Reason 1,567,802

May 15th, 2008

Hot on the heels of the news that the US government drugs people it deports comes the cautionary tale of an Italian man who fell in love with an American woman and visited America one time too many to see her:

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit � meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon � eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

His crime? Nothing. Visitors from the European Union do not need a visum to visit the States, as long as they stay no longer than ninety days and don’t come over to work, but admission isn’t automatic, as the article explains:

Though citizens of those nations do not need visas to enter the United States for as long as 90 days, their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible, including a hunch that the person plans to work or immigrate, or evidence of an overstay, however brief, on an earlier visit.

While those turned away are generally sent home on the next flight, �there are occasional circumstances which require further detention to review their cases,� Ms. De Cima said. And because such �arriving aliens� are not considered to be in the United States at all, even if they are in custody, they have none of the legal rights that even illegal immigrants can claim.

Emphasis mine on that last sentence, which is a key reason why I won’t visit America in this lifetime. It’s an admission that everytime you cross the border you run the risk of being disappeared if some border agent takes a dislike to you, with no recourse available to you. Fortunately for Salerno he had friends in high places, friends who knew how to use their influence to get the New York Times interested in his story. But if you’re not a well connected citizen of an EU country, you’re out of luck.

Apart from the danger it puts any visitors in, this idea that because you haven’t been formally allowed into the US even though you are incarcenated on US soil, you’re not entitled to the protection of the US law and constitution, is more evidence of a worrying trend to hollow out these rights by defining more and more categories of non-citizens; the same happened with Guantanamo Bay, remember?

Categories: Civil liberties, Merkins...

1 Comment

Charlie Stross May 15th, 2008
There *are* two relatively safe ways to visit the USA from the EU.

One is to apply for a visa at the embassy. (If they turn you down, though, don’t even think about trying to use the visa waiver scheme afterwards.)

The other is to enter via Ireland or Canada. They have reciprocal agreements with these nations whereby there are INS offices at Dublin and Shannon airports, for example, and you can clear US immigration on Irish or Canadian soil *before* you enter the country. Which means that if they don’t want to let you in, you nevertheless don’t end up on their soil with no rights — they turn you back before you board your flight/cross the border.