Crossing the Border
On my way back to Vancouver from CISSE, I ran into a border guard who asked me for proof, such as an airline itinerary, that I intended to leave Canada. Not having any such documentation (I ceased carrying printouts of my airline itineraries since I have never been asked for them), I could only assert that I had stable employment in the US and no long-term plans to remain in Canada. At this point, we were at an impasse, since he had no way to verify my intent, and I had no ready way to prove it to him.
His worry was obvious: I am one of those people who are highly mobile, with almost no fixed address or infrastructure holding me to a particular country or location.
Even if they were to pull me into secondary screening and look at the electronic copies of my itinerary, my intent could have been to simply abandon my ticket home. My point is this: beyond some in-depth interview, no paper can prove what my intent might have been.
This incident highlights just how difficult border access control can be: guards are tasked with divining the intent of visitors, travelers, and citizens. Intent is a complex, multi-layered thing with an important temporal component. Border guards must try to understand both long-term and short-term intent as well as any potential security threat or otherwise illegal status. In the course of a one minute conversation, they tend to do this fairly well (from my perspective: I have never been refused entry or even pulled into secondary screening in either direction).
In any event, the guard let me go with a strong admonition to carry such proof in the future and make their job easier. But now that the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative is in full force (i.e., passports required for even land travelers), will border guards be forced to turn more to other secondary documentation to prove intent? How reliable is this documentation at predicting, conveying, or verifying intent?
Might their job previously have been made easier by the diverse array of identification (keeping in mind that identification has little to do with intent) material presented before WHTI? Now that everyone has a passport, that identity “feature” is more homogeneous, and thus carries less information. At the end of the day, allowing someone into a country is ultimately a trust decision.
