Originally Posted by
Annalisa12
I've seen a little girl of 4 ish travelling with an older man and the immigration agent had her sit on the counter and he asked "where is your mommy".
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
I would hope the immigration agent’s questions weren’t sexist and ageist, but I know the questions from border control types can be deeply rooted in the agents’ prejudices/held stereotypes. Having and using an approval letter doesn’t necessarily resolve the issues when encountering agents’ prejudices in action, but at times such a letter may help and at least get the agents to move on to something and someone else.
When our son was about three years old, all three of us (me, Mom, son) were queueing one summer afternoon for an auto-ferry from a Canadian port back to the United States. Son sitting on hood of car. A pair of uniformed Canadian immigration officials strode up to us and, without acknowledging Mom or me, asked our son probing questions: "Where do you live? Are these your real parents? What do you call her (indicating Mom)?"
Fortunately he answered soberly. In that situation obviously no letter would have helped because we were both standing right there, clutching our three valid / current passports. But the episode sensitized us to the unpredictable weirdness and occasional irrationality you see at border checkpoints and from then on one of us never tried to leave / enter the US with our son without a notarized letter from the other.