Detained in the US for “Visiting Thailand Too Much”
richardbarrow.com
richardbarrow.com
"How long have you been gone?"
"I don't know. A year, give or take? Who keeps track?"
"Which countries did you visit while you were away? Your landing card just says 'most of them'"
"Well probably not most of them really, but definitely enough not to fit in that space. Let's see... [followed by a complete list]
"What's your occupation?"
"I own a software company. It pretty much runs itself these days, and I just check in every once in a while to see how things are going."
"Is this bag your only luggage?"
"Yeah. I was only gone a year, remember. I find you don't really need much stuff in the tropics. I've worn this shirt 40 days running now. I think I'll buy a new one now that I'm home"
Basically, it's your opportunity to remind them that their job is to sit in a little cube talking to people who are actually out there leading exciting lives. And that their attempts to make other people's lives worse is not really doing a very good job of making their own life any better.
One day they'll quit and go find a better job. Or give up trying to make other people's lives worse, thus making the world a slightly better place.
Seems to be working. These days at LAX, it seems that one in four of the people manning those desks is genuinely friendly. And the ones that need this sort of treatment are few and far between.
I'm so sorry for not contributing anything of value to the conversation, but that's the funniest thing I've read all week! I've gotta try this next time I don't have a connecting flight!
Sorry, dude. My bad.
That'd be about as about as not getting art in the foam of my latte! I'd write a letter!
Therefore, if any wrath is unleashed on me it won't be because of you. Carry on!
It was pretty fustrating to have to wait sometimes up to hours (Dallas airport sucks) to know that I was going to get sent to another screen and wait anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours to get out, the people were also almost always overly aggressive.
One thing I will say though is there are huge differences in border culture. JFK is uniformly unpleasant to enter/ Houston is pretty bad too. I have rarely had unpleasantness in Seatac.
I've had these same people greet me with a big smile, ask me how well I'll do in a race (they had already met many people doing the same race) and wish me good luck.
Airports are stressful places and traveling in general can also be stressful. My opinion?
Being rude is not your privilege. It won't fix a broken system. It just makes you personally feel better, at the expense of another. We're all much better than that - or so I should hope.
The assumption that those who aren't out traveling are beneath him and deserve the ill treatment that he's intending (whether they realize he's intending to be abusive or not).
There have been people like jasonkester that have appeared in my life before. When times have been good they didn't inspire me, but were just good fun. When times have been bad, their example pushed and motivated me to get my life back on track. They may never have known what kind of good they did for me, and they may have even departed from my life, but I'm extremely grateful for the time they spent with me.
I really don't want to wear the same t-shirt for 40 days in a rainforest, and I really don't want to emulate jasonkester's travel plans; I'm allergic to spiders and nature! However, if I got stuck stamping passports or asking whether you'd like fries with that, I'm quite sure his passion would be quite invaluable as a reminder to sort my life out.
What jasonkester did can be done unpleasantly. Nobody likes people that say "nah nah nah nah boo boo my life is better than yours!", but I just don't get the feeling that's how it went down in this instance.
I've worked in service industries (of which I'll lump in TSA and Customs officials for now) and have been on the receiving end of it, polite or cordial people are welcome to talk about their experience, but then you get people like a friend of mine that would rather make them feel miserable about what they do for a living (the reason I can only take him in small doses these days).
What specifically does your friend do to piss you off?
With the TSA he likes to derail the process (unless he's short on time). Not just asking for a pat down rather than the scanner (if I gave myself more time at the airport I'd likely do the same), but to the point of abusing the worker rather than making the system itself slow down. Also, he has little regard for those behind him in line, and doesn't mind delaying them a few minutes so he can feel better about himself.
As I haven't spent much time with him (physically parted ways after college) the past few years I can't really recall any more specific incidents, but it was a reason that, in college, it took us about 6 months to become friends. I thought he was a jerk, and I was right, he just happens to be a good friend as well.
You have a great life. Appreciate it but also appreciate others. Being successful doesn't have to mean being a jerk.
