The sentences are a bit long and convoluted, but it does.
> Electronic Travel Authorization schemes are becoming increasingly popular among developed nations looking to improve security and keep tabs on all who cross into their national territories. ... Since then, numerous other destinations followed suit, including Canada and the U.S., which have facilitated visa-free travel agreements, but expect all non-Canadian and non-U.S. travelers to apply for electronic authorization, or a visa, ahead of flying. Now it's Britain's turn to reciprocate
And still be assumed a Syrian terrorist selling weapons to North Korea with proceeds that were laundered from a Mexican drug lord by default by the “friendly” folks at the border.
Yeah, but it's not just border patrol, customs, etc., it's everyone I've ever seen or interacted with in American law enforcement: they're almost all assholes. It's nothing at all like, for instance, dealing with police or customs officers here in Japan.
There's no way in hell I'd ever ask an American cop for directions, and I look mostly like they do. But here in Japan, I'd never have any fear asking police for directions or help; it's what they're there for. Just interacting with security in airports between the two countries couldn't be more different. Japanese airport security is helpful and courteous. TSA is.... not.
Our border patrol was placed under DHS sometime around 15 years ago, and DHS itself was created as the 'anti-terrorist' security umbrella post 9/11. CBP (customs and border protection) became a catch all gestapo to create the largest federal police force outside of the FBI, and of course one of their biggest subjects to 'inspection' in their anti-terror goals (be sure to read this in a George Bush accent) were none other than citizen John Q Public. Another group you may remember in DHS as every air traveler's favorite is none other than the TSA.
The CBP is ostensibly primarily interested in the border where the "constitution doesn't (fully) apply." IMO this has caused them to become known a jackboot-thug like entities who terrifyingly are now deployed even within the interior of the US, often with poor discipline to their constitutional restraints. Their special response teams were deployed to Portland during the riots, during which some may remember unmarked vans were grabbing citizens off the street (I have no idea if the vans were DHS). Another favorite of theirs is setting up 'immigration checkpoints' which of course conveniently feature local police (milling in the background) who take advantage of using the stop to catch criminal violations without needing to obtain PC/RAS (silly constitutional stuff) to initiate a stop.
The gestapo like roots of CBP has made it the most terrifying, and unrestrained, and poorly monitored of all the federal polices in America. It deserves even more scrutiny that it is already getting.
In the words of CBP, last time I invoked the few rights I had at the border, "now I'm going to show you my (CBPs) rights." And oh, they did.... [0]
If you cross enough times you start to see patterns in their training. A common one is to ask the same question twice like 'where were you born?' or 'where do you live?' with some filler in between. They want to catch you on any inconsistencies. I've gotten noobs that really struggle to maintain the act and get through the questions in a natural way.
Literally never happened to me, having crossed back into the US from Europe at least 30 times. Nor to my partner that I just asked, who is brown and has an extremely Muslim name.
Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it feels wrong to describe it as the norm, unless we have special flags on our passports to be treated well.
I think the more common thing I experience is an indifference from the customs/border agents.
If smugglers are confident wouldn't that mean they're tailoring their inspection specifically to avoid catching smugglers? Seems like a dumb strategy. I realize they can play tough guy interrogator this way and inflate their egos but the calculated reality is maybe you should just assume everyone is lying and move forward accordingly.
Rehearsed confidence and iron clad stories that don't change is the territory of well prepared smugglers, not wide-eyed tourists who can barely keep their memories straight from one minute to the next. Hell I've been known to give answers in entirely different states minutes apart when asked where I'm from by regular people, because in my mind I'm frome a few places and when forced to pick one it's just kind of a dice roll in my head.
It's a toned down version of what Israel does at their airports. I've been through it a few times and watched others get the intense questioning.
Basically, people can confidently lie, but it's almost impossible to keep a story straight when ask about it multiple times from different directions by different people. During intensive questioning at the Ben Gurion airport, you'll get asked about your future travel plans, your past travel history, your family history, their employment and minute details that are hard to prepare for.
Then after 20 minutes, they'll start all over again and ask you similar (not the exact same questions) and throw in a few curveballs with incorrect facts - you tell them you're flying to London to visit your aunt who lives in a house in Chelsea, then 10 minutes later they'll ask "So you said you're flying to London to visit your niece who lives in Chelsea, correct?". A normal person would say "no, like I said, I'm visiting my aunt, I don't have a niece", but someone lying likely would just say "yeah, that's correct".
And basically you won't get on the plane until they are satisfied with the answers.
