Well, the US, for one example. To be clear, CPB has the authority – at their discretion – to regard non-monetary compensation as a form of unauthorized employment and to bar entry for that reason. But the practical question is whether they will choose to do so in a particular circumstance. I have known, for example, Canadian entertainers traveling to the US to do unpaid gigs for charitable fundraising events. They received no monetary payment, but as an incentive to come, their airfare and hotel accommodation was paid for. They never had any trouble with CPB.
OTOH, there was a news story a few years ago about a young fellow doing exactly this and running into trouble at the Vancouver preclearance point (there seem to be an unusual number of border horror stories coming from that area). He was not only denied entry, but banned from future entry to the US. The story made the news precisely because it seemed so heavy-handed and arbitrary. I suspect there may well have been other factors or suspicions involved.
This is not true. Some international airports allow “airside” transit without passing through border control if you are connecting from an incoming international flight to an outgoing international flight. Here’s Heathrow, for example:
Presumably no U.S. airports were ever set up this way because it requires a certain physical layout, and the market for international transit via the U.S. is much more limited than (say) a major European hub? I’m not sure if there’s a deliberate policy aspect too.
There’s what you can usually get away with and what you should do legally.
Legally, those artists should apply for the appropriate visa, even if they are only getting travel expenses. They shouldn’t (again, legally) be coming over as tourists on a visa waiver and then engaging in voluntary work.
I didn’t know that, and that’s pretty interesting. Looks like you may still need a ‘transit visa’ in some cases, though. Presumably not for most US or Aus citizens, of course.
I think that’s different - those entertainers wouldn’t have had any airfare or hotel expenses but for the unpaid charity gig that would presumably raise more for the charity than the expenses cost. IOW , the hotel and airfare weren’t to compensate them for working , it was so the donation of the unpaid gig didn’t cost them out-of-pocket. Nobody would say I was being paid if the cat rescue group I volunteered for paid for the gas I used to take cats to and from the vet , adoption events etc.
The cat-sitter is a different situation - they were planning to travel for their own purposes and took the cat-sitting job to eliminate hotel expenses that they otherwise would have had to pay for. The cat-sitter is closer to something you’ll see very occasionally , like the minister who gets a free stay at a resort in exchange for holding a service each day. Who is absolutely getting the free stay as compensation for those few hours of work.
I think you’ve misinterpreted what I was saying in a very significant way. Let me be as clear as I possibly can: these people were absolutely doing everything in a perfectly legal way. They were absolutely forthright in describing the purpose of their travel. They were absolutely NOT masquerading as tourists. They were issued B-1 visas on the spot (the designation for permissible US business travel for Canadian visitors) and off they went.
As I said, in theory they could have been turned away, but that would have been a pretty shitty thing to do to someone volunteering their time and talents to a worthy US charity. It’s a judgment call by CPB, and despite some of the horror stories we sometimes hear about, they’re usually pretty reasonable.
Wow, really? That’s not what I was told by my (now formerly) Canadian work colleagues (we shut down our Calgary operations and shipped them over here). I guess there’s some discretion involved for entertainers and such, but that’s very different from everything I’ve been told and experienced. Charity or not, entering the US can get interesting, sometimes even for citizens.
I don’t know about that. When I flew through Frankfurt we were forced into the border control line and it wasn’t until passport stamping they even knew we were connecting to Venice.
It might be a terminology thing - a B-1 is someone coming to the US for business purposes but it’s not employment authorization in the sense of “the Canadian location shut down so I want to transfer to the US location.”
That’s because you were connecting from a non-Schengen country to a flight to another Schengen country. European airports are designed such that flights to/from non-Schengen countries are in one part of the terminal, and flights to/from countries in the Schengen zone are in another part of the terminal. You only need to go through border control to get between the non-Schengen and Schengen parts of the terminal. Going from a non-Schengen country to another non-Schengen country you don’t go through border control.
Thank you for posting your experience; I’m sorry that you found out our (U.S.) rules the hard way. And yes, this qualifies you for deportation.
Can you please answer our questions about when and how an abortion/pregnancy question came up. This kind of thing infringes not only on your privacy but our civil liberties so @susan and I would like to know more. There is a definite effort amongst some people here to push women back to being second-class citizens and even the chattels of men and we want to know more in order to fight their efforts. I appreciate any help you are willing to give.
The pregnancy and abortion questions were asked by just the one officer. And that was a female officer—the one who did the pat down (not the one who observed it (the second female officer was actually a decent enough human)).
I still don’t really know why she asked these questions, but some comments I’ve read suggest the officer was hoping I’d ‘slip up’ and admit I was coming to the US to have a baby?! It’s something Homeland Security would have to comment on because I can’t tell you why they asked these questions.
Thanks Madolline, I’m actually reassured that it was a woman asking you the question and that makes me pretty certain that it has become a routine question due to pregnant citizens of other countries attempting to do just that. It’s been a popular one for women from China to score a birthright citizenship for their child so the child can immigrate and then bring family members over here to live.
Sometimes though, these questions are just harassment by guards and officers. We’ve got many conservatives fighting hard to put women back to barefoot and pregnant status and some are aggressive about it. So, I was trying to figure out if yours was a typical security question these days (as it seems to be) or just harassment. I appreciate your response.
Please make people aware of the U.S. rules on your cat sitting website. I’m sorry you learned the hard way. I’d hate to see anyone else learn that way, too.
My memory may be faulty, but I could swear that I did not have to clear customs in Hawaii when we changed planes on a trip from Vancouver Canada to Auckland NZ. They just made us stay in a fairly small secured area of the terminal, and we were not allowed to go anywhere else, not even outside.
All the major Canadian airports have US Customs pre-clearance. So you probably cleared US Customs in Vancouver before you boarded your flight to Hawaii.
Ahhh, that is certainly possible. It was 20 years ago, and my memory is a bit faded. As I was transiting directly to NZ, they probably did not do much, or make much of an impression on me.
On another trip though, I was heading to Christchurch NZ, and then on to McMurdo Base, Antarctica. I had a J-1 visa from the University of New Mexico, and was transiting through a small airport in Bellingham WA with my Canadian passport.
I gave the immigration/customs guy all my details and paperwork and he just… looked confused. I was not going to New Mexico. Yet they were hiring me with a J-1 to work in the Antarctic. And I was Canadian. Going to New Zealand. Through his tiny airport. He just wished me luck.