There's no requirement for privilege, or even "living wage" to lead such a lifestyle. As such, I appreciate that you thought I was somehow successful, but by most objective standards, I was just a homeless guy.
If a border officer was rude to you, then be a jerk to him, not some random stranger who just happened to be in same situation to him.
But in actual fact, I was doing that thing you describe in your second paragraph. As it states in my original comment.
I have a friend in a similar situation to you (in terms of travelling/freedom/finances). It doesn't inspire me to "find a better job". Frankly, it makes me suicidal (I don't mean that in a hyperbole way). I look at how successful he is and I think; I could never be that successful. He will be cavorting around the world carefree for the rest of his life, and I will chained to a cube (whether at this job or another, doesn't really matter) until I'm unemployable and on the streets.
Getting a better job is nothing like what you and people like my friend have. You guys are in such a different realm, and although I enjoy following along with his adventures, it also hurts when he (and I hear a bit of this in your post too) can't understand that most of us will never and could never be in that position. 90% of new businesses fail. I barely have enough savings to last a month if I was out of a job, so the risk of trying to start and grow a business is much more likely to put me into poverty than it is to put me into financial freedom.
When I encounter a service worker, such a waiter, customs official, bus driver, etc who seems rude and snappy, I try (this is hard for me) to think about what they might be feeling. They could be having a bad day. Maybe someone yelled at them. Maybe their boss is cruel and belittling, but they can't find another job. Maybe their kids or spouse is trouble. Maybe the table before me left a religious tract instead of a monetary tip.
I realize your post is tongue-in-cheek, and intended to be funny (and it is). But it's also a bit hurtful. I can imagine that exchange, and the customs official is completely demoralized. The question in your hypothetical dialogue are entirely legitimate: they need to know where you've been and what you're up to. Your responses, although accurate, are made in such a way as to say "I'm better than you." I know you don't mean it that way. The same as I have to spend time away from facebook just because the endless stream of travels of my friend depress me too much, I sometimes just need to not know about them.
I don't know if you've ever actually said that dialogue to a customs person, but I only request you think carefully. A lot of people struggle with self-deprecation and/or depression. And an exchange which it makes so clear that he/she/me are stuck trying to pay the bills and work two jobs while other people are free and have it all just drives the depression that much deeper.
I don't say you should give up anything, or that you didn't work hard. I'm sure you deserve everything you have! Please just don't rub it in the face of a stranger who is lower class than you :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6277782
As fate would have it, my job description is the same these days, but I am in fact doing much better, financially. Still, it's worth noting that travelling the world doesn't in any way require one to be wealthy.
It's rare to get to see, paired tightly together, such a vivid example of what's going on inside the heads of two participants in an otherwise ordinary and well-meaning conversation (even though it's hypothetical, in this case). Both the traveler and the agent are projecting certain beliefs upon the other, and feeling certain ways about themselves that the other doesn't realize.
I don't know why, but I found reading this exchange really powerful. I think because it happens all the time for many of us (playing both roles), but we never stop to think about what's going on inside the head of the other person.
> Basically, it's your opportunity to remind them that their job is to sit in a little cube talking to people who are actually out there leading exciting lives
As a foreigner, this is exactly what you don't want to do. Pissing them off is a very, very bad idea. I've had many things said and done to me at the entrance to the US that I'd rather avoid in the future.
This is unfortunately correct. The border agent has final say in letting you into the country (regardless of the legitimacy of your documents).
I'm not a tourist, it's my right to enter my own country.
(I got in.)
Another gem: “No way anybody takes a 75-day vacation, I don’t even take two weeks.”
I for one do not understand their obsession with clothes. It seems to me that they focus on people with very little luggage.
In what world is it your role to judge a person for going to work every day to feed their family?
"Basically, it's your opportunity to remind them that their job is to sit in a little cube talking to people who are actually out there leading exciting lives."
I'm trying not to read that sentence in the voice of a young English aristocrat from the 1920s, but that's how it sounds. Mocking the working class for the distasteful faux pas of needing a paycheck to survive?
