21 July 2010
Well, I just had that feeling. And it was right.
After spending the last three months living it up in New York City, it was time for me to say goodbye today. I boarded the 8:15 am Adirondack train at Penn Station, destination: Montreal.
I had already done some research on what to expect in terms of scenery – through the scenic Hudson Valley and the Adirondack Mountains if you sit on the right side of the train — but I wasn’t prepared for what awaited me at the border crossing to Canada.
Carlo and I had joked when we arrived in NYC that we would try and avoid US immigration officers from now on, even going so far as to say that we’re never coming back to the USA. It can be such a traumatizing event. But what happened to me just now at the Canadian border is my latest horror story. I hope that nothing tops this.
The story
Photo: chrisforsyth
With no announcement, we stop in no-mans land, right near a lonely trailer structure out in the bushes. Everyone is waiting patiently. I look up from my book towards two armed border officers walking up the aisle. I make the mistake of locking eyes with one of them.
I don’t know why but I knew, at that instant, that I was in trouble. They start at the back of my train car. Very slowly they question every individual behind me. I’m astonished at the questions they ask the passengers in front of everyone else, forcing them to reveal very personal details.
In my experience, whenever I’ve crossed the border into Canada by car, I’ve only had to answer a couple of questions and am waved through. Sometimes they don’t even check my ID. This was more the experience I was expecting.
The officers move in on my neighbour and me slowly; they look mean. The guy beside me also has a German passport; this does not help matters. Straight away I need to point out that I don’t actually know the dude and that we are not traveling together. They take my passport and my Canadian Permanent Resident (PR) card and use the name on the card to find my train reservation on their list.
This is bad, as I booked my train ticket with my passport, which is in my married name. My PR card is still in my maiden name. They don’t like this very much and start firing questions at me:
- Where do you come from?
- How long have you been gone?
- Where do you work?
- Where do you come from (again)?
- When did you leave Canada?
- And so on.
I’ve always preached to Carlo the importance of having a rock-solid story ready when you cross any border. This time I’m not following my own advice, and now I’m getting burned for it. After question time they say they have to check my PR card and would get back to me. Off they go with my documents.
Photo: Trevor H
I wait patiently in my seat. I don’t bother preparing a story because surely they will come right back with my documents, I think. After all, I am a permanent resident of Canada.
Last time I checked, I have the exact same rights as a Canadian citizen, I just can’t vote. I’ve lived there for over six years, paid taxes, and celebrate Canada Day. And we’re talking about Canada for Christ’s sake. How wrong I was.
After 20 minutes of waiting, two different officers come back and ask me to take my luggage and to follow them into the little wooden trailer. Was I really that surprised? In hindsight, no.
There I was, with five officers (one female), a big table in the middle of the room and some plastic chairs. Through the windows I can see the waiting train, already behind schedule. I am officially frightened.
Two of them start to unpack my backpack and my carry bag, rummaging through everything including the pictures on my camera. The lone female officer comes back with my passport and asks me again what I’ve been doing since I got my PR card in 2007. I know I’m safe because I know my obligations to remain a PR.
As long as I am with my Canadian-born husband while abroad, I don’t need to actually reside in Canada to keep my status. And she knows it too.
But this doesn’t stop the next guy from picking up my passport and firing random questions about my travels. “What did you do in Mongolia? How do you support yourself? Did you work in the US? What are your plans in Canada”? He goes on and on.
At one point I almost lose it as they are really getting on my nerves. How hard is it to understand? For some people there is more to life than mortgages, babies, cars, and soulless jobs where you can harass the innocent. But I don’t, of course.
Photo: Barbara L. Hanson
The officer I first locked eyes with so many minutes ago in the train finds something incriminating. Or so he thinks. He finds my stack of Vagabonderz.com business cards and swiftly goes off to use the Internet. This is good, as it finally convinces them that I just like to roam the world.
They pack up my stuff and send me back to the waiting train. I was the only person pulled off. “Welcome back young lady,” a fellow passenger says to me as I board the car.
How this story can help you
- Try to mentally prepare yourself when face to face with immigration officers.
- When you pack your bags be very mindful of what you put in.
- Every little piece of paper I had was searched. I even got a raised eyebrow for my Stumbling on Happiness
book. (I guess as border guards you cannot fathom that there is actually happiness in this world?)
