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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

one piece that is omitted from this is how the border is enforced. From the looks of it, unless you’re looking at becoming employed here they don’t really check your citizenship. That’s a win in my book.

Reminds me that when I was a kid you could travel to / from Canada without a passport (only nation with that privilege if I recall correctly) and now you can’t. I recall no real good reasoning for it other than the DOH wanted to close the loop hole, without any real evidence it was a cause of issues

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This is completely normal inside the EU. You barely notice you're in another country sometimes.

It's gone the opposite way between US and Canada since 9/11. Used to be able to cross the border with just a driver's license. Now you need a passport and the border agents are often incredibly hostile.

As a result I make a habit of not going to the Hostile States of Overarmed Americans despite it being only an hour away. The people are super nice, the government... not so much.

If it makes you feel any better, the government isn’t very nice to its own citizens either.

>Now you need a passport and the border agents are often incredibly hostile.

Are the Canadian agents hostile as well, or only the American ones?

>The people are super nice, the government... not so much.

The Americans that tend to go into law enforcement jobs are not super nice people, quite the opposite really. It's really eye-opening going to other countries outside the US and interacting with cops and other law enforcement agents (including airport security and customs agents) and seeing just how differently you're treated. Even as a US citizen, entering the US is not a fun experience at all.

The Canadian agents are comically friendly, but that's because I'm coming back into my own country, where I'm a citizen, and, y'know, they have to let me in. Cuz it's my country. I hear from Americans that they're often not very nice, but it sounds not nearly as terrible as "please stand in this room for an hour AND DON'T TOUCH YOUR PHONE while we tear your car apart for no reason because, I dunno... a hunch or something... oh, all's fine have a nice day bye enjoy your tourist trip to the USA"

>The Canadian agents are comically friendly, but that's because I'm coming back into my own country, where I'm a citizen, and, y'know, they have to let me in. Cuz it's my country.

Returning to your own country doesn't mean the agents have to be friendly to you. I'm American and the agents there are not friendly when I return. They don't just do it to non-citizens; they're assholes to everyone. Of course, there's a lot more limitations on what they can do to US citizens than to foreigners, but they don't turn into nice guys when they see a US passport.

Every time I've visited Canada, the agents there were reasonably friendly to me too. To me, this shows that the two countries simply have extremely different standards in what kind of people they hire to be agents, and how agents are allowed to act.

Purely anecdotal and third-hand and a few years old by now, but this trip report to Estcourt (another slightly unusual border situation) also bears this out:

https://mrgris.com/travel/blog/labrador/3/

Quote from the Canadian border guard about the neighbouring US customs officials: "ah yes, they have a... different frame of mind"

I've experienced asshole power-tripping border guards on both sides. They're much less frequent on the Canadian side, and I have a US passport, but they exist.

Except if your car is registered in one of the wrong countries, then you might spend hours getting controlled on Schengen internal borders.

Of course, if your car isn't registered in an Eastern European country you probably won't even know that this is a possibility.

> Reminds me that when I was a kid you could travel to / from Canada without a passport

I assume you mean the era of your childhood, but, Canadian and American children can go back and forth between the US and Canada without passports, provided it’s a land crossing. So to be pedantic, as a kid you can still travel to/from Canada without a passport.

You still need your birth certificate or citizenship card. https://help.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-1280?language=en_US

you used to be able to walk from california to mexico through a one-way metal turnstile gate

Not only Canada; also Bermuda and fewer restrictions for Mexico. All gone now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Travel_Init...

The page you linked mentions several non-passport alternatives.

Yes, the requirements are stricter in that you have to prove citizenship in some way but there are multiple ways to do that which are WHTI-compliant.

You mean all the things just as hard to get as a passport, some invented specifically to be used for this new program? Sure, I guess you could get one of those instead. But there's no reason to get one of them rather than a passport except as a fig leaf for people to say a passport "isn't mandatory".

Or, and bear with me for a second, we could have kept freedoms we had on September 10th, 2001.

It’s far easier to get an EDL than to get a passport, what are you talking about?

We never had Schengen. Almost every other country has similar entry requirements, why should the US and Canada be any different? They’re not in a far-reaching political alliance, there’s no incentive to have open borders or provide exceptions to rules.

9/11 changed things. It’s absurd to expect things to always be the same and just because it was open before doesn’t mean that was ever intended or expected to be permanent.

> It’s absurd to expect things to always be the same and just because it was open before doesn’t mean that was ever intended or expected to be permanent.

On the flip side, there's also an interpretation under which passports (and possibly visas) were not intended or expected to be permanent:

https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...

This article quotes various delegates to international conventions apparently taking for granted that it would be desirable to return to a pre-WWI default of people not usually needing travel documents or being subject to border formalities¹.

(I've seen this article several times, but haven't seen if there's a contrary interpretation under which the diplomats or politicians did not, in fact, have the intuition or consensus that it describes. Obviously improvements in transportation technology mean that there are orders of magnitude more international trips than there were in the pre-WWI era, so one could imagine that most migration -- and tourism -- was seen as a relatively marginal activity in the past and that it no longer looks that way when so many more people can afford to do it.)

¹ not quite sure how to reconcile this with inspections of migrants around the turn of the 20th century, even if those were more focused on public health and stuff

>not quite sure how to reconcile this with inspections of migrants around the turn of the 20th century, even if those were more focused on public health and stuff

More than public health. Every single migrant who came through Ellis Island and other US border stations had to

* Pass said public health examinations

* Prove, to the satisfaction of inspectors, of disaffiliation with a variety of subversive organizations/ideologies (Communism and polygamy being two prominent examples)

* Provide proof of financial support in the US, whether by oneself or from a US financial sponsor

Don't pass any of these tests? You're on the next ship out of the US. Shipping companies were responsible for return passage (just as airlines are responsible for paying the way of those who do not pass US border entry today), so had incentive to make sure that their passengers would pass scrutiny.

I am a migrant to the US. I am very much in favor of restoring and enforcing such rules today.

So I'm kind of confused about who was and wasn't inspected. Was the inspection only for people intending to remain permanently or intending to start a naturalization process? Was this based on what travelers said their intentions were, or the kind of transportation they used, or something else?

My intuition is that someone coming as a tourist, for instance, wouldn't have been subject to this level of inspection. But I also suppose that was much rarer at the beginning of the 20th century than today.

(I also don't know what happened at the land borders in prior centuries.)

>"9/11 changed things.

It changed too many things that should not have been changed.

>"It’s absurd to expect things to always be the same"

Exactly. We should expect them to get better and more free. Otherwise we are moving in wrong direction.

At least in BC, EDLs have been phased out :(

NEXUS is genuinely faster than a passport

The paperwork isn't, alas.

> I recall no real good reasoning for it other than the DOH wanted to close the loop hole, without any real evidence it was a cause of issues

After 9/11 there were (false) rumours (spread by US Congressmen IIRC) that some terrorists entered the US via Canada. Even though that was shown to be false the stigma remained and I think it was a big part of the reason for the changes.

There were a lot of people in border towns affected. Before 9/11 some people crossed daily for work and knew all the border agents. They would just drive through with a wave but that all changed.

The Millennium bomber was cited as one of the reasons. This was pre 9/11.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Ressam

You still can as a kid via land, but a birth certificate is required. The parents do need passports though…

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