Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

I used to walk past the parking lot for Border Patrol at the Rainbow Bridge (US-Canada crossing in Niagara Falls), and 80% of the cars for the US Border Patrol had bumper stickers all over them stating that they were veterans. One of the stickers was even "Vietnam Vets Aren't "Fonda" Jan Fonda" (or something like that).

You could usually tell which ones were probably vets too. For example, during one crossing, the Border Patrol guy started trying to have a "sensible chuckle" with me over the fact that some guy had committed suicide on the casino floor (couple of blocks away) the previous day. He even made a fake "hand gun" to mouth motion.

View on HN

Speaking of Border Patrol, you can always tell the ones that have been recently rotated up from the Mexican to the Canadian border crossing stations. Long-time Canadian border regulars saunter out of the office, casually ask for your passport and barely scan it over, and ask you how your trip was before waving you on through. The officers that are used to the other border come out with one hand on their pistol, on red-alert, spring-loaded to react at the slightest thing.

It makes for quite a contrast, particularly at a place like the sleepy border crossing closest to where I grew up; 95% of the traffic through it was log trucks or Canadian locals that crossed over to buy cheaper gas at the station just across the line on the US side.

Unrelated to the article and discussion of policing, but how does money work in border towns? Do towns close to the border accept both forms of currency? Do people just carry both? Does using a credit card just do the conversion behind the scenes?

Some credit cards charge international fees, some do not.

I can't speak for the Canadian side, but I grew up in El Paso. El Paso is right on the Mexican border with another large Mexican city on the other side, Juarez, and a fair amount of travel in both directions. On the US side, everything is done in dollars. On the Mexican side, pesos or dollars both generally work. I can't answer how Mexicans get ahold of dollars -- it's just never been a problem I've had to solve. I would suspect it's similar to when I've gotten local currency outside the US. There are currency exchange places, though I've only seen them in airports, your CC does the conversion automatically, an ATM does, or you go to a bank.

> your CC does the conversion automatically

At a markup. This was 1% for Visa and MasterCard back in ~2006 when I looked into it.

ahlatimer gave you the southern perspective, and for the Canadian side, my experience says that a store will take your foreign currency at (approximately) the exchange rate, but you'll get local currency as change. As you get further from the border, a vendor will still take your funny money, but "at par": my $20 U. S. buys me $20 Canadian in goods. Which currently means I, a holder of U. S. currency, get screwed by 28%. That's the penalty for not finding a Canadian ATM or using a credit card.

On the U. S. side, it would appear, according to signs at the cash registers, that many U. S. vendors work in a similar manner. The registers signs disappear within tens of miles of the border.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com