It's very good at sussing out people out because it's too hard to keep that detailed of a story straight under hours of questioning.
Just like how the US requires the same for EU travelers visiting the US? Seems reasonable to require the same going the other way. IIRC, it was the US that first introduced these requirements.
Funny quote. Except I think it's also the case that Americans on the whole don't seem to leave their country as much as other citizens of the "western world." So they're not enjoying these privileges.
Travel into the United States is so terrible and authoritarian, especially after 9/11 -- but I don't think Americans on the whole get it. Because their own country is such a centre of gravity that they don't experience it as much as others, or know the contrast on how things happen elsewhere.
As a Canadian, living next door in a "friendly" country, we used to (before 9/11) be able to cross over with just a driver's license. Now, if I travel by myself without my wife and kids, I'm lucky if I can make it over for a quick ski trip or whatever without being detained and aggressively questioned for an hour and having my car searched. It now happens to me the majority of times.
I don't think it works that way. I'm not an Android or iPhone developer but I'm pretty sure the OS does not give the app access to the actual biometric data. Apple made a big deal about fingerprints and facial data being in their secure enclave I think.
Though not quite apt. The UK is one island and part of another. That other part has a border with an EU country. It's only 300 miles of border, but it makes a huge difference. Especially since by law it's an unguarded border.
Even English people seem to forget about it from time to time, despite everyone else being acutely aware of it.
Seems like this only aligns the immigration policies to be reciprocal. UK citizens entering the US must pay a fee (ESTA or Visa if ineligible) and provide biometrics at the border (picture, fingerprints).
Indeed. I think it's all so awful. I remember as a child in the USA in the 80s the general feeling that travel would become free-er and free-er as time went on; and that we could take pride in being a democracy who could let citizens of other democracies travel freely back and forth
(whether that was really true or not -- and it surely wasn't as much as we thought it was, and how rich or poor the person and country mattered -- the point was that our self-image was that it was and that this was good and something to be proud of -- that democracies could allow free travel between each other. No doubt this was in large part due to the context of the cold war, with the desire to distinguish ourselves from those behind the "iron curtain")
It is so sad to me that we're all moving in the opposite direction, to my mind for no good reasons, and not even regretting it.
We -- for some inclusion of "we" -- didn't even used to have to show any paperwork to travel from the USA to Canada. Young people now can probably barely believe that is the truth.
I flew to Britain in 2020 of all times, and got in with a swipe of my passport. That’s easier than it has been for most across history to travel a fraction of that distance.
The flying is easier, in the sense that it takes you long distances quickly and easily and relatively inexpensively, compared to what it took to travel such distances in most of human history.
The border controls, I think you are simply incorrect. For most of human history in most places, if someone had the material means to go somewhere, nobody would keep them out, there were no documents, fingerprints, or fees. For most humans across most of human history there weren't even such things as borders.
At any rate, the OP is saying that it will soon require more than a swipe of the passport for Americans to get into the UK; and the comment I was responding to that it already does for British to get into USA.
> if someone had the material means to go somewhere, nobody would keep them out, there were no documents, fingerprints, or fees
Well of course. It was touch and feel. Safe passage was negotiated piecemeal. That’s why we created standardise documents, so one village chieftain on your 900-Village journey couldn’t veto your transit.
I don't think it's true that's what travel was like for most humans in most of human history. For most people at most places at most times, they could simply travel wherever they chose, and it was fine. Traditions of hospitality to traveling strangers are very common.
> they could simply travel wherever they chose, and it was fine
What are you basing this on? Where do you think the threat of being an outlaw comes from? When justice is customary, one has none away from one’s peers.
There is an early modern period of free movement, when Hamilton emigrated and helped found a nation. But to deny the specialness of that era undermines it.
Customary law does not mean that everything is up to the local authorities to decide. Some customs are assumed to be universal, while others may come from religious or royal authorities far away.
People have tried building great empires for millennia, and those empires have always relied on long-distance trade. In order for trade to flourish, long-distance travel has to be safe and predictable, at least relatively speaking. Traders and other travelers typically had to worry more about outlaws than about being outlaws.
My readings about history in various times/places, and the sense that it creates. Same as you, I suppose? Neither of us are citing our sources or writing a historical monograph here.
One recent read was Graeber and Wengrow's _Dawn of Everything_, which suggested there was evidence of a culture of travel networks throughout much of North America during a significant (pre-Columbian) period, based on a sort of "clan" system calling for hospitality across geographic/culture/language-groups. And similar systems in other places.
