Detained by U.S. Customs: Some thoughts about the future of work
I’m writing this from the Vancouver, British Columbia airport, where I am waiting for a flight to San Francisco after being detained by U.S. Customs for so long that I missed my original flight. A border patrol agent flagged me for “secondary inspection” because (as far as I can tell) I work for a company that exists only on the Internet and has writers — like me — who work from countries other than the U.S. Based on their responses to me over the hour or so I was detained, this seemed to confuse the agents I spoke with, and that got me thinking about some of the issues behind the future of work and how it is changing thanks to the web.
Ironically, I have been thinking a lot about those topics already, because I am flying to San Francisco in order to take part in GigaOM’s Net:Work conference on Thursday. The whole point of the conference is to talk about how the Internet is changing the way we work, and how companies and individuals need to adapt to these new realities in order to prosper. Among those realities are the fact that many companies — including GigaOM itself — have an increasingly distributed workforce, and that means employees who work remotely from different countries, both on contract and on staff.
So while I am an employee of GigaOM, I work from Toronto. But I don’t work for the Canadian subsidiary of GigaOM, because there isn’t one — at least not in the usual legal sense; and I don’t work in the Canadian office of the company, because there isn’t one of those either (unless you include my home office). Like many virtual or web-based companies, GigaOM has writers and other staff who work in all kinds of places, including Britain, Canada and a number of U.S. states.
Was it because I am a blogger?
Like many people who get detained by U.S. Customs when trying to enter the U.S., I don’t really know why I was flagged for “secondary inspection,” or why the border agent spent so long assessing my case (releasing me just five minutes before my flight was scheduled to take off). Was it because they were concerned that, by working from Toronto for a U.S. publication, I am somehow taking writing jobs away from Americans? Possibly. Or was it that by coming to the U.S. to take part in a conference, I am preventing worthy citizens from doing that work instead? I don’t know.
The first agent I spoke to wanted to know a lot about the conference. What was it about? The future of work and how it’s being disrupted by the Internet, I said. Who attends these conferences? Different types of people, I said — executives, entrepreneurs, anyone interested in work. Could I attend this conference, the agent asked? Sure, I said.
After being told to go and sit in a special holding area, where I waited for half an hour in the border equivalent of the DMV line, another agent asked most of these questions again: Who do you work for? GigaOM, I said. She wrote the words down on a sticky note. And what kind of company is it? It’s a blog, I said. “A “blog?” she asked, spitting the word out. Do you manage any employees? No, I said. What do you do? I write. About what? The Internet, I said. After another half an hour, with no explanation, she led me to the door: “Have a nice day,” she said, as she watched me sprint for the gate to see my plane departing without me.
The future of work is inherently borderless
I have no idea whether the agents I spoke to know anything about blogs, or whether they are aware of how the Internet is changing the way we work, and the way companies are organized, or how corporations function from a legal perspective. But they seemed to get hung up on whether I worked in an office, or for a Canadian subsidiary of GigaOM, or whether I was a manager, and what my exact duties were. The idea that I could just write about the Internet for any company located anywhere — including the U.S. — and get paid for doing it seemed to take them by surprise.
Am I taking jobs away from Americans by writing blog posts from Toronto, and should the U.S. be concerned about that kind of activity? I honestly don’t know. All I know is that anyone living anywhere theoretically has the ability to do what I do, for any company based anywhere in the world — just like anyone can be a journalist, or write software or develop apps or design products, or edit books or movies or music, or do a thousand other things that only require a PC and an Internet connection.
That can cause problems for governments, obviously, since they are used to seeing jobs as things that can be contained by national borders and put in discrete little boxes for neat categorization, so that the visas can be issues (and taxes can be assessed). But the reality is that many of us don’t live in such a neat and tidy world any more, and while that may look like a threat to some, it’s also a huge opportunity — and that’s part of what we mean when we talk about the future of work.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users CBP Photography and Wesley Fryer
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I read this with great interest as I have been discussing a job with my current employer that I could do from anywhere in the world. The more I look into it however, I realize that there are many issues and this is just another one.
There certainly are many issues…IT administrators are looking for ways to keep all of their workers (more importantly their devices) under control/well managed. Forethought is the key. Here are some ways to get started: http://bit.ly/uY0mt4
Great piece, Mathew. On the topic, I’m most amazed that contemporary businesses rely on basically 19th or early 20th Century technologies, like telephone calls and U.S. Mail, to communicate with customers. I always say, “You realize we’re in the second decade of the 21st Century, right?”
Telephone calls are almost always the BEST way to conduce business. Actual person-to-person conversations gets things done and decisions made far quicker than any “technology.” And please name some form of electronic communication that was invented in the 21st century. Even text messages are really just an update of the telegraph system.
