Letters to the Editor
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It's the idiocy of "heck-of-a-job" Chertoff
The Canadian border crossing is just a very very small part of the nonsensical way we treat visitors.
Example:
A week ago, the Costa Rican Attorney General with full diplomatic passport and a scheduled meeting with the US Attorney General, was detained for hours at Miami International Airport without the right to a phone call because his name "appeared similar to a person of interest" He was escorted to a ticket agency and forced to buy a return flight back to Costa Rica the next day.
It's barbaric, it's absurd.
We need the inflow of foreign money and tourism. With the dollar at record lows, we should be having record number of tourists flocking to see our beautiful country and spending hard cash, but our system of entry is crazy and without reason and our tourism is suffering for it. A number of friends refuse to even fly through the US because you have to go through this crazy maze of fingerprinting, photo shoots, "secret black-lists", even if you're just going to get onto another plane and leave the country right away. I personally will fly around the US when I travel from one country to another, rather than subjecting myself to this procedure. My frequent flier allegiance is now with a foreign airline just so I don't have to fly through the US to get to another country.
It's high time that we get off the "fear" wagon and start to learn how to live in the modern world.