Customs: a custom I wish we could Do Without (UPDATED Dec. 19)
I often think that the traditional concept of nation-state is obsolete, but nowhere does this seem more obvious than in two [now three] news stories that occurred in the past three weeks or so. All involve agents of the Customs department (or, as they are now often named, border guards) in two neighboring countries: Canada and the U.S. All involve unpleasant events that raise serious concerns about just how much liberty the citizens and other residents of both these countries have nowadays.
The first such case happened on Nov. 25, when American journalist Amy Goodman was stopped by Canadian Customs officials at a border crossing on her way in to Canada. She had apparently been on her way to make a speech at the Vancouver Public Library promoting a book she had recently published. However, the Customs people were totally uninterested in that; they wanted to know whether she was going to be talking about the 2010 Winter Olympics that will take place in Vancouver a few months from now. Her reaction seems to have been initial disbelief, as she, like many other people I know (including yours truly), simply do not care about said Olympics. The Customs people, however, became convinced that she was trying to hide something and quizzed her for 90 minutes. They also searched all of her possessions and allegedly partly dismantled her laptop PC to make sure they did not miss anything. They finally let her go on, but added a document to her passport that required her to leave the country within 48 hours. Needless to say, the speech she made that evening included a description of how badly she had been treated. One wonders whether the Canadian federal government was actually trying to bad-mouth the Olympics surreptitiously, or just being paranoid about what journalists are writing these days. I am more inclined to suspect the latter; it still is rather bad form either way. It also suggests the Canadian government is behaving in an almost allergic fashion to people asking questions about its misdeeds, and has no real concern about human rights or liberties either.
That episode was bad enough, but what happened two weeks later was decidedly worse. A Canadian author named Peter Watts was apparently returning by car to Canada on Dec. 8 after visiting friends in the U.S. when Customs agents pulled him over as he approached the border. It isn’t clear what happened next, but when he apparently objected repeatedly to a thorough search of his vehicle, he was beaten up and tossed into jail for the night, then accused of attacking one of the Customs agents, a charge that he has denied. He now faces charges of assaulting a police officer in the U.S. and is expected to return there to face trial and possibly a two-year jail term if convicted. Another report about this event may be found on the BoingBoing website. Note that a defense against a criminal charge in the U.S. (or Canada) is not cheap; he and his friends are appealing for funds to pay for a good lawyer.
UPDATE: (Dec. 19) On Dec. 17, as reported on CBC, a black woman arrived at Ottawa Airport on a flight from Jamaica, where she had been visiting to commemorate a recent death in the family. A Customs agent claimed to have found heroin on her toothbrush, so she was taken aside, questioned and strip-searched. Her travel agent also noted that blacks are targeted for strip-searches when passing through Ottawa Airport at a rate far more frequently than their numbers would warrant. Is this racism? It sure sounds like it.
What is most disturbing is that there seems to be a common denominator in all these events: if you do not kowtow to authority properly, you can expect to be, at a minimum, questioned at length about misdeeds both potential and actual. As Naomi Wolf warned in her recent book The End of America, arbitrary and unpredictable arrests and detaining of citizenry is a standard tactic of would-be dictators in suppressing democracy. What is even more disturbing is that Peter Watts apparently had to deal with this attitude despite the fact that the main instigator of this arrogance, Bush the Younger, left the U.S. President’s office nearly a year ago. Why has the mindset that sees nothing wrong with this kind of behavior on the part of Customs agents not been discouraged? Not only does some form of oversight need to be established for the Customs department or Agency in both countries, but we the citizens of both countries, as well as foreign visitors, need to have proof that such oversight is effective. Events like these are hardly going to encourage people to travel either between these two countries or to them from other parts of the world (such as Europe, or the Caribbean in the most recent case).
Should we indeed try to scrap customs requirements between Canada and the U.S.? One is tempted to answer in the affirmative. The European Union has demonstrated with its Schengen Agreement Area that such a scheme can be made to work. However, neither Canada nor the U.S. are as comfortable with each other as the E.U. member states are. For example, many Canadians (including yours truly) remember comments from certain right-wing Americans referring to Canada as “Soviet Canuckistan.”
I first heard about the Peter Watts affair from auriaephiala, who wrote a post about it. A well known Canadian SF author has noted that, because of the Peter Watts affair, she is re-considering going to an SF con in the U.S., even though she is listed as a program participant. I too planned to visit the U.S. next March to see other friends that I have not met in person for years; that trip is likewise in jeopardy. However, as the same author (papersky) has noted, we also seriously need to ask whether a world where kowtowing to authority is normal is really a world we want to live in.
What do others think? As always, this well-perched philosopher would like to know.