I have been to dozens of countries that don’t exit stamp. The Caymans, most recently.
Moderator Note
This suggestion is so absurd (especially since as has been noted there are no flights from West Africa to the US) that I assume it must be sarcastic. In order to avoid derailing this thread into a debate, please refrain from such remarks unless you make your intent clear.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The seven African countries I have been to all stamped on entry and exit, and mostly had honking big visa pages.
Flight bans will destroy the aid effort, which will only lead to a bigger problem in the end.
They also encourage people to dodge regulations, which will hurt efforts to trace contacts.
While your average Joe going to Cancun doesn’t have two passports, a lot of the people going in and out of the affected area are either on official travel (two passports), duel citizens (two passports) or are emergency response folks (who frequently have two passports to facilitate getting visas when they have back-to-back travel.) it’s not that rare among people who travel to distant and dangerous places.
When I tried to get my exit stamp in Mali, the official was sleeping. He woke up when I reached the desk, looked me straight in the eye, let out a yawn and stretched…and then stood up, turned around, and walked right out of the room without a word.
Yeah, but visa pages just say you might have been there at some point.
On the other hand, when I left both Zaire and Nigeria a bribe was demanded for the exit stamp. (The implied threat was that you wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country without it.) I’m sure it would have provoked considerable confusion if I agreed not to have it stamped!
If there’s a travel ban, a current visa is certainly going to provoke interest in your recent travels.
True. And since everyone entry-stamps it was more of a nitpick than a practical consideration.
Nitpicks: there is a triweekly oilfield charter (Google “Houston Express”) direct Bush Intercontinental-Luanda. The caveats are that the flight is not available to the general public and Angola is not (yet) part of the current Ebola outbreak, although there have been previous outbreaks in the country’s north.
I believe it’s also possible to fly direct from one or more West Africa points to Brazil, so one could connect the States that way. Otherwise, carry on.
Angola’s not in “West Africa”, though it may be in “west Africa”. West Africa is the bit that sticks out into the Atlantic (except the Mediterreanean states), not all of “western Africa”.
Colombia and St. Lucia also have travel bans.
Here’s my question - why isn’t western Europe in a panic about ebola the same way we seem to be here in the US? Has any country there been considering a travel ban for people flying-in from western Africa?
Well, OK then.
It would be like someone saying that California is part of the American South. Yes, it is south of Oregon and Washington. But it isn’t part of “The South”. It’s in a whole different part of the country altogether, which isn’t “The South”.
“West Africa” is a lot farther west than Angola. Angola is in Southern Africa, not West Africa. Yes, it happens to be in the western part of Southern Africa, just like California is in the southern part of Western America but is not in the western part of Southern America–that would be Texas. Or East Texas. East Texas is Southern, West Texas isn’t.
How easy is it for a citizen of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to gain admittance to the US at an airport without a visa?
At least this is a far more logical a theory than earnestly poised by someone in the comments section of a travel ban article yesterday. They were very sure that if we ban flights from those countries people are just going to take the train from west Africa to the US and that would take much longer so more of their fellow travelers would be put at risk if they were infected.
Very few people from affected countries hold US visas, and airlines generally check before boarding. The people who would be most affected by a travel ban would be aid workers. As goodhearted as they may be, they can be pretty wily and aren’t going to stay put in unsafe conditions because some bureaucrat said they could.
Furthermore, they know they pose less risk to the people around them in the US than they do in Liberia.
Not easy, unless they also have a passport from some other country with better entry rights.
But a ban on Guinean, etc citizens is not at all thing as a travel ban on people who have been to Guinea, etc.
Last time I checked, Brazil was not in North America, which was the region I mentioned in my post.
Last time we arrived in Paris, the douanier regarded our proffered passports with Gallic indifference and waved us through. Same on the way out.
Couldn’t tell from our passports that we’d been in France.
Where were you arriving from: Conakry, or New York? I bet if you were on a flight from Africa, the French authorities would have paid very careful attention to whether you had proper visas or not.
They had the option to pay no attention. If there is as global public health crisis and international quarantines are in force, they certainly could pay attention. And would.