You are blessed for having been able to find a way to live a life of travel and pleasure while others have to worry about which bills they can pay, hope they don't get sick, and dream of someday being able to take even one vacation. Does that mean you are better than them? You certainly seem to think so.
"One day they'll quit . . . the ones that need this sort of treatment . . ."
Honestly, listen to yourself. Are you some authority appointed to correct the misbehavior of your inferiors? No. You're a guy with talent who drew the right cards, played them well, and was rewarded with a life others would like to have. Learn a lesson about humility from my grandmother who grew up in the Great Depression, and reminded me always to tell myself "there, but for the grace of God, go I."
On a side note, I see that you are the founder of Twiddla. Not that the opinion of a single user matters, but as a user, I will now look for an alternative. I have no interest in supporting such arrogance.
No. If you came away with that impression then you may have misread my intent.
My stance is that mean people deserve to live an unhappy life. No more. Nice people, as noted in the comment you responded to, receive no such treatment from me. Mean people get a fictionalized account of a person leading a much better life than themselves, delivered by a person who in actual fact is not likely leading a much more interesting life at all.
As a mean person, the theory goes, one can continue being mean and thus unhappy. Or they can start being nice and be treated nicely. Notice how class does not enter into it at all.
Is it not enough that you've managed to retire as a young man and lounge on the beaches of Thailand, do you also need to be treated with smiles and deference by people who still have to go to work every day? They have a job to do, and your abuse isn't going to help anything. At best, it'll just make the experience that much worse for the person in line behind you.
Empathy is not something that can be forced on a person, and a comment on a web page isn't going to make you change your attitude or think about anyone else's life, but then again, being a dick to customs agents isn't going to help, either, so I guess we're both wasting our breath.
I think Jason made the mistake of not clarifying in his comment that he only does this to agents who are rude to him first. Now his comment has turned into a new story by itself with a lot of angry comments.
I feel sorry for Jason because he seems like a nice guy who just didn't properly proofread his comment before posting and he's now getting a huge ass kicking as a result.
They're probably a little annoyed that Mr Kester has negligently not bothered to retain the first half of his ticket, failed to deep track of when he left or what countries he visited, and was too stupid to fill out the paperwork properly. They may even roll their eyes thinking he's a bit of a smelly pig not to have changed his shirt in over a month and wonder why he couldn't afford to have more than one.
I'm pretty sure they don't give a crap about his software company, or have any use for his product, either. They're probably pretty content in knowing they have the federally mandated power to just just glance over at the big guy off to the side and within three minutes, Mr Kester will be bent over a table in another room with a couple of rubberized fingers up his ass.
If Mr Kester thinks he's making customs officials feel small and unimportant because he has such an "exciting life", or that he's in some way "evening the score" by bragging about having been in the Far East for over a year, I must say that "this sort of treatment" is rather too subtle for thick-skinned customs staffers. They really couldn't care less where he's been or where he's going, as long as he isn't carrying any contraband.
If he really wanted to make them feel that they're so much worse off than he is, he'd have to add, "... unlike you, with your shitty, dead-end job, sitting in a little cube," or some similar direct comparison. But that would probably get him taken into the other room.
Finally, I'm willing to bet that the agents aren't regular readers of Hacker News, so they haven't seen Mr Kester's post. In this case, ignorance is bliss.
1) to keep people out
2) to keep people in
3) to be able to search/detain people without cause
I've yet to see a border that I liked. In plenty of countries this now extends to a certain distance away from the border (sometimes surprisingly large), even when you are not actively crossing or have not crossed.
My point is, those borders are still very real, they have great social, cultural, legal and economic significance, yet they don't serve any of those three purposes.
I used to live near a place where they frequently put the "mobile" control on an interstate in Vermont about 80 miles from the border, so I got stopped by it a lot.
