US Customs and Border Patrol

Ethel and I went to Austria this summer for vacation (the one in Europe, not the one in the southern hemisphere). Surprisingly enough we were able to book our flights using her frequent flier miles - it only took about three hours total of phone time, and a bunch of very helpful airline (Lufthansa and United) employees - more on them another time.

Everything about the trip was great. We saw friends, family, ate good food, drank great beer, etc. It didn't even matter that it rained 10 days out of 10 days. The only "problem" with the whole trip happened when we landed in Seattle and tried to go through immigration.

Holy Crap! Never before have I seen so much incompetence packed so tightly in a small place.

Ethel's a green card holder, and I'm a good old boy, citizen of the U.S. of A. I'm so 'merican, I might as well be from Alabama (but thankfully I'm not). There were six or so different lines in the immigration area - one labeled "US Citizens," and the other five labeled "Visitors."

Ethel's not a citizen, nor is she a visitor, she's a resident alien. In San Francisco, we always get in the "US Citizens and Resident Aliens" line, so we did the same thing in Seattle, assuming they were trying to save money on printing ("it's $0.75 per letter Jan"). The line moved quickly - after 10 minutes, we were near the start - woohoo..

Then one of the immigration officers said something about this line being ONLY for US Citizens, not resident aliens, etc. And then we noticed small 8.5x11 sheets of paper taped to the immigration booths saying the same thing - professional looking - right down to the yellow highlighing scribbled on parts to draw attention to it. Pity these signs were not at the END of the line where we would have seen them before waiting..

So we moved over to line 5.. Sadly, we were at the end of the line. And there we sat, at the end of the line. Literally only about two people were ever behind us in the line ever again. We were in that line for over an hour.

Why was it so slow? Simple.. Stupidity. The US Citizen line went quickly because processing everyone was simple - look at the passport, stamp it, look at the customs declaration, scribble on it, off you go. The "Visitors" line, on the other hand was littered with people with all sorts of issues. There were the people who had been outside the country for more than a year (a no-no if you are a resident alien), there was the gaggle of Korean teenage girls, processed individually, 10 minutes per child, all claiming to be here to work for the summer on an internship at restaurants (yeah, I'm thinking "prostitution" too).

And so on.. What the hell were they thinking..

Of course, when we were finally at the front of the line, we asked - what were you thinking (toned down from "what the f*ck are you thinking, are you people idiots?").. And "Helen" explained - non-US Citizens need to have their pictures taken and get fingerprinted, so they can't go in the other line, this includes resident aliens - a new procedure, starting in 2009.

Ethel said "but I flew into San Francisco in March, they allowed resident aliens in the US Citizens line." Helen ignored her. A good approach when faced with facts - ignore them. Maybe Helen was a Creationist at heart?

We pointed out to Helen that her colleagues were now, in fact, doing exactly that - processing "foreigners" in the line that had previously been used to process US Citizens (that line had emptied of US Citizens 45 minutes earlier). She seemed to not follow this, nor to see the cameras and fingerprint machines in those lines. Facts don't work, logic doesn't work. Thanks for playing along Helen, there are some nice parting gifts for you backstage.

I had a few minutes the other day and decided to go off in search of this "policy" that Helen mentioned. I found tidbits about the fingerprinting and pictures, but that was it, nothing that spelled out that resident aliens couldn't be processed alongside US Citizens.

But I did find the most amazing news release - apparently from less than a week ago, describing a "Model Port" initiative to make our ports of entry more friendly to visitors, to improve signage, to be more professional, to speed people through, etc. Amazing. Right there, at the bottom of the news story - Seattle is a model port. Excellent. I particularly like that the 8.5x11 inch pieces of paper are considered "improved signage" - I wonder what they had earlier..

The other thing I found on the border patrol web site was a "wait time" application. Simply select the airport code, a date, (ignoring javascript messages along the way) and magically you see the wait times. For grins, I put in the date we were there - June 27, 2009. The site said the maximum wait time was under 30 minutes - I guess they divided the hour that we had waited by two (because there are two of us?) to come up with that?