4 ms·

>You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing wa

>You won't believe how many borders I've crossed without paying bribes, or for that matter how little attention to metrics or the goodness of people crossing was paid at the one border that did garnish their staff's wages with an unofficial dollar fee for everyone... While we're telling stories, here's two tales from me 1) Robbed at the Mexican border by police. They didn't even bother asking me, just took it. They get no real reward for jailing people so they were very happy for the $180 and then left me the fuck alone. 2) Enter USA. Passport, everything good, everything legit. Insane border patrol degradingly strip searched me, watched me as I performed bowel movements, jailed me, took me halfway across the state in a prisoner van, and then ran up $1k in medical bills while they search my body for drugs that didn't exist. Unceremoniously dumped at the border with no apologies when absolutely nothing unlawful was found. Still debt collectors chasing me for this. Now, which was fairer? Definitely getting robbed. The Mexican just wanted his reward. The US CBP could only get a reward by getting me arrested. Now do both societal models suck? Yes they do. But as a guy on the street, I cannot change society, especially if I am an immigrant presenting at the border to a country I've never been to in my life. What I can do is get robbed of $200, and be in a fairer position than getting robbed of $1k of medical bills and a day in jail I'll never get back, or deported while some officer tries to win some dumb metric. I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges. That is the reality I am dealing with. Not a made up la-la land where top-down society is going to be changed by the immigrant presenting at the border. Legalized bribery is relative fairness in this world we live, compared to many of the actual alternatives many people have on the ground where they are staring at someone who gets to play god and the only question they have is how they can maximize their rewards.

notahacker 1y ago
> I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges. I mean, why on earth wouldn't he do both if there's any incentive to do the latter, especially if he's dealing with individual immigrants rather than a people smuggling racket that might offer repeat business? You're accusing me of talking about "made up la la land" (i.e. the majority of the civilized world where border guards are paid flat salaries, not deportation bonuses) whilst inventing a society in which legalized theft from immigrants somehow results in border guards defying orders and incentives to scrupulously ensure all the "good" people get in.
- mothballed 1y ago
  Officers don't get a payout generally just for falsely arresting people and it eats up time they could be robbing someone else. It's generally more profitable to take $200 from a bunch more people than to burn a bunch of time falsely arrest someone, but more profitable for their career to arrest someone actually guilty than to do a bunch of robbing. Therefore in the USA corruption model you end up with a bunch of false arrests while in the LatAm corruption model you end up with a bunch of fast robberies but not so much the lengthy deportation/arrest of innocents based on the officer thinking that's the bigger reward. The way I've had this play out time and time again is my shit gets robbed in the third world but I have no problems entering, and the exact opposite issue with the USA. Of course you could point to say the Swedish model where as far as I can tell they have no incentive to do any job whatsoever. I've entered Stockholm straight on a flight from a sketchy part of Iraq and no one even bothered to look at me or even question where I was coming from or what I might have with me. Their border guards must just lounge in a room drinking tea and draw their salaries or something.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    The bit where a bored person checks your papers and maybe asks a basic question to gauge the awkwardness of your response is the norm for the civilised world and many other parts too, and doesn't seem less secure than shaking down arrivals from sketchy parts of Iraq for $200 but having no incentive (or other staff) to do anything else afterwards... But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      Look I don't expect to convince you at this point because we obviously come from two different realities. Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time. Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.
jacquesm 1y ago
I think this is very much a false dichotomy. Of course it would be much better if neither of these things happened.
- mothballed 1y ago
  A false dichotomy is thinking the alternative is border guards who respond without incentives, one of which is cash. There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. The question then is how to game their robbery to best help the rest of humans, not just hope magically they will be nice.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    > There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. I've lived in that world for many years.

notahacker 1y ago

> I want the border officer to have more incentive to rob me than to deport me or send me to prison for false charges. I mean, why on earth wouldn't he do both if there's any incentive to do the latter, especially if he's dealing with individual immigrants rather than a people smuggling racket that might offer repeat business? You're accusing me of talking about "made up la la land" (i.e. the majority of the civilized world where border guards are paid flat salaries, not deportation bonuses) whilst inventing a society in which legalized theft from immigrants somehow results in border guards defying orders and incentives to scrupulously ensure all the "good" people get in.

mothballed 1y ago
Officers don't get a payout generally just for falsely arresting people and it eats up time they could be robbing someone else. It's generally more profitable to take $200 from a bunch more people than to burn a bunch of time falsely arrest someone, but more profitable for their career to arrest someone actually guilty than to do a bunch of robbing. Therefore in the USA corruption model you end up with a bunch of false arrests while in the LatAm corruption model you end up with a bunch of fast robberies but not so much the lengthy deportation/arrest of innocents based on the officer thinking that's the bigger reward. The way I've had this play out time and time again is my shit gets robbed in the third world but I have no problems entering, and the exact opposite issue with the USA. Of course you could point to say the Swedish model where as far as I can tell they have no incentive to do any job whatsoever. I've entered Stockholm straight on a flight from a sketchy part of Iraq and no one even bothered to look at me or even question where I was coming from or what I might have with me. Their border guards must just lounge in a room drinking tea and draw their salaries or something.
- notahacker 1y ago
  The bit where a bored person checks your papers and maybe asks a basic question to gauge the awkwardness of your response is the norm for the civilised world and many other parts too, and doesn't seem less secure than shaking down arrivals from sketchy parts of Iraq for $200 but having no incentive (or other staff) to do anything else afterwards... But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    Look I don't expect to convince you at this point because we obviously come from two different realities. Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time. Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.

jacquesm 1y ago

I think this is very much a false dichotomy. Of course it would be much better if neither of these things happened.

mothballed 1y ago
A false dichotomy is thinking the alternative is border guards who respond without incentives, one of which is cash. There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. The question then is how to game their robbery to best help the rest of humans, not just hope magically they will be nice.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  > There is no world in which police don't rob someone, either via taxes/salary, fees, or bribes. I've lived in that world for many years.