Why is the customs agent asking what I do for a living?

[Sleel]

I once had an . . . interesting time coming back from Tijuana with a couple of buddies. E. was a naturalized American citizen. He’d entered the US when he was 2 as a refugee and election for citizenship when he turned 18 was a no-brainer since for all intents and purposes he was an American anyway. As a citizen, he’s got no green card, no papers showing residence status, nothing other than the kind of ID anyone would have normally; i.e.: a student ID and a driver’s license.

The border official stopped us and asked us a question or two. I was asked where I was born and where I lived. E. got the same questions, and he answered truthfully.

“Where were you born?”
“El Salvador.”
“Where do you live?”
“Now, San Diego, but I’m from L.A.”
“Would you step over to the counter there, please.”

My other friend and I were not allowed to stay with him and had to cross over to the other side of the border.

Thirty minutes later, E. finally rejoined us. He was pissed off and humiliated, and I didn’t blame him. I would have felt the same if I’d had to go through that. He was asked for a passport, which of course he didn’t have. US citizens don’t need passports to cross to Mexico or Canada. His license wasn’t a “valid ID” as far as they were concerned, he didn’t have any other citizenship papers since all that stuff becomes invalid when you become a citizen. In short there was nothing that they would accept as proof that he belonged in the US, even though he had every legal right as a citizen to cross. I’m not sure that the border agent’s suggestion of carrying a passport would have helped him very much since that might have aroused even more suspicion. It’s ironic that telling the truth got him much more attention than lying and saying something like, “L.A.” would have.

[Fretful_Porpentine]

I’m not sure that the border agent’s suggestion of carrying a passport would have helped him very much since that might have aroused even more suspicion.

Why? I can see how passport-less travel between the US and Mexico would be a useful convenience for people who don’t have passports and don’t want to pony up the fee, but I can’t imagine why anybody who did have a passport would choose to make the crossing without it. (I certainly wouldn’t dream of doing so, and I’m as American-looking as you get.)

[Sleel]

He didn’t have a passport. He’d never applied for one since he’d never traveled anyplace that would require one. Out of dozens of friends and acquaintences I have never met anyone who carried a passport on a trip to Tijuana. Feel free to carry your passport there if you want to. There’s a better than average chance of being pickpocketed though, so be careful about it; US passports are valuable.

[Tastes_of_Chocolate]

I’ve gotten the impression that there is quite a bit of profiling that goes on at US customs desks. It seems that students are high on the list of “the usual suspects”.

My sister, her husband and I once made a trip to Tanzania, followed by a weeks stay in Amsterdam. We were all in our early to mid 20s, and we all got a good bit of grilling before being let back into the states. My impression at the time was that 3 20 somethings, with that itinerary, were seens as having a good chance of smuggling something (this was pre 9/11).

My parents, who have been making that same trip for 15 years plus, never get that much hassle. But then again, they are in their 60s.

[susan]

I once made the mistake of flying to Heathrow with no checked luggage (long before 9/11/01, BTW). I was grilled, grilled, grilled, then my passport was taken away, stuck all over with mysterious stickers, my camping gear diassembled (including the agent looking inside my tent poles), and placed in an isolated waiting area with, shall I say, others of a darker persuasion. Which just proved to me that Jews aren’t really white, but that’s another story. I’m doing some backpack travel in Europe later this year, but I’ll be checking a bag with a couple of guidebooks in it for the sole purpose of not appearing to be under-laden.

[Anne_Neville]

@Cunctator

A friend of mine who’s an Australian customs officer working at Sydney airport says that they often run a sweep at work on how soon on any given day they’ll get a smartarse traveller (generally English or American) spouting the “I didn’t know that was still a requirement” line in a tone suggesting it was somehow original and humorous.

They actually do that? I figured they might (I was thinking about this when I went to Sydney last fall), but I didn’t know that they actually do.

[The_Chao_Goes_Mu]

@sqweels

I got popped for DWI a little over 3 years ago. I understnd that pretty much puts to kibosh on me travelling to Canada, but in what other countries (esp. European) is this likely to be a problem?

Seriously? I had a friend who was convicted of a felony years ago and he had no problem travelling to Canada. He did so quite frequently.

[Iggins]

My only difficult time through Customs was traveling to Toronto for work, and it was the first time I’d used a passport.

I used to design smoke detectors, and we have to have them approved by UL (Canada) for use in Canada. So, I was carrying on a box of smoke detectors on the plane, and these were a bit suspicious to the agents. I was escorted to a room and questioned for 45 minutes or so. This was in 1996 or so, but I recall that they were pleasant enough, so I wasn’t overly nervous about whole thing.

