Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

This is horrific. Eventually the product will become so bad that, at the margin, foreign tourists will cease to be interested in it and take their (NZ) dollars elsewhere.

Though I've had a nasty experience at Canadian immigration. Once I was invited to speak at a University of Ottawa law school event but neglected to bring the invitation letter. I was directed to secondary screening and spent what seemed like hours there before being allowed to enter the country. At one point a Canadian immigration official said they couldn't find any record of the conference, but as far as I could tell they were looking at the main school's web site, not the law school's. Sigh. Ironically the event was sponsored by the Canadian federal government...

At least it wasn't 33 hours of hell.

Investigating suspicious claims when people arrive at immigration control is perfectly reasonable; if you claim to be speaking at a conference but they can't find any indication that said conference exists, holding on to you for a while makes sense. I hope that, even without your invitation letter, you eventually managed to put the CBSA agents in contact with someone who could verify your bona fides and they let you into the country though?

To me, the largest problem with the reported story isn't that they weren't allowed into the US -- applying for a work visa, then trying to enter as tourists when you don't get the work visa is definitely suspicious behaviour -- but rather that they were kept in jail until they could be deported. These were not dangerous individuals; they could easily have been told to go find a hotel and stay there overnight but report back to be deported in the morning.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened to a BSDCan attendee a few years ago when he was deemed inadmissible to Canada a few years ago: "You're not allowed in, but it's too late to send you back tonight and you seem harmless, so we're going to give you a 24 hour pass. Be back here at 9 AM tomorrow."

> Investigating suspicious claims when people arrive at immigration control is perfectly reasonable

Not knowing how to Google isn't.

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