Originally Posted by
yyzvoyageur
I think it's the fluff and the unnecessary drama of the story that make it unbelievable to some: "She was brought into a small room where she saw a camera peering down. The officer conducting the shakedown...." Ooooh!
There was a lot of fluff in the article, but I don't think the above is among it. I've been taken in back before, and the description above is quite accurate: it was a small room, there was a camera peering down, and I was patted down.
Understandably, it raises suspicions when a foreign national doesn't have a round-trip ticket in an age of massive illegal immigration -- even if that person is an educated professional with a home and career, and even though Aew has a ten-year visa to the United States.
The OP should have known that foreign nationals on any type of tourist visa or visa waiver ALWAYS need to have a return ticket. Plain and simple.
Actually, that's not true. It's a requirement for a WVP entry, but a holder of a B-2 tourist visa is not required to have a return ticket. But if the immigration inspector thinks this is suspicious, they may have to provide an explanation as to why they don't have one. The OP seemed to have a good explanation - as to whether that was going to be believed or not is another story.
Unfortunately the fact that she is a "Thai woman who weighs 90 pounds" does not preclude the possibility that she was in the US for unlawful purposes.
Isn't this what the visa process is for? Pre-screening these individuals? Once they have the visa, hasn't this already been addressed? The times I've needed a visa to visit a nation, once I arrived it was just a rubber-stamp because the approval process had already occurred.
There seems to be a great amount of confusion over this issue. The fact that the person in question has a 10-year visa (which I would guess is either a B-2 or a B-1/B-2) does not automatically establish eligibility to enter the US for any particular trip during that 10 years. For example the B-2 allows for entry for the purpose of tourism. If she showed up at the border and said "I'm planning to marry my boyfriend in Florida" then this would not be compatible with a B-2 visa, and she'd be denied entry. Especially since the visa could have been issued up to 10 years prior, there's absolutely no way the US Embassy in Thailand could possibly determine if a potential future trip some 10 years later would be for the purpose of getting married, no matter how much documentation was presented about the trip for which the visa was issued. Similarly, if someone planned to come to the US for several months, it could not be determined up to 10 years in advance if they'll have enough money to support themselves, even if they were independently wealthy 8 years ago. Times change.
So, having the visa gets you over a lot of hurdles, but there are still a lot of things that simply can't be known in advance of arrival. I guess one alternative would be for the US to switch to a system similar to China, where you basically can't get a visa that's valid for a long period of time, allowing the embassy staff to verify your bona fides shortly in advance of each visit, but I don't think that would go over very well.