- Think of your camera. You might want to download and delete the nude pictures you took of your beach romance.
- Think about your hard drive on your laptop or portable device. Is there anything they can suspect you of wrongdoing (pirated movies)?
- While you travel, take notes when and where you have been and try to always remember the dates, at least vaguely.
- Or have a quick check of all your visas before you cross boarder. I was asked when and how long I was in Mongolia and what direction I traveled in Vietnam from my travels over two years ago. Good thing I have a sharp memory.
- Always keep your cool, getting angry doesn’t get you anywhere.
As we cross the St. Lawrance River and pull into Montreal the sky has changed from a blue with billowy white clouds to dark gray with rain and thunder. Bonjour Canada…
[Top photo: cuttlefish / Flickr]
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We crossed the canadian border recently on semi and the officer told us that we came too fast at the booth. He told us that he can take away my license. Do i like my job. Do i want to keep my job. I am going to kill somebody. I am crossing this border for last 15 years, never had any problem but this officer i feel was out of line. At the end he told us that he had added some kind of comments on our (both drivers) fast cards. Probabley if we make one mistake it will be taken away. One thing i don’t understand is how fast you can go, when you know you have stop coming. Why would the passanger get comments on his fast card. I find this was unfair.
I’ve traveled to 30 countries and the worst immigration officers are in Canada. They ask stupid question after stupid question assuming everyone who goes there wants to live there. For that, I could just lock myself in my freezer. They obviously train them to be assholes. It’s the only time, I’ve had each page of my passport looked at by anybody. I guess they want to see all of the places they’ll never visit. These people don’t make Canadians look good at all, which is a shame b/c Canadians are in general quite nice.
I came to Canada 5 years ago as a permanent resident. I’m now a Canadian citizen. When I got my passport I thought that I would be able to (finally) skip all the questions and ugly looks that I always got at the Toronto airport when I was coming back from visiting my family. How wrong I was. A couple of weeks ago I went to visit my family, when I came back, after a very long flight, the officer (a lady) wanted me to specify exactly what kind of gifts I had bought with the $150 that I filled out in the customs form, when I got the ticket, how I paid for it, how much did it cost, was I travelling alone and other questions like that. Is that normal procedure? because it really felt like I was receiving a ‘special’ treatment for not being born here. It seems like it doesn’t matter if you became a Canadian citizen, for the border officers you will always be an immigrant, a ‘second class’ citizen. If that’s the case, I may ask for some discount in my taxes. If I’m not going to be treated as the Canadian born citizens, then I don’t see the point in paying as much taxes as they do
Claudia, I am a naturally born Canadian living in the us and i get the same crap coming.home. its not an immigrant thing. Once I even got a Canadian visa stamp in my passport. Idiots.
As a dual citizen (both through naturalization) of US and Canada I always take pleasure crossing the border. I know that at the very end no officer can deny me entry on both sides. maybe delay me, but thats ok.
no question that they ask is stupid. is made in purpose to get a reaction on your side. make no mistake, dont get angry and play ball along with that officer that is doing his job. keep a track of what you are saying as this is a game mind. take nothing for granted and answer everything. less you speak better your chances of not being delayed. give answers that they like and make sense. convey your attitude through smart and concise answers. in a word try to fall in the box that they think you are belonging and reinforce their thinking by passively complying.
confronting doesnt help. have raised a lot of red flags when crossing with some friends car with US plates ( by myself), after living for a decade in Asia, and answering the question: how long are you planning to stay, with a smile and : I dont really know
went through a secondary inspection with a Quebecois hottie and a cute asian (I guess I was lucky that they were both female officers), which felt more like a threesome (after they went through my dirty underwear in my bag), rather than inspection, since they saw that my irony was getting sharper, and they had to let me go.
there is no surprise when there are customs issues involved, that they treat citizens same way as everybody else.
be educated and know what their manuals of conduct say: once established that you are a canadian citizen, it is their top priority to let you in the country without any delays.
on the US side never had a problem. Being born in the EU states, seem like it is not fetching the minimum interest in a secondary royal treatment.
