That’s an interesting concept. :rolleyes:
FWIW, I do run into the Border Patrol from time to time when I’m recreating in places where the dirt road network gets close to the border. I think it’s a little misleading because even though there’s no border security at the border itself, there is a fair amount of patrolling and surveillance (at least on the US side) along the roads that would be the natural connection points to any sort of smuggling. I think it’s similar on the Great Lakes where they don’t really bother trying to interdict boats crossing the border, but are more focused on looking for suspicious activity at docks and such on either side.
I’m not saying the border isn’t porous, but the chances of getting caught smuggling something overland (or overwater) aren’t entirely negligible, so having something other than the old wave-through at the official crossings still has some conceivable value.
I have gone one further and would not mind a Schengen style open area between all major majority-anglophone states – UK, Ireland, Canada, USA, Australia, NZ, with the only exception being arrival by boat, but that’s more expensive than flying anyway. I don’t know why we are not considering this.
I do, however, know why we are not considering an EU-style Anglophone Union – which is due to the factors already mentioned in this thread – that the other countries would feel swamped by the hugeness of the USA and the USA would be concerned about its security (not to mention lunatics who would be concerned about USA losing its independence even though we’d almost double the population of the rest of the other states combined).
Heck, we are similar enough when you compare to other countries that it would make a lot of sense. For instance the cultural tradition of owning hunting guns but not forming bands of warlords. Heck, they should join the USA as states and it would be the best of both worlds – a larger economic community for free and fair trade, liberalization of fiscal policies, while the social conservatives from each country are conservative in their own way so we could divide and conquer.
Perhaps because there are a lot of “majority-Anglophone” countries in Asia and Africa, and the UK has already received a lot of English-speaking but nonwhite or not-exactly-white immigrants from Commonwealth countries, including Muslim countries such as Pakistan, and that has given rise to a lot of controversy, nativism and racist backlash there. If that is expanded to include the U.S., our present level of nativism, etc., would pale snerk by comparison.
I looked at Kenya and India and it appears they are not majority Anglophone (although it is more than 10% and probably a lot more than 10% in major cities), and I assumed that any others would not be “major”. Although I definitely agree on the cultural implications which is why I made sure to exclude them.
The border is needed for the maps. If there are two different sets of laws, then the areas where each set applies has to be recorded. Hence a border line.
There are still “borders” between the European countries in the Schengen Area; they look like this.
Within the United States, different states still have different laws, and we have “state lines”. They typically look something like this. (For some reason, every state also likes to remind you to fasten your seatbelt and [del]for Chrissake not run over the cops[/del] move over a lane for stopped emergency vehicles on the shoulder. Perhaps those laws aren’t actually universal yet.)
State lines (and, so far, at least, Schengen Area borders) don’t look like this. That’s what’s up for discussion in this thread.
It did in the 1970s. Not so much now. And there are plenty of Indians and especially black people in the US already.
Well, former British colonies are countries where English is the language of rule and the language of wider communication – the people might speak other languages at home, but almost everybody knows some English as a second language, the major newspapers are in English, etc. Is it not so? I understand that India has even done a lot with English as a literary language.
When it comes to the threat of terrorism, the Canadian border is a bigger problem than the Mexican one, a U.S. security official says.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin said he is concerned that potential terrorists are exploiting Canadian loopholes to gain entry to the United States.
“We have had more cases where people who are suspected of alliances with terrorist organizations, or have had a terrorist suspicion in their background - we see more people crossing over from Canada than we have from Mexico,” he said during in his testimony to the U.S. Senate this week.
The remarks will grate on Ottawa officials, who frequently try to persuade U.S. counterparts that the terrorist threat emanating from north of the border is not that bad.
Last year, U.S. agents are said to have arrested 450,000 migrants crossing from Mexico, where drug wars are resulting in mass murder. This compares to about 7,500 inadmissible people caught crossing the Canadian border.
Despite these overall numbers, Mr. Bersin said that it is “commonly accepted that the more significant threat” to the United States comes from the north.
One reason for that perception might be the sheer number of people being flagged in Canada as terrorist threats, a practice that leaked State Department memos are now calling into question.
Three leaked memos, released by WikiLeaks to the CBC Wednesday, show that U.S. diplomats used Canadian information to place several never-arrested suspects - including one paid police agent - on U.S. blacklists.
In 2006, the RCMP arrested 18 terrorism suspects in a case that garnered 11 convictions. Yet a total of 27 people were secretly placed on U.S. watch lists, according to a cable from 2009. “The Canadian authorities have not arrested nine other individuals involved in the Toronto 18 case,” the cable reads.
Oddly, one of nine is Mubin Shaikh, a paid police infiltrator who was - at the time the cable was sent - giving public testimony about how he had infiltrated the wider group on behalf of police.
“Clearly it’s a mistake,” Mr. Shaikh said in an interview. He argued that most people who are on watch lists belong on the lists, and that he has “compete confidence” in Canada’s ability to safeguard intelligence sources.
A February, 2010, State Department cable shows 12 Canadians were red flagged for being “known associates” of Hiva Alizadeh, an Iranian-Canadian who was arrested in Ottawa last August on bomb-plot charges. Only two alleged co-conspirators were charged.
Watch lists are cautionary by nature, and compiled by authorities who work to far lower thresholds than counterterrorism police.
In his Senate testimony, Mr. Bersin also complained that Canadian and U.S. officials do not share “No Fly” lists.
Terrorists would be able to get across too easy if there was no border
The terrorists who pulled off 9/11 seemed to have no problem getting in from places further away than Canada.
How can we (the US) have a country if we do not have defined borders ?
Canada doesn’t want Americans to know aboot poutine.
Indeed, but if you have no border, as the OP proposes, you have no border checks, and so cannot do that. Which is why Germany finds itself on the receiving end of so many new arrivals that it has reimposed border controls.
That’s an interesting concept. :rolleyes:
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But it is a natural outcome of the trends that you have noted. Canada and the US have similar constitutional protections and refugee laws. So if a person lands in the US, they can make a refugee claim there under US law, rather than coming to Canada and then claiming it.
Essentially, for refugee laws, there is no border. Where a person lands is where they make the refugee claim, and there is only one claim within Canada and the US.
Isn’t that what you’re saying should happen?
See post #27.
I’m not saying that there are any invasion plans, but I do have to point out that the Jamaican navy isn’t as impressive as it was two hundred years ago.
I think the major stumbling block would be handguns. In most first world countries you can own hunting guns fairly easily, but handguns are very difficult if not completely impossible for private citizens to own. In the case of the US-Canadian border, Canada has long required handgun registration but handguns are fairly common, so the problem of unregistered guns coming up from the states has always been an issue, but a generally minor one. If it were the same thing but with somewhere like the UK where handguns are mostly illegal and there aren’t currently a lot of them out there, it would be a BIG issue.
I imagine this is technically true, but only because the minuscule threat of terrorists entering via Canada is larger than the basically non-existent threat of them entering via Mexico. Assuming we don’t count the drug and border war violence as terrorism, of course.
The threat of terrorists sneaking across either the Mexican or Canadian border (in either direction) is, essentially, insignificant.
Nor is having guarded border crossings a good way to deal with the threat, small as it is (closer co-operation between various national, state- or provincial - level, and municipal policing and security services is far more important than essentially random border surveliance).
Only if you reclaim Cruz.