People are quick to blame this on Trump, but reading through the comments on a previous article for this incident (http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/travellers-stori...), it looks like it’s par for the course to test someone’s knowledge on their claimed profession. Here’s a comment from one of the users:
> Had the same experience 12 years ago: admitted I am developing linux device drivers, and had to explain differences between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs. The guy actually understood it.
Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying. To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer without actually being in that profession.
Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”
There's plenty of professions a con can claim without this problem: an uber/taxi driver, hotel receptionist, child tutor, retail worker, farmers market vendor, stay at home parent, a convenience store, valet, or gas station attendant, a mall cop or bouncer at a bar...
This is classic security theater. Inconveniencing legitimate people while leaving gaping holes for any actual crook to exploit.
In politics and bureaucracies, orchestrating a perception is more important than instrumenting a reality.
Yes, but then that helps down in narrowing down the focus in border control. If you are arriving in US and declare "I plan to work as a taxi driver" or "I'm coming as a hotel receptionist", but you lack the appropriate work permit, it's a flag.
That's not what this is. First, this guy is in the US on a layover between Europe and Australia [1]. And second, these questions are being asked of tourists.
And before you say things are not affordable to people in those professions, flights are under $200 right now. A person of modest means could feasibly save up for an overseas vacation.
My theory is they have KPIs to hit and found denying entry based on challenging field-related puzzles is a decent way to do it. An indicator of how many actual thwarted espionage or terror events is likely harder to quantify (and for most, it's probably zero).
This may have been par for the course in the past, but the threat has moved on some time ago. Most of the 9/11 hijackers, we're talking 2001, were professionals with advanced technical degrees. Several of them had PhDs. Asking these questions may help with an imagined problem, but I suspect the value is limited in practice.
And it being par for the course does not excuse Trump from blame for having his departments use it in an arena where it has been proved ineffective.
I've been asked my profession a number of times on entering the US (as a visitor - not on a work permit). I'm an electrical engineer, but my response is usually just "engineer". Electrical engineering is such an incredibly broad profession, including everything from chip designers to radio engineers to power systems. Just how many quizzes is CBP going to have design to cover every branch of my profession and not deny an antenna designer entry because he doesn't know anything about power transformers?
I was entering the country with a friend of mine I'd been visiting in Jena, Germany (he's American as well) and when he was asked we both got to see the reaction to, "Numerical simulations of the n-body problem."
Wrong. I've been asked to explain details of autonomous underwater vehicles in an Italian airport. They don't care what your answer is. They care how you answer.
What is ohm's law? What's the difference between AC and DC?
Not very hard. It won't deter someone willing to learn EE 101 but will deter the guy who plans to overstay his visa and work as a dishwasher in his cousin's restaurant.
That assumes the border agents are familiar with all professions to come up with smart questions, or to understand answers that say the same thing with different terminology.
At best they will google "<profession> interview questions" and ask the first one, and do word-by-word matching on the answer.
For Electrical Engineering, the first one that comes up for me is "Why star delta starter is preferred with induction motor?".
>Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”
Hopefully for the estranged brother, Mr. Hitman doesn't happen to enjoy a photography hobby in his spare time. :)
Then again, high-end assassins are probably adept at photography anyways. Part of their job is planning, and that involves surveilling targets prior.
> Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying.
> To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how
> to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer
> without actually being in that profession.
Whether it's "par for the course" or not, this requires us to trust that every immigration officer in service is enough of an expert in every field of endeavor to A) come up with relevant questions and B) judge quality of answers.
The likelihood of that being true is incredibly low. What's worse, we know that typically people specialize within fields; a kernel hacker probably knows nothing whatsoever about using Ruby on Rails, but that might be the question the border agent googles up (or the web dev might get asked about kernel APIs).
Plus: making excuses for this makes you complicit in whatever evil it begets, so maybe you should stop making excuses for it.
It's not terribly hard to come up with bad consequences from people being detained/turned away/deported because they didn't pass the uninformed pop quiz of the border agent.
