Originally Posted by
johnnywho
Reading about the missing signature and its consequences seems so ridiculous when you think about the fact that over the past two years literally thousands of migrants have entered Germany without passports.
The coyotes told the migrants to throw away and/or destroy their passports, unless they had Syrian passports.
Every single day illegals are entering Germany without any documentation. They just walk or drive across the borders. There are mostly no border controls whatsoever on any of Germany's borders. People can enter Germany from any of its neighboring countries.
I guess the world has gone nuts.
Well for many years, illegals have flown into the U.S. in large numbers yet when you enter the U.S. via an airport as a tourist, visitor or business traveler you feel like it's a fortress and they make you feel like you're a potential threat. The reality is that in both cases there are rules and enforcement mechanisms that are strict - if and when there is a political will for them to be.
The fact they don't let Americans sign the passport upon arrival and being questioned by German officials is one of those bureaucratic absurdities that only make sense within the mindset of an official in that line of work.
If you start with the premise that an unsigned passport is not valid, you also accept the notion that the signature is necessary to confirm the identity of the traveler. Since the person in possession of an unsigned passport thus cannot be confirmed to be the person whose name is on the passport, their signature would thus be the signature of someone who may not be the holder of the passport. If you had signed the passport in the airplane lavatory, it would be fine, because for the offical it's signed and thus 'confirmed' it was you who signed it. But because they have seen the unsigned passport and a potentially unauthorized person sign it, they can't accept it.
The American practice of leaving the signature to the passport holder outside of a regulated administrative process basically breaks the rigid logic of German officialdom.