Immigration lunacy watch: Canadian blogger strip searched

Via Tzuredzuregusa, it’s reported that a Canadian blogger who was seeking to offer his blogging services to a US company was strip searched at the US border by immigration officials who apparently don’t realise that blogging can actually be a means of making a living. The person concerned has temporarily pulled the entry on the subject off the air, after being advised that it might not help his case. His commenter “joop” writes that he had lived in dictatorships, and the most depressing aspect of living in dictatorships is the self-censorship, and his withdrawal of the story is more telling than the story itself.

This may well be the typically malicious and ignorant behaviour of immigration officials in many countries, or it could be the ratcheting up of US arrogance and indifference of how non-Americans see the country. They have the might, they can do what they like to non-Americans. It probably suits the US government fine that the Brazilians retaliate by inconveniencing US tourists in Rio, because it means more Americans holidaying in Florida (or some location with lots of American businesses) rather than Brazil.

Then again, the people responsible for this incident could have been acting on personal prejudice or some agenda of their own rather than actual US policy. In 1998, some Muslims of a Sufi inclination alleged that foreign speakers coming to address their Unity Conference were encouraged by Wahhabis working at Dulles airport not to go to the conference as it was a “kufr and shirk” (disbelief and idolatry) conference. I’m not suggesting that this sort of infiltration is what happened here, simply that this blogger ran up against a set of prejudiced and paranoid immigration officers. These morons appeared not to know that you could talk to someone these days without the aid of a telephone – I mean, how do you do that?

A couple of years back I found a list, on a website which contained a spoof of Abu Hamza’s Supporters of Shari’ah website, of email addresses which were alleged to belong to terrorists. The list was actually the subscribers to the Islamic News and Information Network (ININ), a pro-Palestinian mailing list which ceased operations a couple of years back. The individual is a blind friend of ours, and I had gathered from reading things she had written both before and after her conversion to Islam that she couldn’t possibly be a supporter of any terrorist organisation, and I posted an email about it to another mailing list. One of the goons (and I did not know that one of them had subscribed to this list) replied that the FBI had contacted them to ask how a blind woman could read her email. We had ascertained that the spoof website was based in Scotland, so this moron imagined that the FBI would contact people in Scotland to find out about blind people in the USA, when there were two blind people’s organisations in DC they could have contacted. We never actually found out who these idiots were – and no, I don’t think it was Mossad, they were too thick – but it just goes to show that some people are still living in the early 1990s (or earlier) in terms of their awareness of modern technology.

In this country, people intending to enter the country have to prove that they are eligible to enter, and in some cases, immigration officers make assumptions that people have come to work illegally, as in this case described by a former British immigration officer in the Observer. For another example of immigration officials’ attitudes, this article (currently free, this may well change) in the present edition of Prospect (a British liberal publication) reports that one Afghan was refused asylum in the UK because it was assumed that he was not really Afghan, but Pakistani. This arose because of the stock questions they asked him, including the proper name of Kabul airport. Locals call it Kabul airport, not its official name of Khwaja someone-or-other after the district in which it’s actually located. (By the way, this happened at Lunar House in Croydon, which is part of London with its five airports – City, Heathrow, Luton, Gatwick and Stansted.)

Those of us living “behind” the immigration lines generally have no idea of how these departments operate, and I’ve received more than one request from people in Muslim countries to get them into this country. Having never been an immigrant, I can’t possibly help anyone with immigration, and this is the main reason why I’m apprehensive about bringing a future wife to this country. I know for a fact that British people have emigrated due to difficulties with bringing their spouses here. These kinds of actions are the logical result of the anti-immigrant hysteria whipped up by governments and the media, and people often only realise it when it’s their family and friends who are affected.