Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Whether we like it or not, there is often a kind of trade-off between convenience at a given moment and paying a price for exercising one's rights. I don't generally like it, but the trade-off does exist and it's doubtful that any one's going to change that by way of deciding what to do or not do at the POE.
I agree completely that it's a trade off for the person concerned to decide at the time it happens. The important part, to me, was the idea that someone should
as a matter of course/practice, not consider protesting or acting upon their rights.
Originally Posted by
jphripjah
Back to the racism point, it is the job of CBP officers to prevent inadmissible aliens from entering the country, even if they are bearing documents falsely purporting to be US citizens. That's why they question people. And, a lot of you won't want to hear this, but non-white people with foreign accents presenting US passports and green cards are more likely to be frauds than white people with native born American accents presenting US passports.
Think about it for a moment. 95+% of white skinned people born since WWII are citizens of the US or Western Europe or Australia/NZ or Israel or South Africa or some other country whose citizens are allowed visa free entry into the United States or entry with an easily obtained visa. The vast majority of foreigners who try to illegally enter the US on false documents are not white skinned.
Do you have any citation for that? Given ~25% of the US population isn't "white" CBP would be setting themselves up to fail if they started with the mindset you begin with there.
When a CBP officer sees white skin and hears an American accent and sees a passport that looks like the person, the chances that this is a foreigner pretending to be American so as to enter the US are infinitesimal.
The chances of someone presenting with a false American document are not exactly large, IIRC. Accent has little to do with it. Accents are learned.
That is why those people are not asked many questions about citizenship. Similarly, native-born African Americans who speak in an American accent probably get the same pass on citizenship questions.
Really? You think that? Even I give US CBP more credit than that for the underlying premise (ie. US CBP engages in racial profiling and is so badly trained that it's unaware of it) that you're running there.
Foreign born travelers with foreign accents who were born in developing countries where people have been known to try to illegally immigrate to the US (many of whom may have non-white skin) warrant scrutiny upon entry to confirm that they are in fact, who they purport to be and that their documentation of permission to enter or reside in the US is legitimate.
Most countries rely on establishing if the documents are genuine. Automated heuristics for judging flight/country patterns etc are also useful for pegging who to concentrate resources on. Judging via accent, skin colour, and where they were born is a crappy way to form a plan of interrogation at a border.