Of course, I've always wondered about how useful the mobile controls are, other than for getting people used to a police state. They are not allowed to ask any US citizens for passports or proof of US citizenship; so they always ask "is everyone in this car a US citizen" and then wave you on if you say yes. When my friend, who is Malaysian, answered "no, I'm not a US citizen", they thought based on his excellent American English accent that he was joking and waved him on anyhow.
And if you're a dirty foreigner you have to have your Iris scanned, a picture taken and your fingerprints taken.
I've lived on the US/Canadian border and if they make a flip-book of all the pictures they took of me over the years it would make for a neat animated study in aging.
Actually, they are not taken. They are just copied. ;-)
I wasn't a Canadian. Merely a Dutch guy living in Canada.
Unless it's something new
Note also that people who are in this country illegally may have come here legally, and then simply stayed beyond the point that they were allowed to. That has nothing to do with border patrols, but rather whether we feel it's appropriate to aggressively police inside the country for people who may have overstayed the amount of time they were supposed to.
If you happen to use a navigation system, it might say something like "Welcome to Italy". But that's it.
Between .ch and one of the surrounding countries?
Between any two Schengen countries?
Between a Schengen country and a non-Schengen country?
What kind?
On an airfield, a shipping port or a land border?
How are you moving?
With a vehicle or just you?
Who are you?
A Citizen of a Schengen country?
A Citizen of the EU?
A Citizen of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia or New-Zealand?
A Citizen of another country?
What do you look like?
All have different rules governing what border patrols can/may/must do and the other variables determine what you're up against depending on the can/may bit. Hard to know your rights (sometimes the guards don't even know...), and your obligations.
Amongst what you could encounter:
- fixed stop-all checks
- mobile checks
- abandoned borders
- randomly manned borders
- nothing at all
EU border strategy is pretty messy. Even on the outside borders of the EU it is very much dependent on where you are what you'll encounter.
Some borders are so porous they might as well not exist, others are so locked up that even though technically cross border traffic is open in practice it's just like it was before or worse.
If you want to know about borders in the EU: become a trucker for a few years.
Also, come to think of it, the sleeper train from Paris to Munich last summer didn't ask me for any ID at all...
The time we drove from Croatia to Italy was a different story though (come to think of it, that was before it joined the EU a month ago, so probably not relevant.)
It's more of a tollbooth/administrativa affair, really.
For white people those open borders are quite nice and quite open in every sense of the word. The outside borders of the EU are for aggressively and inhumanly keeping people out.
Ok, if you are young, alone and in a train from the Netherlands to Germany (or in similar suspicious places) you might get searched for drugs but that’s about it. And even then those searches are quite random and don’t happen very often.
But the rampant racial profiling sucks. (One example of why that is the case and obviously unfair: I can be lazy and late and show up at the train station three minutes before my train leaves. I do that regularly. No problem practically every time. The police never once in my life stopped me. And whenever I did see them stop someone in the train station those people had one thing in common: they were not white. If I were brown I would have to think twice about arriving so late and hope that the police doesn’t see me.)
Mind you, though, I find that the security checks at a German aiport are heaps more comfortable and relaxed than anything I've experienced at any American aiport I've been.
During the last 25 years of my life I had exactly two run-ins with the police, one traffic stop (all I had to say that I didn’t drink any alcohol and they let me drive on – I didn’t even have to leave the car) and one time I was jaywalking (the police was hiding right at the pedestrian crossing, I had to pay a €5 fine).
Fly to Ireland with a stop in the UK (from a Schengen country or somewhere else)
You'll go through passport control twice
Passport controls aren't technically necessary between the UK & Ireland, but few airports in Ireland are architected to treat ingress differently. (I suspect in at least one case, they've actually gone backwards, as the domestic channel was repurposed for the US "ingress before you fly" method.)
If you do the same trip in reverse, you're less likely to see passport controls entering the UK, as most larger airports are architected around domestic & International travel - Irish flights are usually landed as domestic.
