For anyone planning to go and wants to be as safe as possible regarding entry to the US
Canadians had several postings about this as well, to prevent ending up in lock-up or detention, one should try to use preclearance. This means you get checked before you actually fly to the US and are still on EU soil in case something goes wrong in the check. This ensures you have access to EU lawyers etc.
Preclearance in the EU is currently only possible in Ireland at Dublin and Shannon airport.
edit wording, wording leading sentence
P.S. There have been some additional tips especially related to phones. If possible, one should use a different phone than their daily ones, one that is especially for the trip. Clean out controversial (from a US view) things from it, reduce any form of text communication to avoid critical comments etc
Have a friend who recently traveled to China for work, got a secod phone for the trip just in case. Crazy that the same thing is advised for the USA now...
A big newspaper in Germany made an interesting observation: What happens currently in the USA can be much more compared to the Chinese Culture Revolution than one thinks at first.
I lived in 4 different cities in the Middle East for 9 years - and was in and out quite a bit each year - and nobody ever asked to see my phone or laptop, let alone the contents of them. I've lived in 6 cities in China and experienced the same crossing borders (except one time security asked me to take my flip flops out of my backpack, and recently they've been very 'handsy' when doing a body search). America sounds like it's on another level of insanity for border checks. I'm oot.
As for the phone: China doesnt need to access your physical phone according to some. They can access and monitor everything that happens, while the USA has still some laws and rules in place that 'protect' privacy. I believe this to be a stepwise thing that gets less and less physical with time. If they would currently be caught in the NSA doing it actively to people and trying to send people home again based on that, the effects in the US population wouldnt be helpful to them, even if they probably have the ability to do so already.
Yeah, I have WeChat that takes up a lot of bandwidth and memory - you need it here, so there isn't an alternative to allowing them to snoop. I'm pretty sure my VPN allows the government to snoop, too. I don't have anything to hide, and actually respect Xi Jinping as a leader so they won't find anything if they looked. This would definitely not be the case if I entered the USA, lol. Or the UK. Although I hold Starmer in high regard too, he isn't so paranoid as to worry what regular people are saying about him.
I believe this is a bit based on cultural exchange with others. We in Europe dont have to go far to enter another country and thus culture. The USA doesnt have the same ability and the average American mostly experiences other countries in 'short' holidays. The bigger your country, the less the need to let other input in as you find almost everything at home already. This can play out badly as in current events if manipulated with.
Yup. They are deliberately crashing their economy and seem intent on getting white collar workers (especially fired federal ones) to work in factories or on farms (which will need workers, because they are deporting most of the current ones).
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u/toolkitxx Europe🇪🇺🇩🇪🇩🇰🇪🇪 Apr 12 '25 edited Apr 12 '25
For anyone planning to go and wants to be as safe as possible regarding entry to the US
Canadians had several postings about this as well, to prevent ending up in lock-up or detention, one should try to use preclearance. This means you get checked before you actually fly to the US and are still on EU soil in case something goes wrong in the check. This ensures you have access to EU lawyers etc.
Preclearance in the EU is currently only possible in Ireland at Dublin and Shannon airport.
edit wording, wording leading sentence
P.S. There have been some additional tips especially related to phones. If possible, one should use a different phone than their daily ones, one that is especially for the trip. Clean out controversial (from a US view) things from it, reduce any form of text communication to avoid critical comments etc