I just found an ebook copy public online, so could search to find this quote:
> In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.
> It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.
> Perhaps the most insightful contribution came from Marcel Mauss, who tackled the notion of ‘culture areas’ in a series of essays on nationalism and civilization written between 1910 and 1930.10 Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most
anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),11 but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual.
> The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been
unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were regularly employed a month or two’s journey away; the same could presumably be said of ancestor cults or syncopated drum rhythms. Mauss went further. He was convinced the entire Pacific Rim had once been a single realm of cultural exchange, with voyagers criss-crossing it at regular intervals. He too was interested in the distribution of games across the entire region…
This just being a book I read recently so is in my mind, which touches on relevant things. Since you asked, I thought to look for passages from it, it's not alone supposed to answer all questions, and is not the only source on which i've based my view.
What do you base your conclusions about most people throughout most of human history on?
To an extent I think it's still true if you're on foot/boat (i.e. the way people travelled in the olden days). You could probably travel all of Africa and all of South America without ever showing a passport, and even between the two with a boat. It would require some deliberate approaches but I think it would be possible without playing mission impossible.
The informal economies in both continents are large enough I would wager someone could travel between and among those two continents for life and get by without ever having a passport.
For the most part, rigid passport control can really only exist at airports, controlled ports, possibly some 'choke-points' in roads, and some exceptionally closely guarded borders. If you're in bumfuck nowhere in the third world absolutely no one has time to mess with deporting you unless you did some dumb shit to make it worth their while. Watch some documentaries on people trying to immigrate (illegally) to EU or America. You always see the stories about people working from country to country all though Central/South America and Africa and when they get stuck at the border absolutely no one has the money to deport them all the way back to their home country. There are tons of people like this that get stuck somewhere like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile with no papers and somehow their life just.... continues on. Eventually their children are born wherever they get stuck and there's a good chance after 1-2 generations their family are <new country> nationality.
Yep. JRR Tolkien's mentor and prof, the great Joseph Wright, started working in the Yorkshire mines as a child, learned to read at 15, and managed to save enough (by teaching other factory workers for read for tuppence a week) that he saved up passage for a ferry to the continent. He then walked to Heidelberg University, enrolled, and ultimately became an academic.
Good luck just wandering into other countries in order to sign up as a student today.
And a face scan when you're going through the gates, which is better than fingerprints and iris scans these days, given the improvements made in LIDAR.
And I walked into the US in 2022 after presenting valid US passport and following all border related law, was strip searched, was x-rayed (or some weird x-ray looking machine, idk what it was to be honest), was placed into detention for 16 hours (as in tossed in a cell), was shackled, was cuffed, taken to two hospitals against my will while CBP officers told insane lies to doctors suggesting there were drugs up my ass, was forced to perform bodily functions in front of officers (repeatedly), and at the end I was left in medical debt when CBP put the bills in my name. For the record, I denied consent to everything including medical care. I am still in debt to this day for this incident.
In the end I was dumped at the border, along with an ex-post-facto warrant of complete fabrications used to get a judge to sign off AFTER THE FACT AND AFTER EXECUTION of the 'medical' searches they initiated. No evidence of a crime was ever found, no truthful probable cause or even articulable suspicion ever existed. I found out later this was part of a systematic pattern of abuse by CBP [0].
I just tried to arrange a visit to London for this Christmas just for tourism.
After my girlfriend spent 3 hours trying to get a tourist visa (she's from Ukraine), she finally gave up. It seems the only way to go is pay $800 to the company that runs the UK visas in the US. She'd be without a passport for an undefined amount of time.
I dunno that just sounds like a standard visitor visa that costs £100. U.K. government websites are excellent and you can apply for all this stuff yourself online.
The USPS is considered secure. It's even legal to send classified secret documents by mail as long as certain procedures are followed. Many other countries also require you to mail in your passport to get a visa.
If you need to travel during that period you can obtain a second passport book from the State Department. It is a bit of extra hassle and expense.
They actually tell you to mail it by UPS only. I mailed it by USPS first and they lost it en route. I wrote my congressman and practically begged him to help. He contacted the postmaster general's office who told him that it was essentially lost for good even though the USPS was "searching for it" and that there was a 0.01% chance I'd ever see it again. My rep then contacted the state department who printed me a new passport in 48 hours, which is basically unheard of. Mailed it again by UPS and got it back just in time to leave for the UK. God what a nightmare, I am lucky to have had a great representative at that time. He really went to bat for me.
My other passport is still lost, lord knows where.
