Stop harassing tourists who are visiting our country:
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors. […]
Each year, thousands of would-be visitors from 27 so-called visa waiver countries are turned away when they present their passports, said Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case. In the last seven months, 3,300 people have been rejected and more than 8 million admitted, she said.
I’ve already covered this issue here. At a time when the U.S. economy is weak and gas prices are at record highs, the last thing Route 66 needs is its own government harassing foreign tourists. Anecdotal evidence suggests that foreigners consist of up to 40 percent of Route 66 tourism, so this is no small thing.
It was obvious that security needed to be tightened after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Customs and other airport-security departments have gone overboard trying to show how tough they are. When you have travelers harassed in airports for carrying bottles of hair gel or fingernail clippers or reusable Zippo lighters, that is no longer security — that is a ridiculous dog-and-pony show by bureaucrats.
It’s time to end it, and it’s time for more commonsense security procedures.
I’d suggest US residents take a good look at what happens when they return home in the “non-US resident” lanes at immigration.
Every visitor is subjected to
– mugshot: it looks like a cute camera, but you’re told in a stern voice to look in the camera.
– fingerprinting: no messy inkt, but they will manipulate your finger on the fingerprint scanner to get a perfect set of fingerprints
– interrogation: you get a bunch of tricky interrogation style questions, not even cloaked by a sheen of friendliness anymore. Worse, they do this to you after a session of sleep depravation onboard the aircraft.
And what did we do ? Try to come on a vacation in a country we like.
Now remember your trip out the other way ? Did you go to a industrialized western country ? Did you get treated like a criminal for wanting to go on a vacation or a business trip ?
No doubt the mantra of “security” will be sung heavily, but is that threat that much different in other industrialized western countries ?