Border passports?

[question everything]

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL

Border passports?

Picture 48 million people in line at San Ysidro

April 18, 2005

Let's say your relatives from Little Rock are in San Diego for yet another visit and everyone wants to go to Tijuana for dinner. So, you jump in the car, cross the border with no hassle and dine out on fish tacos and beer. After your cousins have done a little bargain hunting on Avenida Revolución – leatherwear is very popular in Arkansas – you head back to the San Ysidro border crossing.

But, unbeknownst to you, the U.S. government has imposed a new rule: All American citizens returning to the United States from Mexico must show their passports in order to re-enter the country. Only problem is, your passport expired last year and your kin from Little Rock don't even know what a passport is.

(snip)

What's more, today only a very small percentage of Americans hold valid passports. Yet, in 2003 a staggering 193 million people entered the United States from Mexico through land border crossings. Another 30 million people entered the country from Canada through land crossings. The Department of Homeland Security wants every single one of these travelers to carry passports even when they simply are making a brief visit across the border to shop or dine.

San Ysidro is the busiest land border crossing in the country, with 48 million crossings last year. There are hundreds of thousands of daily crossers who live on one side of the border but work on the other. It makes no sense to require casual American tourists to present a passport upon re-entering the country after just a few hours spent in Tijuana. Far worse, the new requirement would cause monumental traffic backups at San Ysidro and further constrict legitimate cross-border commerce between San Diego and Baja California – to the detriment of job growth and economic development on both sides of the border.

Encouragingly, President Bush appears to recognize the problem. "When I first read that in the newspaper ... I said, 'What's going on here?' If people have to have a passport, it's going to disrupt honest flow of traffic," he told a group of newspaper editors last week. Bush has directed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to find a more flexible approach, such as allowing for "finger imaging" to screen Americans returning to the United States. Certainly there has to be a better way than requiring your Little Rock cousins to apply for passports merely to go to dinner in Tijuana.


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050418/news_mz1ed18top.html

[FloridaPat]

1. Is this new law to keep the creeps out or Americans in?

Considering that most of the real terrorists that came into our country came under goverment sponsorship, to say this will protect us is unbelieveable. Especially since there are so many ways to get in illegally. So why bother? May the idea is to keep Americans in the country so they can't get out. Can the dollar so we can't afford to get out. This will kill trade on border towns from the Mexican border to the Canadian border too.

[Warpy]

2. It's a stupid law to keep Americans in

and it's going to be a huge clusterfuck in border states north and south. My guess is that it's going to have to be abandoned in a big hurry as detention facilities become crammed with casual tourists and old folks trying to get a bargain on their heart pills, all of them seriously pissed off at Repuglicans.

[happyslug]

3. No Stupid, Smart, the more people buy passports and less objections...

A National ID, or even an Internal Passport like Stalin Imposed on the old Soviet Union (I.e. If you wanted to travel out of your county/City/Local Municipality you had to have a passport i.e. permission to leave and return). If the price of Gasoline goes to $5 a gallon, to maintain control I foresee such internal Passports (Especially as more and more poorer people opt NOT to re-new or obtain driver's licenses since they could no longer afford to buy gasoline).

[satya]

4. You nailed it! And passage of the "REAL ID" act puts it into place.

Section 102 gives Chertoff (Homeland "Security" director) total dictatorial control of our borders: the ability to suspend the rule of law, without judicial oversight.

And there are no limitations to what info can be stored in the ID card, or how it is recorded--RFID, biometrics, etc.