4 ms·

> 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

> 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.
    - notahacker 1y ago
      I'm perfectly happy to believe that in your actual reality the world's most paranoid, politicised and expensively resourced border control had more time to make your life a misery than frontline guards (apparently without any backup to deal with jailings) in another country whose interest in foreigners began and ended with the assumption most of them had more cash than them. I just don't believe the theory that if only US frontline border control staff were given leeway to pinch the contents of wallets they'd completely forget the national 'security threat' obsession, and all those people hired specifically to deal with alleged smugglers and terrorists sent to them by frontline staff would sit and twiddle their thumbs and absolutely nobody would care at any level. Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.
      - mothballed 1y ago

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.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    I'm perfectly happy to believe that in your actual reality the world's most paranoid, politicised and expensively resourced border control had more time to make your life a misery than frontline guards (apparently without any backup to deal with jailings) in another country whose interest in foreigners began and ended with the assumption most of them had more cash than them. I just don't believe the theory that if only US frontline border control staff were given leeway to pinch the contents of wallets they'd completely forget the national 'security threat' obsession, and all those people hired specifically to deal with alleged smugglers and terrorists sent to them by frontline staff would sit and twiddle their thumbs and absolutely nobody would care at any level. Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.
    - mothballed 1y ago