Quote:
Originally Posted by Morpheus
It's a little cavalier to say that $94 billion doesn't matter. Of course it does as per the comments of the US tourism reps in the article. It certainly hurts all those in the US tourism industry.
If this crossing is made more restrictive it will hurt both economies - I would remind you that Canada is the number 1 export market for more than 30 US states. Once again, the opposite of insubstantial. The question is, why would the US risk screwing up this huge mutually beneficial relationship? I would venture the answer - because most in Washington don't have a clue that this is the world's largest economic relationship bar none. Ignorance is a poor excuse for bad policy decisions. [/url]
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Actually I would venture a different answer. In a recent excercise to see how easy it is to get into the US from both Canada and Mexico DHS had people come in using false drivers licenses and state issues ID's. Only one person got caught, and that was someone trying to enter using a forged passport. In the US alone there are over 5,000 various official federal or state forms of ID that are currently acceptable at the border. There is no possible way the border guards can identify fakes in all those, and that accounts for just the US ones not the Canadian licenses. I know of no one who claims this will make us completely safe, but it will make us safer than we are right now.
As for the tourism industry, it isn't the US economy you are worried about, any more than it was the focus of Bailey's concern. It is the Canadian tourism industry. Approximately 20%, according to recent studies I have seen, of Americans have passports and that number goes to 40% among Canadians. In the lead up to the rules being placed on air travel the passport offices indicated there was at least a doubling of the passport requests that they recieved, in fact the went to a 24 hour work day and are planning on opening up a new facility to handle the expected increase. So it appears that those that have to travel to Canada, or know they will be traveling to Canada, are already taking appropriate steps. fact of the matter is no one yet knows the extent of the alleged impact on the tourism industry since the rule for airlines just went into effect and the rule for all other crossings won't go into effect until Jan 08 at the earliest. So in essnece all we are hearing now is typical spin and fear mongering among those that do not like whatever it is they are opposed to. THis is nothing new to us, perhaps you Canadians are not quite as familiar with the tactics of special interest groups.