I was grabbing a quick bight at my favorite taco stand yesterday and I actually overheard three Asian people talking about pretty much exactly this.

It does seem a little intense that those random not exactly high paid, under a lot of stress border guards have so much sway and phone searches at travel points need significantly tight controls. But I’m also not against a bit of a clampdown. People can be a tad laissez fairy and entitled when they travel.

So there were three Asians sitting by me. I’m going to guess they were Korean because that’s where one of them seemed to indicate they were from. Two were a couple who had been traveling together so it’s possible the third was a local, although I got the impression they were all travelers.

The one asked the couple how Chicago was and the guy said, “It all went as planned but you need some drama. When we flew into LA, they asked grilled us on all sorts of questions.”

The woman chimes in, “I had just written on the form for destination LA and the he asks, ‘what city is this?’” Then the guy also mentions they had been to Shanghai and they got ask questions about that.

None of that exchange seems terribly out of line with my own experience in Europe. But in just the same way as my traveling in Europe showed me...

This whole process of last minute boarder and travel checks seems very WWII levels of archaic to me. Why is this “good old fashioned police work,” being conducted by these gruff dudes at the check stand? Traveling is stressful enough.

Why aren’t these tasks performed at the Visa issuing level? It seems like a good old mission creep power grab to me where existing departments just try to get more and more power for themselves while no one has their eye on the overall system.

All I know is, this thing with civil rights disappearing at the boarder has got to go. It’s not conducive to an open, growing economy and flourishing society.

At the same time, I’m open to certain people from certain countries being more highly scrutinized. It’s a small percentage, sure, but it’s also a sad fact that we have allies and enemies and there are Chinese business interests actively attempting to steal tech secrets and other people in other parts of the world who mean us harm.