I applied for a visit visa in October. It was a straightforward process. Paid the fees (100 pounds), went for biometrics to local uscis office, uploaded supporting docs to a online portal and sent my passport to New york. It came back in 2 weeks with stamped visa.
The situation is similar trying to visit the US from most places. If your passport isn't from Western Europe, US, Canada, Australia, NZ there's quite a visa process. Citizens of 5 southern & eastern EU countries don't qualify for the US visa waver.
Are you a US citizen? I went on several trips to Europe and the UK (including post Brexit) before I learned you are apparently supposed to get some kind of visas. Nobody ever asked for anything.
While I agree wiih this sentiment over all after my time in the UK, don't Ukranins get he special arrangement due to the war, as in they can enter under refugee status? I'm not saying that is ideal, and I've seen what it takes for Ukrainians to enter the US under that policy, but it is possible.
I was supposed to go to the UK last summer '21 flying from the EU as a US citizen, during the supposed relaxed COVID restrictions in the UK you needed not just a negative covid test to board the plane, but also a tracking document that I had not completed moments before boarding began. It stipulated many things, in addition to testing upon arrival and then details about where you were staying and more testing etc...
It was a nightmare, and I'm sad to say that the World hasn't gone any saner since then; I'm guessing with tall the influx of illegal mass migration from France deal that was just brokered between the two may have set some things in motion.
This really sucks for those of us that are trying to avoid covid while travelling. (This is a collecting point where they want you maskless) They want to do this so they can collect your biometrics and look secure.
A time is coming where the upright man must decide where he would like to live, stay there, and abandon the hope of simply being allowed onto an airplane. He should cultivate inner virtues, and charitably leave his coming air travel "carbon credits" for another person, whose flexible spine can stomach the bio surveillance and bureaucracy.
The first time I saw london was a few years ago on a long, multi-hour layover. I left the airport and walked around the city, then headed back to the airport to catch my flight. Looks like mini visits like this will become a thing of the past.
Globalisation is slowly but steadily dying. These measures are ridiculous. Reciprocating on the steady slow down to the 1970s again.
Simple everyday things like "my transit flight is cancelled and now I have to stay a night over in Europe" will become "I will now stay at the airport instead of being able to get a hotel steps outside the terminal" because you didn't apply for authorisation beforehand
Agreed, they are ridiculous measures, but I'd say this is exactly what "globalization" has intended from the beginning. Internationalism was different; where Globalists seeks to tear down walls by building gates, Internationalists seek to overcome borders by building bridges.
US charges way more and demands finger print, social media links, property papers, employment papers, bank account statement going back 6 months and various other details from many countries' tourists.
What actually happens to the biometric data after your trip is over? I can understand keeping it for a length of time. But one scenario where this could be a problem is if you did not agree to share this biometric data with another country, but that country requests it from the UK who happily complies.
Another scenario is the one where the data is leaked because of a security issue and it enables you to be tracked with facial recognition software because your identity was tied to it. Although it's still possible to track someone without an identity and it's possible to get an identity without needing leaked government data, I still would consider this data very sensitive.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread> Electronic Travel Authorization schemes are becoming increasingly popular among developed nations looking to improve security and keep tabs on all who cross into their national territories. ... Since then, numerous other destinations followed suit, including Canada and the U.S., which have facilitated visa-free travel agreements, but expect all non-Canadian and non-U.S. travelers to apply for electronic authorization, or a visa, ahead of flying. Now it's Britain's turn to reciprocate
There's no way in hell I'd ever ask an American cop for directions, and I look mostly like they do. But here in Japan, I'd never have any fear asking police for directions or help; it's what they're there for. Just interacting with security in airports between the two countries couldn't be more different. Japanese airport security is helpful and courteous. TSA is.... not.
The CBP is ostensibly primarily interested in the border where the "constitution doesn't (fully) apply." IMO this has caused them to become known a jackboot-thug like entities who terrifyingly are now deployed even within the interior of the US, often with poor discipline to their constitutional restraints. Their special response teams were deployed to Portland during the riots, during which some may remember unmarked vans were grabbing citizens off the street (I have no idea if the vans were DHS). Another favorite of theirs is setting up 'immigration checkpoints' which of course conveniently feature local police (milling in the background) who take advantage of using the stop to catch criminal violations without needing to obtain PC/RAS (silly constitutional stuff) to initiate a stop.
The gestapo like roots of CBP has made it the most terrifying, and unrestrained, and poorly monitored of all the federal polices in America. It deserves even more scrutiny that it is already getting.
