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And also, one supposes, a good way to plant misleading business rumours.
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Some time ago my retired dad started a freelance gig that is basically all travel to all corners of the earth.
Honestly, the only assignment that sent a shiver down my spine when he mentioned it was one in the US.
I know that statistically I overreact and white doctors going on seventy are relatively far down the list of people America wants to hurt anyway, but the uneasy feeling remains. He can be a little abrasive and doesn’t always hide his contempt very well. (Basically imagine German Bob Kelso.) Unfortunately I could totally see him getting into trouble.
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Wants are about as frivolous as beliefs are. Why not ask about people’s ethos, or systems?
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As others have mentioned, those with nefarious intent won’t have a problem giving themselves covers. So what legitimate traveler would be willing to travel to the US with this policy in place? I suppose the kind of person who insists that we don’t need privacy if we’ve got nothing to hide and hands out their bank account information to Nigerian princes. Everyone else is going to give the US a wide berth if they can help it. Hell, I can imagine just the news that they’d like to do this will cause an immediate plummeting in travel plans, just as Trump’s election did and the blocked travel ban.
It’s absolutely breathtaking how much the US economy is going to get screwed over by the Trump administration.
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I think that word would be better used to describe how screwed over the environment is going to be by the Trump administration.
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A friend of mine from school just built a startup around the idea of helping people navigate customs and airports, foreign destinatons. Solve.com, I guess. Seems like uber for people with special clearance who want a side hustle.
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The Free Market finds a way.
Every day in Manhattan the passport office has about ten free slots for emergency passport services. These free slots invariably go to hustlers who shop up ungodly early and then charge people who show up for their services to walk them through from window to window.
The people in charge don’t care because “they got here first” and the hustlers don’t care because they’re just making a dime off your problems but it’s not like they’re trying to make a flight tomorrow. So apathy wins!
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I’ve read (here on BongBoing, I think) that US tech executives visiting China take clean devices to prevent industrial espionage by the Chinese authorities.
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“Phone and all passwords, please.”
“Sure! And here all my diaries of the last 5 years!”
“Oh no, again one of those post privacy buggers.”
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I forgot about exhibitionists…
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And the folks who the government employs to screen incoming visitors have such a wonderful record for honesty. . . .
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Sure, but if I have to get on a plane to get there, I’m a lot less likely to go. I’m not even in a most-likely-to-get-harrassed demographic and I still don’t want to do it. I’m going to San Diego this summer and I’m very happy to say that we’re taking the train (though I read somewhere that federal funding for rail might be getting slashed? WHY 
).
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Hi, white woman whose last name has a J in the middle of it here! I think you’re completely in the right to feel uneasy.
Now, if you’re German I’m sure you know most European last names with Js in the middle of them are supposed to be pronounced with a “Y” sound (using English phonetic conventions), and so it is the case with my name.
But ever since 9/11, I’d say two out of three times crossing into the US or leaving it, I wind up giving a TSA agent a brief overview of my family tree. Sometimes they just say, “How do you pronounce your surname?”
Bonus: it’s a weird last name for where my father’s from, so if I just tell them that and they know what the typical names are for that region, I get extra questions. All of which I have to answer in a friendly but deferential way without losing my patience or saying, “Look, I’m not Arab or Muslim, okay? Not that there’s anything actually wrong with that.”
Now, compared to the crap brown people who may or may not be Muslim go through at borders, I have nothing to complain about, but it’s profiling BS, and it happens often enough.
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Off topic, but John Betjeman had problems at school because of kids who thought his name was German, not Dutch (when we were having one of our periodic disagreements with Germany. One of the ones that involved actual shooting, not just sending over our joke politicians to insult people’s intelligence.)
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