By Former Agent
08/17/2023
I received the following letter from a friend who recently visited China:
Chinese EXIT Control, or what you do in a serious country:
Upon leaving China for America out of Shanghai Pudong airport, we went through the Chinese version of what’s called Exit Control. I didn’t see it coming, as we’d already had our passports looked at by security (then, later on, BTW, 3, yes, THREE times by the departure gate).
The idea is to keep track of people leaving your country, China, in this case, by scanning passports, taking facial photos and even looking at the visas we had for entry. The point is, if it’s known who enters and who leaves, then the small amount of accumulation of non-immigrant entrants* can be determined. Your country can be considered a control volume, in the engineering sense, so ΔP = P-in — P-out + P-generation (births — deaths). In the case of people, they aren’t just numbers but specific individuals who can be found and deported for illegally overstaying their visas, with the likely threat of being banned from further entry in the future.
It took me a second, but when it came to me what this checkpoint of sorts was about, I remarked to people next to me in the short line, “This is exit control. This is what you do in a serious country.”
Not only are they serious about who resides in their land of over a billion Han people, the Chinese have it good when it comes to rooting out visa overstayers once they easily determine who they are. Because they don’t have masses and masses of unassimilated foreigners, finding some “White ghost” who was supposed to have left is much easier than it would be for American authorities, even if they made an effort, to root out some illegal Chinese guy working at a restaurant along with a million others in one of the New York Chinatowns, or even in Anytown, USA. (The number of Chinese illegal aliens in America is big.)
* And China doesn’t allow very many immigrant entries, best I can see.
A couple of thoughts on that. First, the 9-11 Commission had recommended that CBP check outbound passengers too. This is called “Exit Tracking” — the 9-11 attackers were visa overstayers. However, that was one thing that was never implemented. I believe this was because it would more accurately show who is overstaying their visas and the open borders Bush and Obama administrations didn’t want to know, especially since it could potentially accurately identify the names of the individuals who overstayed their visas.
Secondly, about the Chinese easily being able to pick up white people overstaying a visa, the Border Patrol used to do that sort of profiling. We were taught not to do that when I went through the academy as it would get thrown out in court. However, older Agents (dinosaurs) would sometimes put in their justification for a vehicle stop something along the lines of “Saw three Mexicans driving north from the border. They didn’t make eye contact with me, so, I initiated a vehicle stop.” (I’m oversimplifying a little.) China can still do that since it’s pretty obvious who is not Chinese at a glance. In America, it’s no longer possible to do.
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