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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
If you happen to use a navigation system, it might say something like "Welcome to Italy". But that's it.
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.
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).