I'm not sure about the US, but they do have scanners in the subway and in train stations, but the scanning they do is lackluster at best. They did however once find a 6 inch knife in my bag (i forgot it in there) on my return trip from Wangfujing. If I truly wanted to get it across, I could have just hidden it in a pocket, as there are no metal detectors in the subway. I assume the xrays are simply there to detect larger, bag based bombs or to convince foreigners that there is actually security.
You need to travel more.
I spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina through 17 countries with my Jeep. The border that gave me the most trouble? Coming into the US in Washington (off the ferry from Victoria, Canada)
Also, see "Long Way Round" where Ewan and Charlie ride motorbikes from London to NYC, "around" the earth. Which border gave them the most problems? You guessed it.
Hehe, that's funny.
The one at Point Roberts is a bit of a hoot:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2011/08/three-geopolitical-odditi...
Another one like that. Only since the tunnel is open can you get to this part of NL without going through Belgium first (or take a boat).
For comparison, in many (if not most) countries (I don't want to name my specific case because this could derail the discussino) a border guard presented with a passport issued by his own country has exactly two options: 1) arrest the person on the spot (arrest meaning what it should, e.g. call the police and follow the law) or 2) let the person in. There are no questions, because the border guard has zero discretion in letting the person in. In general, a citizen of any country should always be able to enter that country, no questions asked (with the possibility of being arrested right afterwards, of course).
I find it both strange and disturbing that this gray area seems to be universally accepted and that outrage (like in the article above) is rare.
It's a common claim around here that airport security is mostly theater and that El Al does it right. But El Al uses behavioral profiling, and as you point out, that can seem as intrusive as any scan.
What if I'm a little absent minded and I already have a hard time answering without delays and inconsistencies?
The classification technique goes beyond just watching how fast you answer: It's a skill that takes training and practice, but can be extremely effective, which is why the Israelis and U.S. ICE use it.
And I'm a "rights-free person" (a foreigner). If they do this stuff to citizens, I can't even imagine what sort of authority they have over foreigners. You guys really need to rein in your government, this is getting insane.
You have no rights at an international border. And if you're non-white, you have even fewer rights.
I may be completely out of line here but why can't he request a lawyer before doing this kind of stuff? Why are they allowed to dig so deep into someone without any evidence of doing something illegal?
Basically, the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply at the border, and they're under no obligation to allow him to contact anyone.
Although it can be interpreted as such, it's not a sign of guilt, it's a response to the possible threat of immigration officers on a power trip. The vast majority are absolutely fine, but there are some that overstep their bounds or work within an egregious legal framework, e.g. the Brits. If they force you to decrypt your data (as they legally can in the UK), who knows what they'll do with it, especially if you've got proprietary work and confidential business stuff on there.
I'm guessing you don't actually travel very much.
(I just realized that this would be a silly and not-too-funny joke several years back, while these days it is both not silly and not funny at all)
I'm a little surprised they bothered to copy the hard drives. Usually they just do a full search down and then they want you to be gone as soon as possible.
It makes me sad, but I'm unsure as to what to do about it. I'd generally suggest removing the hard drive from the computer, but that's becoming more difficult to do. You can use full drive encryption, but then if they want they might just confiscate the whole computer. Beyond that, at this point that unless your paranoid your communications can be monitored with ease.
"Distributed Nationality" if you will.
Distributed systems is all the rage now. It makes sense on all levels of life.
My college at an arab civil engineers aid that the FO was normaly quite understanding about this.
Reminds me of a story just like that. The only source I can find now: http://www.muripo.com/2013/06/07/elderly-man-arrested-for-po... but I'm sure quite it was on HN.
I've flown into L.A. and Dallas/Fort-Worth a bunch of times from the Asia Pacific region of the world and never received a glance at any of my visa pages.
i) Was it reasonable to suspect this person of being worthy of a closer look? It seems like the answer is a yes based on his locations and pattern ii) Is the form that that 'closer look' takes reasonable? Causing someone to miss their connecting flight seems unfortunate.
Of course, the TSA is another story.
On the other hand, we do have a pretty serious human trafficking problem, so I'm glad to see someone taking it seriously.