bottom line: kid the officers with love, be in a good mood and smile, and go with the flow
Hi,
I found this article and some of the comments interestingly ignorant of the fact that border officers are employed to protect their countries from harm. That is their job. And as one comment cleverly pointed out, this job involves pushing people to feel awkward, uncomfortable, or angry, to get a reaction, or ellicit a mistake, especially from those people who are attempting to enter illegally bring in illegal substances. If those efforts make a person feel uncomfortable or angry or inconvenienced for a few minutes, oh well, stay home. I have crossed many borders, and have especially crossed into the United States and Canada many, many times. I have had very pleasant experiences, as well as a number of not so pleasant experiences with border officers for both the US and Canada and other countries, but I understand that one bad experience does not label all officers, nor the whole country. If I actually thought carefully of every border experience, I would have to say most have been pleasant experiences. I don’t at all think bad border experiences should immediately lead to insults of all border officers as “soulless” as the writer of this article has decided to do, in her determined effort to declare that anyone who doesn’t wander the earth as she does, rather than raise babies or pay a mortgage, must be less worthy than she is. I find it amusing that some people who “roam the world” as this writer does are so quick to decide that they must be so much more open-minded than others, and are so quick to insult and label others’ choices to live their lives as lesser and souless if they decide they are more fullfilled by surrounding themselves with family, rather than the next stamp in the passport, or group of temporary hostel companions. those judgements are not open-minded.
I actually had an officer give me a smile once … but its a very, very rare occurrence.
Had absolutely the worst experience of my life involving authority figures today. April 2013. Crossing the Canadian border from Montana I was stopped at the immigration desk and asked personal question after personal question, including how much money I made a year, how much money I had in the bank, etc. I was given the run around for a bout five hours, denied entry over paper work I don’t need, and never needed, threatened with arrest, and then my vehicle searched.
Oh and then the agent demanded I hand over my cell phone, whereupon she read through my texts, looked at my pictures, and violated my privacy in as many ways as she could think of. No, not an April fools day joke.
I’m here for work until Thursday, leaving Wednesday, well, she eventually realized my story was true, and that I hadn’t been lying to her at all, and gave me a one day trip permit to drive to Calgary from the Sweetgrass Montana Border crossing so I can drop this gear off for the show our company is here for. Apparently I have to drive the 4.5 hours BACK from Calgary to the border and leave tomorrow by 3pm. I’m also banned form doing any work in Canada while I’m here. Did I mention I am here for work until Wednesday? Not here to take Canadian work from locals, we hired a local Canadian business for all the labor and tech stuff, I’m just supervising my equipment, then driving home.
Looks like I’m going to have to go to the Embassy and a local customs office tomorrow to try and resolve this crazy scenario without having to drive all the way back to Sweetgrass, and then try to get BACK in again to get MY equipment out on Wednesday. Seriously, I have never been treated so poorly in my life, and I was a US Marine for 8 years, my drill instructors were nicer than this.
Do they even have the right to search my cell phone? I don’t know! They wouldn’t cite any code for me, only that if I didn’t do it, I risked “serious” trouble. I even requested a supervisor be present to help explain to me what was going on, he was indifferent and looked and talked to me like I was a common crimnal. Did I mention that I used to be a US Deputy Sheriff as well as a military man? True story, I’m so straight and narrow I make arrows look bad.
this whole experience has left me feeling sick as a dog afterwards and where I once had an idealistic image of Canada in my head, and thought of the country as my friendly cousins to the north, I am nothing but disgusted with how I was treated. I definitely want to file a complaint with someone somehow. The way I was treated can’t be acceptable! Though since i’m honestly not sure what rights I have as an American in Canada, I don’t expect much to happen, and a part of me knows that this is just par for the course up here.
Please don’t cross any borders. Make these bastards unemployed
Been into Canada twice and got the same treatment both times , questions repeated over and over and on the last occasion the officer gave me a hard time cause she thinks I wasn’t looking at her when she is talking to me. They need to update the Canadian entry system the U.S just do the prints and scans and they straight up know If you have a criminal record or have overstayed before which is a lot more efficient if you have no violations they just let you through. The problem with the Canadian system is that they tend to profile and presume every one is guilty before innocent. For a law abiding citizen this can be distressing as they start to feel like they have done something wrong when they haven’t .Its an out dated method of entry . Get some new passport technology Canada your method of screening is not doing wonders for the traveller experience and is a bad welcome to Canada. Not every one wants to live in Canada.And to the Marine in the earlier post sorry that happened to you man some people are just idiots on a power trip.
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