I understand what you're saying, but there are a few issues with this:
1. There are many accounts exactly to the opposite, non-US citizens having traveled to and from the US for decades without this level of questioning. If there is a policy change, then it should be clear to travelers; such a change doesn't just affect non-citizens, citizens working to bring in employees, guest lecturers, business associates, etc, are made to look foolish as well when they can't arrange the meeting. They don't have to publish the questions at all, but there should be some guarantee that the CBP is actually qualified to judge the answers.
2. Most of this should be done by the consular at the embassy when you apply for the visa, well before you even get to the border. CBP guards see dozens of persons each day with a wide breadth of employment backgrounds - is it really required by these guards to be that knowledgable in so many subjects to perform their duties? Or is it arbitrary checks based on what the guard themselves knows? The contention with this is that no one knows what the actual policy is, so it's hard to say whether or not the guards are doing checks they're supposed to be doing or if the guard even has the requisite knowledge themselves to judge a yes/no of an answer. A questionnaire for professions is equally troubling since, as many can recount with recruiters marking perfectly sound answer as "wrong" because the answers weren't what was written on the sheet, or the recruiter didn't understand the answer.
3. Some of the criteria are really strange for using to judge whether or not someone is telling the truth - the qualifier mentioned elsewhere in the discussion about asking someone's wife what her husband worked on seems pretty asinine; how many people from the DC area tell their spouses by requirement they work for the DoD and nothing more? How many contractors that land a government contract are 100% open with their spouses about what they work on? Certainly other governments have similar restrictions and NDAs for their employees/contractors. Or even once you start to get into specialized topics, how much can your spouse really understand about what you're doing if they're not in the same field? For a simple example, I work in just IT support, and my partner is fairly computer illiterate. If pressed, she probably could tell someone I work with databases, but not much beyond that, even though I've explained what I do at her request multiple times. I get there can be levels of validation here (does she at least confirm he's a programmer), but the validity of such a test question really depends on a lot of variables, and the value judgement of "how much should they know" will change drastically depending on very common circumstances.
People are quick to pin this on the Trump Administration because it is taking a very hard stance towards immigration and not addressing the issue at hand. While it may be individual guards being emboldened into getting this aggressive, the question becomes why is the administration not making a statement on it? Why has the CBP not made a statement one way or another on whether these are legitimate actions? With the EU planning to end free-travel for US citizens and the Trump Administration trying to play hardball with the deal, it's pretty easy to wonder why the current administration isn't dealing with something that a lot of people find to be ridiculous and wrong. With a president that is willing to tweet and comment about celebrity impersonations and individual news stories, it seems strange that they'd turn a blind eye to something that has a major impact on US relations with the entire rest of the world, especially since there are numbers to show that interest in US travel is declining.
As a final aside, international flights, especially trans-atlantic, can be pretty rough on sleep schedules and just in general. I just went from St. Petersburg Russia to Seoul, and I'm not sure that I'd be able to answer difficult questions about my profession on the spot without some time or resources. It's pretty bizarre too since entering Korea took about 30 seconds at the passport control. I'm a US citizen and I haven't even been able to enter the US that quickly in all my travels.
Except that this thing happens many times long before Trump and not limited to US.
comments in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741746 tells lots such story happens years ago.
True for travel, but I was more thinking work visa and other visas. I understand the article is about someone who was able to utilize the Visa Waiver Program, but this has pretty broad reaching consequences period if it's a unilateral policy.
> Had the same experience 12 years ago: admitted I am developing linux device drivers, and had to explain differences between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs. The guy actually understood it.
Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying. To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer without actually being in that profession.
Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator. Before you go, you’re given a fake passport and character sheet telling you your profession, your family situation, etc. It’s pretty easy to answer questions like “how long have you been working as a photographer?” or “how did you meet your wife?” but a lot more difficult to prepare for questions like “What is the best lense for close ups?”