Hacker News Reader

Comment by gst | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your last comment:

Had the same experience in Europe. I'm Austrian citizen, but live in the US. During my last flight back to Austria (via Amsterdam), the border-agent in Amsterdam asked me quite in detail about why I'm entering the European Union. Wonder what would have happened if I had refused to answer.

View on HN

From my experience, that seems to be the policy in Amsterdam. I am en EU citizen, but live in the Netherlands. If I fly to the US I can reliably expect lengthy and silly questions. Example:

Agent: why did you come the Netherlands six years ago? Me: to study

A: where's your student id? M: that was six years ago...

A: any other proof you might have?

and so on...

Most of the time it's not about your answers but about your reaction.

Cool. A random stranger asks you an incredible amount of horribly silly questions in an aggressive/bored/annoyed tone and they expect your reaction to be something else than "WTF? Leave me alone." If this really were about your reaction to questions the staff at border stations would be trained to look for more than "has a beard, looks around nervously" and the questions would be tailored to actually invoke some observable reaction.

Have you had training in what questions to ask in order to properly gauge a person's reaction to said question to determine the likelihood of that person to commit a crime or other undesirable act?

I would imagine in most cases the "WTF? Leave me alone." response would not mark you as anything other than a law-abiding citizen that's just annoyed with the process. They ask the horribly silly questions for a reason. Well, most of the time, sometimes you just get someone who's having a bad day or maybe just an overall jerk high on abusing his authority.

I think tintin is right - your complaint is that it's not effective, which is also probably true. But they just want to get you talking, and your current plans are an easy topic that at least are relevant.

As long as you have a EU (Schengen) passport, another EU (Schengen) member state can only deny your entry if its authorities can prove that you pose a "genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat". The burden of proof is on them. It's very likely that even if you have refused to answer eventually the border control officer would have granted you entry.

"genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat". Reading: they can stop anyone for any reason anytime at any place. EU is not much better than US. I hold Polish, German and US citizenships. Europe is actually worse because they think that they treat people better when in reality they are much worse it just doesn't get as much attention because it is not US.

Funny, I'm an American working in the EU and my experience has been loads better than when I go back to the US. Growing up in the places I have you learn to say as little as possible to authorities (ie, don't give too much rope to hang yourself).

In every country I've visited it's known your flight number, know your hotel address, know your return date, and if anyone asks, you are just visiting. Getting into specifics just invites more and more questions.

> Growing up in the places I have you learn to say as little as possible to authorities (ie, don't give too much rope to hang yourself)

It's very true. There's a reason that, when your Miranda rights are read upon a rest, they say "...anything you say can and will be used against you.."

I'll leave it up to the viewer to judge this video with a defense attorney talking about why it's never good to talk to the Police: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

(48mins in length)

How do you have german citizenship and two others at the same time? I thought germany was a one citizenship state. Or is it in practice that you can avoid that rule fairly easily?

In some country you are given the nationality of your father, in germany it is the mother and in the US it is the country. My brother has three nationalities because of that. I have two but not the US nationality.

There are now also agreements between some european countries that you don't have to drop your previous nationality when you adopt a new nationality. So I should get three nationalities in a few months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com