What's the point of hand-filled immigration forms?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 10 Aug, 2023
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My understanding is that the forms primarily exist for two purposes:
- For tracking. This is increasingly obsolete as records become digital, and while bureaucracy moves slowly, some of these forms are disappearing: eg. the US paper I-94 is long gone and Australia no longer has departure cards.
- For making it easier to charge you with crime. For example, if you bring in drugs and state on your declaration form that you’re not bringing in drugs, that’s two offences right there, and it’s apparently often easier to charge you with the bureaucratic violation than the actual contraband. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937)
I do agree that the forms often seem pointless in practice: yesterday I dutifully declared I was bringing a meat product to the US, twice at that (Customs paper form and ESTA machine), and nobody even bothered to ask me what it was (jerky), much less inspect it…
In the UK, there are situations where the landing card is recorded – a so-called coded landing. This happens when, above the date stamp, you get a “custom” rectangular stamp with the landing card number on it rather than the plain-text 6-month stamp.
This happens when there’s been suspicions about a person they nevertheless chose to land, and always happens when a visa national is admitted for visa-free landside transit (until 23:59 the next day) as well as when a non-visa national is admitted for visa-free study for up to 6 months (short-term study).
As for the US, either the customs form or the APC/Global entry receipt has to be collected by the customs officer (for what purpose, I do not know) – hence the need to fill that one out.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