In the words of CBP, last time I invoked the few rights I had at the border, "now I'm going to show you my (CBPs) rights." And oh, they did.... [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33617350#33618162
Until they put on a uniform and are tasked with "enforcing" something. It's also pretty exceptional, but in another direction.
Not that I've travelled everywhere, but I haven't seen this in other countries.
After a few minutes, I was pulled aside and whisked through customs. As I was nearing the exit, a staff member said "welcome home".
It hadn't hit me until later that I was likely skipped ahead due to having a military surplus duffel bag.
No particular point here aside from how silly the whole thing is.
Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it feels wrong to describe it as the norm, unless we have special flags on our passports to be treated well.
I think the more common thing I experience is an indifference from the customs/border agents.
Rehearsed confidence and iron clad stories that don't change is the territory of well prepared smugglers, not wide-eyed tourists who can barely keep their memories straight from one minute to the next. Hell I've been known to give answers in entirely different states minutes apart when asked where I'm from by regular people, because in my mind I'm frome a few places and when forced to pick one it's just kind of a dice roll in my head.
Basically, people can confidently lie, but it's almost impossible to keep a story straight when ask about it multiple times from different directions by different people. During intensive questioning at the Ben Gurion airport, you'll get asked about your future travel plans, your past travel history, your family history, their employment and minute details that are hard to prepare for.
Then after 20 minutes, they'll start all over again and ask you similar (not the exact same questions) and throw in a few curveballs with incorrect facts - you tell them you're flying to London to visit your aunt who lives in a house in Chelsea, then 10 minutes later they'll ask "So you said you're flying to London to visit your niece who lives in Chelsea, correct?". A normal person would say "no, like I said, I'm visiting my aunt, I don't have a niece", but someone lying likely would just say "yeah, that's correct".
And basically you won't get on the plane until they are satisfied with the answers.
It's very good at sussing out people out because it's too hard to keep that detailed of a story straight under hours of questioning.
Throw out random question, see how you react. A friend got asked “Are you going to import this car illegally?”.
My friend went “huh?” then got waved through.
It’s an interview technique to see how you react.
To paraphrase someone more famous, "an American is never a foreigner, he belongs everywhere that he goes."
Travel into the United States is so terrible and authoritarian, especially after 9/11 -- but I don't think Americans on the whole get it. Because their own country is such a centre of gravity that they don't experience it as much as others, or know the contrast on how things happen elsewhere.
As a Canadian, living next door in a "friendly" country, we used to (before 9/11) be able to cross over with just a driver's license. Now, if I travel by myself without my wife and kids, I'm lucky if I can make it over for a quick ski trip or whatever without being detained and aggressively questioned for an hour and having my car searched. It now happens to me the majority of times.
The only thing I could think of would be taking a picture of an old-fashion ink on paper fingerprint. But that's far from ideal.
Calling the UK insular was also rather ironic given that the US has required ETAs for travel and fingerprints on arrival for many years.
Even English people seem to forget about it from time to time, despite everyone else being acutely aware of it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Travel_Area
(whether that was really true or not -- and it surely wasn't as much as we thought it was, and how rich or poor the person and country mattered -- the point was that our self-image was that it was and that this was good and something to be proud of -- that democracies could allow free travel between each other. No doubt this was in large part due to the context of the cold war, with the desire to distinguish ourselves from those behind the "iron curtain")
It is so sad to me that we're all moving in the opposite direction, to my mind for no good reasons, and not even regretting it.
We -- for some inclusion of "we" -- didn't even used to have to show any paperwork to travel from the USA to Canada. Young people now can probably barely believe that is the truth.
I flew to Britain in 2020 of all times, and got in with a swipe of my passport. That’s easier than it has been for most across history to travel a fraction of that distance.
The border controls, I think you are simply incorrect. For most of human history in most places, if someone had the material means to go somewhere, nobody would keep them out, there were no documents, fingerprints, or fees. For most humans across most of human history there weren't even such things as borders.
At any rate, the OP is saying that it will soon require more than a swipe of the passport for Americans to get into the UK; and the comment I was responding to that it already does for British to get into USA.
Well of course. It was touch and feel. Safe passage was negotiated piecemeal. That’s why we created standardise documents, so one village chieftain on your 900-Village journey couldn’t veto your transit.
What are you basing this on? Where do you think the threat of being an outlaw comes from? When justice is customary, one has none away from one’s peers.
There is an early modern period of free movement, when Hamilton emigrated and helped found a nation. But to deny the specialness of that era undermines it.
