Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
But to play the devils advocate, there is probably an objectively lower risk factor for various border shenanigans when you're dealing with a clean-cut, Canadian born white guy. So I suppose it's not without valid reason.
|
I'm not sure this is the right way to look at it though. Even if you're a clean-cut white guy who always gets waved through, you're still paying for the border guards and you're still waiting in a line at the border.
It is better to think of this in terms of cost vs. benefit and the statistical likelihood of the various things that border guards might catch versus how much effort that takes and how effective they can be.
They are not very effective at finding terrorists through ad hoc questioning. It is impossible. Terrorists are extremely rare, and not that obviously different from non-terrorists. There are around 40 million legal border crossings per year and a terrorist attack happens every year or two (usually having nothing to do with the border). Virtually any test the border guard comes up with will result in a huge number of false positives, probably zero true positives, and a huge amount of waste. Most of their tests are based on the
last terrorist (e.g. one guy was a shoe bomber) so they are completely useless against minimally creative terrorists.
The car parts that people aren't paying duty on probably aren't even worth more than what it takes to pay the border guards to find them.
A 10-minute delay in average border crossing times at the Canada-US border wastes the equivalent of about 10 human lifetimes per year and costs billions of dollars.
I'm not against effective security measures (e.g. metal detectors at airports) but they have to be demonstrably effective, and border guards should not be given carte blanche to hassle people.