Jamie

Weinstein

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September 1, 2009

Border Control: ‘What’s Your Major?’; Terrorist: ‘OK, I Give Up!’

I have been noticing for some time that some of the security measures taken by immigration officials in the United States and the United Kingdom are, well, a tad bit silly. 

I began to notice something strange back in 2003 when I was a freshman in college. Some friends and I decided to take a weekend jaunt to Montreal, a short five-hour drive from Cornell University where I was then an undergraduate. We hopped into my car and were on our way.

A couple of hours into the trip, right before we reached the Canadian border, one of my friends informed me that he only had a Cornell ID with him and asked whether that would be OK. Not thinking he was serious, I chuckled a bit. But he wasn’t joking. We were two hours into our journey and I was only now being told that he not only did not have a passport with him, but he didn’t have his driver’s license.

He was going to try to get into Canada with a Cornell ID.

Before September 11, one could safely assume that they would get through the Canadian border if they had a hockey puck or a Wayne Gretzky trading card for identification, much less a Cornell ID. If you had hockey sticks, you were probably just assumed to be Canadian – and often better armed than the people protecting the Canadian border.

But we were traveling to Canada in a post-Sept. 11 world. And to make matters worse, the United States government had just raised the terror threat warning for that weekend. One would think this would mean that the Canadian border would become less porous as a result, and that our Canadian adventure would end before it even began.

Shockingly, we all got in without much problem.

"OK," I thought, "we got in. But this is Canada. Who would want to attack Canada? Terrorists, like most Americans, are only vaguely aware that the country exists" (I’m kidding, Canada. Keep that maple syrup coming). Anyway, I suspected that our journey back into the U.S. at the end of the weekend would be a much more difficult process.

Well, I don’t remember the Cornell ID being a problem (again, shockingly), but I do remember the conversation with the U.S. border control agent that transpired. I remember it because it was the first time I encountered a bedeviling question that I would come to know well.  

After we told the border agent our reason for being in Canada and our intention to return to our college in our home country, the border agent pounced. He said something along the lines of, “College students, huh. What is your major then?” After I answered, he proceeded to ask the question to everyone in the car. 

I know what you are thinking. How did we ever make it back into the United States having to answer such a question? Since, luckily, we were all not lying about going to college and none of us were terrorists (I think), we somehow managed to provide a reasonable answer to the “what is your major if you are going to college” query and proceed into the United States. One could only imagine the difficulty that question would pose for would-be terrorists trying to sneak across the border posing as American college students.

As it turns out, this brain buster of a question is not only found in the repertoire of American border control agents. The British also use this question in an effort to catch terrorists posing as foreign university students.

As a graduate student in London with a student visa over the last year, whenever I returned to the UK from a trip, I’d face the very same stupefying query I faced in 2003 at the U.S.-Canadian border. Since I was still not a terrorist and actually a legitimate master’s student at a British University, I could fortunately muster up an answer to the question. But one can only imagine what it would be like for a terrorist posing as a student. It must go a little something like this.

Terrorist Posing as a Student (TPS): Hello, Ms/Mr. Border Agent. I am a foreign national studying in London. Here is my student visa with my passport. (TPS smiles broadly below his husky mustache.)

Border Agent (BA): A student, you say? What are you studying?

(TPS’s smile instantaneously fades.) TPS: Uhh. Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. Fine. I give up. You got me. Our training did not prepare us for such a bedeviling question. I confess: I am a terrorist just posing as a student.

BA: Works every time. Officers, we have a pick up on aisle five.

Through my poor attempt at humor, I do not mean to completely belittle this strategy, but it does seem a bit ludicrous, doesn’t it? Has this question ever caught a single terrorist or criminal sneaking into the U.S. or the U.K.?

There is merit to the idea of aggressive questioning like what the Israeli airline El Al does to each one of its passengers, and if done properly by trained analysts of human behavior, it can probably help catch some would-be saboteurs. But this doesn’t seem to me what is happening with border control’s favorite question. Hopefully America and Britain’s other anti-infiltration strategies are a little better. It’s probably best they go back to the drawing board with this one.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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