Welcome to customs. I hate to break it to you, but customs getting into Canada treats Americans the *exact same way* if you’re traveling there for anything that can be even remotely construed as business related. They act as though you’ve murdered their whole family in front of them.
The reason they’re treating you that way is because if you’re entering the country for work, you need a work Visa (which I’m guessing you didn’t have and probably didn’t need).
While it may just be security theater, most of them take their jobs very seriously. I can’t blame them – if you got into the country without a Visa, were supposed to have one, and it was later traced back to them, they’re not only out of that job, they’re out of pretty much ANY job that requires any kind of security clearance with the government ever again. If your way of life depended on you not making a certain mistake, I’d be willing to bet you’d err on the side of caution too.
My experience is that they randomly hassle anyone traveling to the US for any reason other than tourism. Just about any wrinkle beyond a standard 40 hour work week “confuses” them.
TimC is right – its the same way getting into Canada. The Canadian customs… sometimes you just wonder: Are they just stupid?
I don’t get this. Magazines, books, and newspapers have existed for 100′s of years and yet the concept of an independent contract journalist/blogger is foreign to some people? How do authors, who have no company that they work for and have no real way of being organized into any occupational category other than “author”, get by with all of their “research trips” and signing tours? What I think is really at the crux of this, is the growing inability to make concepts connect across different contexts. It’s as if no one is capable of thinking outside the box. I’m betting that “Sanitation Engineers” must get grilled for potential nuclear secrets all the time, based on their current mode of thinking.
I get exactly what you are saying and as a teacher I see it all the time. In my opinion, this is the consequence of 20 years of an educational system based on standardized testing. Thinking outside the box does not work on standardized tests. Creative thought, curiosity, and (true) inquisitiveness are also not measured, and therefore, not encouraged. Also, security functionaries are famously unimaginative throughout history, so you’ve got that too…
I had very similar problem in Calgary flying to SFO – working for “branch” in Canada and trying to go to meeting. They wanted to know who I worked for, how long that branch has been part of US ownership, where my pay comes from, wanted to see my ID badge, etc.
Suffice to say, I don’t think you got called out for being a blogger.
I don’t think customs gives a crap about bloggers or virtual workplaces. You are not being singled out. You were being asked questions to see if you got nervous/angry/evasive. They could have asked you about any topic at all. They want to find holes in your responses and then grill you on them to see if you are hiding something.
That’s how it’s always been when coming to the USA; US citizen or not.
US Customs does not give a crap about the future of the workplace.
True, that multiple people asking repetitive questions is standard security practice. The idea being to trip you up and flush out what you may be hiding. A similar fluster the interviewee practice is common in job interviews.
I would suggest that you may have indeed been singled out. Go back and read some of your “net neutrality” posts, which are of a heavy political tone I personally find somewhat out of place in a technology blog. An American citizen making such posts should pretty much expect to end up on some lists. A foreign national? Working outside the country? Count on it. All those get the consumers to spend more analytics you folks constantly crow about come back with a reality bite. Welcome to the real world. You are free to post whatever you want, but you are also free to enjoy the consequences. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with whether these practices are right or not. But that is the state of things. And to become indignant over a reality check shows either cluelessness over reality, or some youthfull unearned sense of entitlement to be separate from it.
So you’re saying you believe U.S. customs harasses people because of things they write on blogs about foreign policy? That’s a pretty frightening view of the world.
I have done similar law enforcement jobs at airports around the world. Basically your looking for the unusual, the odd or something that doesn’t fit. These are possible indications of nefarious activities.
Knowing a fair bit about alert lists on the IT and policy side I can assure you that unless your a crim or associate, attached to terrorism, controversial, formally been caught out for breaking the law or currently suspected you won’t be on a warning list. Anything above that is paranoid.
The people doing this work in my experience are dedicated, have specialist skills, usually well educated (degree or above) trying to find the small amount of bad in the vastly bigger numbers of good.
I had the same problem last year when I wanted to go to San Francisco for holidays and visiting the Web 2.0 Expo. To me it seemed the problem was due to my “weird” name (arabic first name, I’m European) and being a blogger and webdesigner myself. I thought I’d be one of the few, was pretty furious to having missed my plan and once again answering stupid questions like “Do you have relatives in Russia?”…but it seems others have similar problems :)
Hey Matthew, I feel your pain! I just joined GigaOM as a full time employee and by complete coincidence had my interview for US citizenship on my second day at GigaOM. The interrogation officer, I mean immigration officer did not believe me that I only have one phone number, my cell and that I do not have a desk number. She kept asking the same question in multiple different ways, hoping for another answer. Someone needs to bring this department into 21st Century… As part of the routine interview questions she also asked me if I was or ever have been a member of the communist party. Does it even still exist really!?
The communist party? Aren’t most of those countries allies or bankrolling half the western democracies?! You should have answered: Yes, but I didn’t inhale!
Sorry to hear that, Jo — that is ridiculous.