| In addition to the legality issues that others have brought up, I have been asked questions about the details of my trip, which might be intended to weed out people doing the sort of thing you're asking about. "Which hotel are you staying at?" "Do you have an itinerary? Can I see it?" "Why are you coming here?" (With a weird intonation of something like, why would anyone come here to vacation? It's so boring here!") "What do you plan on doing while you're here?" "Are you meeting anyone?" "How do you plan to get back?" Etc. I think more often than not, the people asking probably don't even care about what your actual answer is, but want to see how you react to those questions, and if the answers make basic logical sense. I.e. "I'm vacationing for 2 weeks, but don't have a hotel.", or "I'm meeting friends and family at my vacation house, but I have never been here before." A person might not remember the address of their hotel for example, but they'll be able to give a general description without freaking out, "It's a Hilton in Albany, I don't remember which." I would imagine that they're trying to distinguish between the natural nervousness that people have with interacting with border guards, vs people who are trying to do various illegal activities. As a fun little sidenote: I actually got tripped up by a guard one time because he asked a weirdly phrased question, "Is this your vehicle?" I took that to mean, "Is this vehicle stolen?", so I told him "Yes, it is mine." (...because I had paid to rent it). He asked why the plates didn't match my drivers license. I explained that it was a rental, and he got very angry and said, "Well I guess it isn't YOURS then, huh!?" I didn't realize you could answer "Rental" to strictly Yes or No question! It was such a weird way of phrasing the question, because if I were to say, "No, this isn't my vehicle." the logical follow-up question would have been, "Why are you driving someone else's vehicle? Where are they? Why aren't they driving it!?" |