Brazil isnt exactly known for its thorough systems of identification and working beauracracy.
If they want to be pissy - fine, lets see who suffers for it.
By the way comparing tracking of foriegn nations to nazism - makes you an idiot. Ypu could legitimatly call it many bad things, but to compare it to the perpetraters of the holocost makes you a fool.
Posts: 1,250
Threads: 16
Joined: Feb 2003
Is there a logical explanation for the 27 excludees, and the mention here of criminals?
Regarding the mention of wanted criminals: There are databases of people who have been charged with crimes but are still at-large. The person's photo and fingerprint would be part of the data assuming they are available. So if someone went through customs under the new system and their fingerprints matched something in the database, they could be arrested and transported to whatever jurisdiction they were charged in to stand trial. In practice, this won't apply to very many people. But I suppose a few foreigners who have criminal records will have to figure out a way to get into the country without going through this system.
Regarding the 27 excluded nations: Different countries have different relationships with each other, which results in different levels of security for going from one to the other. For example, the U.S. and Canada are (eh, usually) very friendly nations with a huge common border who do massive amounts of trade and travel over this border. Thus, the U.S. and Canada have agreements which allow each other's citizens to pass through customs without much difficulty. I think a birth certificate and some form telling your travel plan is all that is needed. People will go through customs for something as trivial as a good deal on cigarettes or gasoline. Making each Canadian get out of their car to have their photo and fingerprint taken would be very impractical. That would be the most extreme example, but the point is that when you go through customs in any country, your citizenship makes a big difference in how much paperwork you need to have prepared. So it should be no big surprise that your citizenship will also make a difference when it comes to this system.
US-VISIT will not be in place along all land borders in Mexico and Canada until December 2005. The majority of the 500 million people who enter the United States each year come across land borders.
What this means is that the system will be at ship ports and airports first, before they can put it at all the checkpoints on the roads to Mexico and Canada. So for now, a Brazilian could bypass the system by going to Mexico and then driving into the U.S. (he would still need his paperwork but the machine to take his photo and fingerprints wouldn't be there yet). The majority of people who enter the U.S. enter at the land borders, simply because the majority of people who enter the U.S. are either Canadian or Mexican.
Posts: 1,298
Threads: 79
Joined: Feb 2003
For what it is worth, in the wake of 9/11 and the recent 'orange' alerts over the Christmas/New Year's holidays, I noted some differences as we made our annual visit to some American friends who live just across the border.
1) There are X-ray machines that scan the vehicle before you have your friendly chat with the border official - new thing since last year's visit.
2) The man asked for identification instead of just asking for citizenship. He took the identification and looked at it to compare the photographs to us.
3) Instead of taking our word for it that there were four children in the car, as was usual in prior years, the man opened the rear car door and visually checked for them and re-looked at my husband and me.
He did not search the car. He did not ask for identification for the children.
It took about an hour to cross the bridge to get to that point. On the way home (a Sunday evening) we cruised along just fine until we got to the sign that said "1 1/4 miles to the border", at which point we commenced the stop'n'go of waiting to get across. This only took about an hour to manage, and our bitching about the wait to get home was silenced very quickly by the sight of about seven miles of backed up traffic of those waiting to get into the U.S.A. in the other lanes. It seems there were quite a few Americans who had done much the same as we did, but in the other direction. B)
The numbers cited about how many cross at the land crossings per annum are difficult to interpret. A lot of people who live in Buffalo go grocery shopping in Fort Erie, for example. They go to Niagara Falls to go drinking and gambling too. I know people who live on one side and work on the other. Do they get counted as two crossings per day? I know many cottagers who live in the U.S.A. and own cottages in Canada. They cross at least twice a week for six months a year. What about all the truck traffic that crosses? NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) means that a lot of goods cross and re-cross the borders on a regular basis. Does this count every truck driver's crossings?
And you may call it righteousness
When civility survives,
But I've had dinner with the Devil and
I know nice from right.
From Dinner with the Devil, by Big Rude Jake
