Originally Posted by
jphripjah
OK, let's talk statistics. According to this Wikipedia article based on data from the Australian bureau of statistics, the population of Australia is estimated to be 23,969,900 in January 2016.
Many residents of Australia were born in other countries. But if you scroll down to the country of birth section, a large chunk of those foreigners come from the UK, New Zealand, or Western Europe.
Pakistan, the 6th most populous country in the world, doesn't even place in the top 30 countries of birth for Australians.
Of those 23,969,900 Australian residents, only 49,770 were born in Pakistan. That means that 99.8% of Australian residents weren't born in Pakistan. Only two out of every thousand Australian residents were born in Pakistan. I expect the numbers for Australian citizens are probably similar.
My point is that it's quite rare for a person who hands an Australian passport to a CBP officer to have been born and raised in Pakistan. I have no problem with them taking an hour or more to confirm the Australian citizenship of this couple.
So according to your analysis what percentage threshold would be considered "reasonable" to assume the person presenting the passport is in fact a genuine Australian Citizen? Do you think CBP officers have access to such stats? I doubt it.
I agree with most of the other posters that once a valid passport has been presented along with other information and questions to establish that the visitor who they say they are they should be allowed to proceed without further delay. I think asking about their background is okay including their path to living in Australia. What is not clear form the article is if they took exception to that line of questioning and it resulted in the 1 hour interrrogation or if the CBP decided to instigate the 1 hour interrogation as a result of their sterotyping. If it is the latter it is absolutely not okay to delay someone for an hour due to their naturalized status assuming proper documents were presented and everything else was in order.