People have tried building great empires for millennia, and those empires have always relied on long-distance trade. In order for trade to flourish, long-distance travel has to be safe and predictable, at least relatively speaking. Traders and other travelers typically had to worry more about outlaws than about being outlaws.
One recent read was Graeber and Wengrow's _Dawn of Everything_, which suggested there was evidence of a culture of travel networks throughout much of North America during a significant (pre-Columbian) period, based on a sort of "clan" system calling for hospitality across geographic/culture/language-groups. And similar systems in other places.
I just found an ebook copy public online, so could search to find this quote:
> In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.
> It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.
Hm, there's no page numbers on this PDF, but it's PDF page 132. (it has it's own footnote citations) https://docdrop.org/download_annotation_doc/The-Dawn-of-Ever...
Here's another passage:
> Perhaps the most insightful contribution came from Marcel Mauss, who tackled the notion of ‘culture areas’ in a series of essays on nationalism and civilization written between 1910 and 1930.10 Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),11 but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual.
> The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were regularly employed a month or two’s journey away; the same could presumably be said of ancestor cults or syncopated drum rhythms. Mauss went further. He was convinced the entire Pacific Rim had once been a single realm of cultural exchange, with voyagers criss-crossing it at regular intervals. He too was interested in the distribution of games across the entire region…
This just being a book I read recently so is in my mind, which touches on relevant things. Since you asked, I thought to look for passages from it, it's not alone supposed to answer all questions, and is not the only source on which i've based my view.
What do you base your conclusions about most people throughout most of human history on?
For the most part, rigid passport control can really only exist at airports, controlled ports, possibly some 'choke-points' in roads, and some exceptionally closely guarded borders. If you're in bumfuck nowhere in the third world absolutely no one has time to mess with deporting you unless you did some dumb shit to make it worth their while. Watch some documentaries on people trying to immigrate (illegally) to EU or America. You always see the stories about people working from country to country all though Central/South America and Africa and when they get stuck at the border absolutely no one has the money to deport them all the way back to their home country. There are tons of people like this that get stuck somewhere like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile with no papers and somehow their life just.... continues on. Eventually their children are born wherever they get stuck and there's a good chance after 1-2 generations their family are <new country> nationality.
Good luck just wandering into other countries in order to sign up as a student today.
In the end I was dumped at the border, along with an ex-post-facto warrant of complete fabrications used to get a judge to sign off AFTER THE FACT AND AFTER EXECUTION of the 'medical' searches they initiated. No evidence of a crime was ever found, no truthful probable cause or even articulable suspicion ever existed. I found out later this was part of a systematic pattern of abuse by CBP [0].
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
https://fee.org/articles/passports-were-a-temporary-war-meas...
After my girlfriend spent 3 hours trying to get a tourist visa (she's from Ukraine), she finally gave up. It seems the only way to go is pay $800 to the company that runs the UK visas in the US. She'd be without a passport for an undefined amount of time.
The UK really, really doesn't want tourists.
Source: I have a British visa.
If you need to travel during that period you can obtain a second passport book from the State Department. It is a bit of extra hassle and expense.
My other passport is still lost, lord knows where.
While I agree wiih this sentiment over all after my time in the UK, don't Ukranins get he special arrangement due to the war, as in they can enter under refugee status? I'm not saying that is ideal, and I've seen what it takes for Ukrainians to enter the US under that policy, but it is possible.
I was supposed to go to the UK last summer '21 flying from the EU as a US citizen, during the supposed relaxed COVID restrictions in the UK you needed not just a negative covid test to board the plane, but also a tracking document that I had not completed moments before boarding began. It stipulated many things, in addition to testing upon arrival and then details about where you were staying and more testing etc...
It was a nightmare, and I'm sad to say that the World hasn't gone any saner since then; I'm guessing with tall the influx of illegal mass migration from France deal that was just brokered between the two may have set some things in motion.
It likely has more to do with reciprocity, as the US places these same burdens on travelers (including those from UK) visiting the US.
Simple everyday things like "my transit flight is cancelled and now I have to stay a night over in Europe" will become "I will now stay at the airport instead of being able to get a hotel steps outside the terminal" because you didn't apply for authorisation beforehand
Bet you can go through Dublin and drive in.
Another scenario is the one where the data is leaked because of a security issue and it enables you to be tracked with facial recognition software because your identity was tied to it. Although it's still possible to track someone without an identity and it's possible to get an identity without needing leaked government data, I still would consider this data very sensitive.