My wife and I also just returned from Playa Del Carmen, Mexico, and had a very quick trip through customs both ways. The US Agent on the return trip was pretty humorless, but didn’t hassle us.

[Cartooniverse]

I just came back through Canadian and US Customs in Ottowa. First I walk through Canadian. They very meticulously removed the moustache scissors from my toilet bag ( length- 2.5 inches ).

They completely missed the Super Leatherman Tool With Locking Blades Of Death on my hip pouch. :wally

Then, I stroll into US Customs. A swipe of my Passport and I’m through. Apparently at least in Ottowa, once you have cleared US Customs you are considered in the US. Is that possible? I landed in Newark and did not have to go through US Customs again. Hmph.

[Doctor_Who]

@Sleel

He didn’t have a passport. He’d never applied for one since he’d never traveled anyplace that would require one. Out of dozens of friends and acquaintences I have never met anyone who carried a passport on a trip to Tijuana. Feel free to carry your passport there if you want to. There’s a better than average chance of being pickpocketed though, so be careful about it; US passports are valuable.

Just FYI - as of Jan 1, 2008 - you WILL need a passport to go to and from Tijuana. Cite. IIRC, they’ve started to post signs at the border about this change in policy.

[Mississippienne]

Fun stories of entering various countries…

I met some American girls in a hostel in Istanbul who had recently gone on the Birthright trip to Israel. They told me about how they’d been grilled by the Israeli authorities pretty fiercely. This was in 2006.

A Serbian guy I met at the same hostel told me about the insane red-tape neccesary to visit the USA from Serbia. When we submitted his paperwork, he was brought in for questioning and asked things like, “Did you ever rape anyone during wartime?” Do they actually catch criminals with these questions?

A Japanese lady I know was pulled off a plane to Australia upon arrival and sent home because she had a felony on her record (her boyfriend had been dealing drugs and she was in the apartment when the shit went down).

[robardin]

@Asimovian

You just reminded me that we did have a minor (and amusing) exchange with the Canadian customs agent over being too literal. She asked us if either of us had been fingerprinted, and we both said “yes” (my wife was fingerprinted because she was a bank employee, and I have a security clearance where fingerprints were part of the application).

This happened to me, too, back in 1993 while working with a military contractor on mission planning software project that needed access to confidental digital maps. I realized what they meant and answered: “Yes, I just got fingerprinted 3 months ago… To get my CLASSIFIED clearance with the Air Force.” I even had some kind of card to prove it. Laughter ensued.

And for the record, I was in a car at the time with my parents and grandmother… And we were in the act of (succesfully) smuggling my “sleeping” grandmother across the border at Niagara Falls, whose US visa had expired and couldn’t be renewed for a set period of time. We arranged for her to fly in from Taiwan to Toronto, did some sightseeing, then took her home with us. We had picked that particular crossing because there was so much US-Canada traffic there and we figured they’d be less scrutinizing (i.e., overlook a sleeping elderly passenger). The dialogue on fingerprints and classified clearance was a great additional distraction!

…And somewhat off the record, shortly after 9/11 we got a wrong-number call to our house while we were out, and a message was left on our machine in what sounded like Arabic (we live in Queens, in NYC), with some English words thrown in – place names like “Toronto” and “New York”. The next day, my wife was at home and got not one but two calls from this person, who refused to believe he had dialed the wrong number, and in halting English said just to leave the message for “Ali” that they would “be coming in through Toronto in two days”.

Hmmm.

We decided not to take chances and called the hotline they were promoting at the time to report suspicious activity. They seemed puzzled why we would be so suspicious about someone coming to NY from Toronto. We explained that it was a “commonly known trick” (cough) to drive across the Falls passage from Toronto to minimize the scrutiny of border checks.

Unfortunately we had erased the message on our machine from the previous day, and it was a digital machine so they couldn’t recover the message from magnetic tape residue (they did ask).

We did a White Pages web search online after calling them and found that there was indeed an “Ali” who lived not too far from us whose phone number was one digit off from ours. We called them back to report this and they said simply, “Yes, we know. Thank you for calling.”

I know that the most likely scenario was that we caused a lot of trouble for someone who probably wasn’t up to anything other than an unlucky confluence of ethnicity and timeframe of international travel plans… But we really didn’t feel like we could take that 0.01% chance that we had picked up on something truly dangerous.

Now do you feel a bit more sympathetic for the Canadian border patrol people?

(And to all you Buffalo/Toronto people who have been getting hugely hassled at the US border since 9/11… Sorry, in some small way I may be personally responsible)