A Tale of Two Continents

The European Union established a border-free zone some years ago. Participants in the Schengen Agreement have done away with border and passport checks when moving from one to another. I was surprised at this a few years ago when traveling to Greece. I flew overseas to Milan and passed through Italian border control at the airport. It wasn't a big deal--my passport was stamped and I was sent on my to way catch my flight for the rest of the trip to Athens. Once I landed there, I fully expected to go through the same process again, and I actually spent three of four minutes looking for someone to stamp my passport and officially allow me into the country. It quickly became apparent that there would be no such process, and I was soon heading out of the airport and into the rest of the country to travel wherever I wanted to go.

This week, participation in the Schengen Agreement grew from 15 nations to 24, as Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries joined the party. If you land in Milan, as I did, you can travel to Athens, Paris, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Madrid, Budapest, Stockholm, Berlin, Lisbon, Oslo, Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Brussels, Reykjavik, and any number of other places without going through a border check once. Information and trade are moving around more, and so are people.

Contrast that to the new passport restrictions that the United States is implementing. The U.S. border with Canada, long celebrated as the longest undefended border in the world, has been getting tighter. Toward the beginning of this year, anyone entering this country by plane from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean needed a passport. They wanted to expand that in January of next year (a month from now) to anyone entering by car or ship, as well, but with all the local traffic coming back and forth across the borders, it was too much to do too quickly. So next months, U.S. customs will tighten up the restrictions to allow for some sort of government photo ID and proof of citizenship. An actual passport won't be necessary until the summer (on an as-yet-undecided date).

I don't want to put too much on all this, but I can't escape the symbolism that as the United States is becoming more and more removed from the rest of the world community, it's playing out its isolation in its border and customs policies. With the dollar falling, the war in Iraq having lost what little favor it ever might have had in the first place, and U.S. recalcitrance in the face of international efforts to address climate change, the last thing we need to do is make informal interaction even more difficult.