josh wrote:
Bootstrap wrote:For a darker story - this one during the Obama Administration - see this story of families driving from the States to a wedding in Toronto:

My Detainment Story or: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Safe in My Own Country and Hate Border Agents

Things really can get out of hand. The US Customs and Border Protection agency does not have the same level of protection for people's rights as other law enforcement agencies, and they sometimes do things to citizens that seem unmotivated and scary.
I suspect she got detained because of her past involvement with various rebel groups in Libya.
Because she is a reporter who has reported on these groups and other groups? That's all quite public. And if we harass people who know the language and culture, how will we ever get good reporting? Or are you claiming something darker? They apparently didn't have anything to charge her with. They could easily have investigated these same things without holding her and her family captive. She felt secure enough in her facts to publish this story.

Did you listen to the segment? Do you like the way the border patrol treated several families driving, separately and from different states, to a wedding in Toronto? Do you like the way they treated the children? Do you think people should have the right to make a phone call and let people know where they are so they don't just disappear without a trace? What rights do you think people should have at the border?
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by haithabu »

Some rights, I suppose, but unquestioned entry is not one of them.

I have been held up at the border, sometimes for no reason that I could see unless it was the border officer's spidey sense, but I always considered it as the price of admission.
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