General existing world immigration/border notes

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

Post by Bootstrap »

appleman2006 wrote:Kind of feeds in the generally accepted thinking up here in Canada that geography outside of the borders of your 48 states is not taught very well. I bet there are people in your country that believe Alaska and Hawaii exist as islands just below Texas.
Yeah, some people do get Alaska and Hawaii confused with the islands just below Texas - they are actually called Canada, right?
appleman2006 wrote:On a more serious note there is at least a slight chance that the border guard was intentionally playing dumb just to really test out the possibility that in fact Bootstrap may have been an agent for some foreign eastern power. 1988 was just after the end of the cold war after all and border guards do use some weird ways to get at facts at times.
I think you're giving him too much credit. He didn't seem to know what a transit visa is. His questions focused on what I had been doing in East Germany, and I would have been arrested if I went into East Germany. I lived in West Berlin, which was crawling with spies for all sides, and he asked me no questions at all about what I was doing in Berlin, what kind of work I did as a computer scientist, etc.

When I say Berlin was crawling with spies ... I played flute and penny whistle for a Scottish Country Dance group led by an American working for counterespionage - he interviewed spies suspected of working for the other side. When I landed in the hospital, the guy in the bed next to mine was a spy studying East German technology. You bumped into spies in everyday life in Berlin. I've never lived anywhere else where that happened.
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ohio jones
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by ohio jones »

Bootstrap wrote:I've never lived anywhere else where that happened.
Or at least where they admitted it so freely. 8-)
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appleman2006
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by appleman2006 »

Bootstrap, your last paragraph actually helps to make my point but be that as it may. You were there, I was not.

I am just saying that I would never make the mistake of thinking a border guard may be stupid at least not while I was in his presence.
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Bootstrap
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

appleman2006 wrote:Bootstrap, your last paragraph actually helps to make my point but be that as it may. You were there, I was not.

I am just saying that I would never make the mistake of thinking a border guard may be stupid at least not while I was in his presence.
When someone is exercising authority over me, I rarely find it helpful to think they are stupid. Particularly if they have a machismo complex, and some border agents definitely seem to.

I was once interviewed by a Mossad agent while I was traveling to teach a workshop. He asked me what I did, I explained that I was teaching a workshop on object oriented database programming, he asked me what that meant, and I asked him if he knew what objects are in computer programming. He said he did not. I asked him if he had ever programmed. He said he had not. So far, no problem. Then I said, "well, in that case it would be pretty hard to explain it to you." Big mistake. That's when he decided to take me to the back and grill me for 40 minutes. He did things like suddenly speak to me in Russian to see if I understood, grill me on my connections to East Germany, etc. So ... don't do that.

This guy was probably a lot smarter than the border agent, incidentally. But not a programmer.
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appleman2006
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by appleman2006 »

:D As I said border officials are not really there to make our life easy. Nor are they supposed to be our friends. I have certainly run into those that appear to be having a bad day but I am guessing even that is sometimes a put on. They really are trained to try and catch us off guard and to trick any of us that may have something to hide. Since I never have anything that I want to hide from them my border crossings are usually quite relaxed but I am always aware that my relaxed state in no way guarantees that I will not be dragged in and given the third degree.

Sometimes they will play the bad cop routine and other times they will crack jokes simply to put you at ease just before they ask a leading question. I am sure that for every interesting border crossing story that you and I could tell and I have a number, they could tell a 100.
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Bootstrap
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

appleman2006 wrote:I am sure that for every interesting border crossing story that you and I could tell and I have a number, they could tell a 100.
Me too. Maybe we need one of them to contribute to this thread.
appleman2006 wrote:They really are trained to try and catch us off guard and to trick any of us that may have something to hide. Since I never have anything that I want to hide from them my border crossings are usually quite relaxed but I am always aware that my relaxed state in no way guarantees that I will not be dragged in and given the third degree.
I only once had something to hide from a border control agent. The company I was working for asked me to smuggle in some product so that they could avoid paying taxes on it. I said I couldn't do that. They insisted that I take it with me, and I asked if they would pay the taxes if border control charged me. They said they would, so I planned to declare the product, pay the taxes, and get reimbursed.

But when I got there, and went to the side where you go to declare things, there was nobody there. After a while someone came up to me, I explained the situation, and he said that they really didn't have anyone who could collect the taxes and waved me on. That one event was my entire career as a smuggler. I figured attempting to declare and pay taxes was the best I could have done, and didn't worry about it.

Actually, that probably wasn't border control. But I get all those people with uniforms at the border mixed up.
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appleman2006
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by appleman2006 »

Yes. I never understand people that will risk lying to border officials just to save a few bucks or even a few thousand dollars. Seems really stupid to me.
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Bootstrap
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Bootstrap »

appleman2006 wrote:Yes. I never understand people that will risk lying to border officials just to save a few bucks or even a few thousand dollars. Seems really stupid to me.
Apart from the basic Christian integrity issue ... was my then-employer really asking me to risk my own criminal record by smuggling goods to save them a few bucks? They get the savings, I get the risk?
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appleman2006
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by appleman2006 »

Bootstrap wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:Yes. I never understand people that will risk lying to border officials just to save a few bucks or even a few thousand dollars. Seems really stupid to me.
Apart from the basic Christian integrity issue ... was my then-employer really asking me to risk my own criminal record by smuggling goods to save them a few bucks? They get the savings, I get the risk?
That is the way it looks to me.
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Judas Maccabeus
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Re: General existing world immigration/border notes

Post by Judas Maccabeus »

appleman2006 wrote:
Bootstrap wrote:
appleman2006 wrote:Yes. I never understand people that will risk lying to border officials just to save a few bucks or even a few thousand dollars. Seems really stupid to me.
Apart from the basic Christian integrity issue ... was my then-employer really asking me to risk my own criminal record by smuggling goods to save them a few bucks? They get the savings, I get the risk?
That is the way it looks to me.
U.S. Customs and Border enforcement is not about money these days. It is about terrorism, drugs and agricultural pests.

Just watch out for these guys:

Image

J.M.
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