Suppose you’re a US citizen, traveling (legally, with visa) to a not-so-friendly nation such as Iran, Russia, Cuba, etc. And for whatever reason, you end up locked in a basement by the government or rebels/kidnappers or whatever, indefinitely. No family or friends who are aware of your plight, either.
Does the US State Department (or some other agency) keep tabs of sort on which US citizens are traveling out of the nation and when they are expected to return, and raise a red flag when someone fails to come back?
They do if you register your trip with the STEP program. They will forward your itinerary to the nearest embassy or consulate. But they’re not so much “keeping tabs” as “here’s this guy’s next of kin in case he gets hit by a [del]truck[/del] lorry.”
If you were a person of interest or on a watch list, you are (I understand but happy to be corrected) still legally able to travel, but I’m sure both your departure and subsequent non-return would be noted by one or other arm of government.
Whether not returning would simply be noted as another instance of jerk-like behaviour on your file or might trigger a search among the unclaimed bodies in the morgue in Havana is an interesting point.
Our government has been having a bit of a campaign to remind Australians travelling overseas that they are not your parents, and while they will provide consular assistance that does not mean bailing you out of trouble, or proactively looking after you. You have to ask for consular assistance and can’t really do that from the basement.
The USG does not check your passport when you leave the United States, so how could it know that you are abroad?
I suppose that the government could try to get passenger manifests from aircraft and vessels departing the United States and perhaps could ask the Canadians for the names of US citizens arriving by road, but do the Mexicans check the identities of Americans crossing into Mexico?
I knew a guy here in Hawaii a little over 25 years ago, a fellow student, who took a semester off and traveled in Europe and the Middle East. He went to Iraq too. When he came back, he claimed someone in the government had contacted his parents on the Big Island to ask them exactly what he was doing in Iraq. This was post-Gulf War, about 1992 or 1993.
Good god. The amount of work necessary to implement this, the amount of resources required and the overwhelmingly large number of false alarms would be staggering.
I can’t imagine that many people would want the government to keep that close of tabs on citizens. I sure as hell would resist filling paperwork on expected dates of return, then change of plans.
Most countries have exit checks for everyone, but there aren’t any databases to track who is where, when, except for — probably— those on watch lists.
Yes, every country checks the identities of people arriving into their territory from another country unless there is some specific treaty not to do so (Schengen or similar). The depth and extent of the checks will vary depending on the location and other details such as terrorist alerts (for example, right now France doesn’t check passports for land-based arrivals but checks arrivals by air even if from a Schengen country).
‘Checks’ - yes; but is it recorded on a database somewhere, and if so, is that data used for anything more than just a cross-check against undesirables etc? Or for a search at a later date to see when Nava bin Laden from Milwaukee flew in.
It seems like it is the same as in France.
In Mexico you go through immigration if you arrive by air, but if you drive from the US into Mexico, say, from El Paso to Cd. Juárez, you just drive through.
I don’t know what the situation is at the southern border…
You have clearly never crossed from San Diego into Tijuana by foot. There are no checks. None. There is a presence of officials (at least, they have an office: I’ve never seen any staff), and you could, in theory, be checked, but I have crossed there dozens of times and have never been spoken to by a Mexican official. If you go further into Mexico, sure, but not at the border.
Yes, the wife and I have crossed into Tijuana. We passed through a gate, a revolving door that locks with a loud CLICK once you’re through, and there was no way back into the US in case of a change of mind. We saw no officials anywhere. Quite different from when we reentered the US. Juarez too, just walk in, no one gives you a glance.
However, that is for day trips and x number of miles into the interior, I forget how many. 25 maybe? (On one Anthropology school trip in university, we entered Mexico in a small caravan of cars from New Mexico and encountered no Mexican officials. We were on our way to visit the northernmost Aztec site, which was close to the border, and did encounter a military roadblock eventually. Those soldiers had some big-ass guns. But after checking driver’s licenses, they let us all through.) If you are going deep into Mexico, you do need to register to least. In 1987 I took the train from Juarez to Mexico City and had to give some information to the Mexican officials at the border. I was actually on my way to Nicaragua to pick coffee for a couple of weeks as part of a program. My group came from all over the US, and Mexico City was where we met up to fly to Managua together. I had stayed overnight in El Paso with a married couple who were administrators with the program. The husband is the one who took my info in to the official once we’d crossed the border. The official never even saw me.
And flying back to Mexico City from Managua was a hoot. I and a few others were first off the plane, as we had sat near the front. So Mexican Immigration looked at our passports. But at some point, they got bored or something and just left. Then the rest of our group came off the plane and looked around for the now-disappeared Immigration officials. Those of us who had disembarked and faced officials just told our comrades, “Welcome to Mexico!”
A similar thing happened to me on the ferry from England to France back in the '90s. We got off at Calais and there was an “Immigration” checkpoint with a teeny psychological-barrier 2 foot high chain link fence where we were supposed to walk through. No officials in sight. We looked left. We looked right. Someone thought ‘fuck it’ and jumped the fence. Then we all did.