Did Megan Draper need a visa to work in New York in the 60s?

February 20, 2024 2:51 PM

Stupid question has been bugging me. She's a Canadian from Montreal... did she just... show up?

And how come my uncle could take me cross border shopping in the 80s without like any letter or documents and it was just... ok?

In the 90s if I brought my car down after a move did I just... sign it up at the local DMV and that was it?

When did we start needing work visas? How easy was it for a Canadian to move to the US? When did we need passports instead of driver's licenses?

Basically is there any good website or resource on the evolution of Canada-US border policies for the itchingly curious.

Because having moved cross the border a few times now in the 2020s is like an anal probing omg (not in a good way). Thanks!

posted by St. Peepsburg to Law & Government (24 answers total)

It was only in 2009 that Canadians needed a passport (or enhanced ID) to cross the US border, before that you could use a driver's license (and maybe get away without even showing it in some places).
posted by ssg at 3:17 PM on February 20 [4 favorites]

How easy was it for a Canadian to move to the US? When did we need passports instead of driver's licenses?

I can't answer all of your questions, but I can give you some data points: I grew up in Canada not far from the border and in the seventies it was not uncommon for our school to go onto field trips for the day into the US: twenty-five or thirty kids on a school bus with nothing more official than our parents' signed permission slips.

I didn't have a passport until young adulthood (1991, I think) and I have never had a driver's license. I made at least a half-dozen trips to the US sans either in the eighties.

As late as 1995, when I was well into my twenties, I crossed into New York state with no return ticket. The border agent gave me some friction about whether I might be coming to take a job away from an American, but it turned out we had a shared interest, so he waved me through.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:17 PM on February 20 [8 favorites]

Anecdotally I went on vacation to Ontario all the time as a kid in the 90s (my aunt's mother owned a cottage) and my aunt and uncle were able to bring me across the border without any issues; I think we had a letter from my mom.

I believe the rules changed after 9/11. I was a university student and then on a work visa in Canada so I always had my passport and visa with me and was always asked for it (this was in the 2000s).
posted by tivalasvegas at 3:19 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]

To answer the passport part of your question — Canadians entering the US by air were required to have a passport starting in 2007 (unless they had a NEXUS card). By land and sea passports were required for entry starting in 2009. Prior to this, Canadian citizens only had to make an oral declaration at the border.

The new passport requirements were part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.
posted by theory at 3:24 PM on February 20 [2 favorites]

Ah, living in Buffalo during the 60s. It was easy to cross the border into Ft. Erie
.We always brought back fireworks, cheddar cheese, McIntosh toffee candy...and 222's which are aspirin with codeine. We had to hide them of course. Everyone who went to Canada usually brought some back with them...They were and probably are still over the counter.
posted by Czjewel at 3:51 PM on February 20 [2 favorites]

I grew up and lived in Buffalo; from the late 60s through the late 80s (when I moved away), all you had to do at the border (in either direction) was to answer a few questions, usually why are you coming (or why were you there) and sometimes where were you born. We went to Fort Erie (Ontario) for Chinese food all the time, and I don't remember ever being at the border for more than a minute, and we never had to show ID, coming or returning. Neither my parents nor I had passports until my Mom and I went to France in the 90s, so I know I'm not misremembering.

In the 80s and 90s, the radio commercials for various Buffalo bars used to say, "Canadian money accepted at par at the bar," so a lot of people were coming over and drinking!

I can't answer the work visa question, either, but I had elementary school teachers who commuted from Canada in the early '70s.


Czjewel, I'm a Coffee Crisp girl, but I'd forgotten McIntosh toffee candy. Mmmmm!
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 4:33 PM on February 20 [6 favorites]

Uh, you didn't need documents to cross the border until 2009, yes (US family with a Canadian cottage), but the border agents definitely wanted to know your plans, and if you were moving or working you still had to go through visa, etc. Any stay more than 6 months required a trip to secondary immigration. Sure, there was a time not That long ago when people crossed the border and it wasn't a big deal, but that was earlier. Lots of families (like mine!) had people on both sides of the border. But even my great aunt from Ohio, who married a man she met off a freighter and moved to Ontario in the 1930s? 40s? had to go through a long formal process to become a
Canadian citizen (and it seems like it wasn't formalized for a long time).

So, sure, we could declare citizenship and cross earlier, but US immigration would have wanted to talk with anyone moving to the states to work in the 1960s. Crackdowns were more lax (especially for Canadians) but she wouldn't have been able to legally live and work in the US without paperwork.
posted by ldthomps at 5:00 PM on February 20 [2 favorites]

The Wrong Kind of Cheese...I Had forgotten about all the great Chinese food joints. Also, Crystal Beach, a yearly visit. I luckily was able to experience the boat passage from Buffalo to some port in Canada for the Crystal Beach trip...Before the riots put an end to that. And yes, Coffee crisps...
posted by Czjewel at 5:20 PM on February 20

When did we need passports instead of driver's licenses?
The WHTI only applies to entering the US, but it was going to be in effect Jan 1, 2008. The passport process that year was so clogged up that the deadline was delayed to 2009.

In 2003, I tried to cross from the US to Canada in my own car. I brought my license and was told I need to go to secondary screening. They said I needed proof of citizenship and I replied that I didn't bring anything else because I thought my license was enough. I wasn't rude or anything, just a naive US citizen. The woman snapped at me, "It isn't!" and then had me pull my car into a garage. A man looked through all of my luggage and poked around my car with a flashlight while I stood about 5 feet away. It was a very amateur search compared to those you see on tv. They let me through, so I guess it was enough, or they had looked me up while I was under inspection and didn't find anything. I am sure that being a white woman helped. I had no issues coming back into Vermont a week or so later.

Later in the trip, I walked across the Mexican border where there is just a bridge and no one blinked at me from either country. Returning, I had to wait in line and show id, but no proof of citizenship and zero push back for not having anything besides a license. That was in El Paso.

I was under the impression that you had to be a citizen to get a license or that there was some kind of indicator on the DL for non-citizens. I know better now, of course. I've got a passport, enhanced license, and Nexus card.
posted by soelo at 6:16 PM on February 20 [1 favorite]

The passport process that year was so clogged up that the deadline was delayed to 2009.
Er, correction the passport requirement for air travel was in effect in January 2007. 1/1/2009 was the effective date for land and sea travel
posted by soelo at 6:23 PM on February 20

Presumably she arrived before the 1965 immigration act, which was the first time that a cap was introduced on immigrants from the western hemisphere. I don't know that it was very easy to immigrate from Canada to the United States in the early 60s but I suspect it would have easier for a receptionist than in later time periods.
posted by plonkee at 9:14 PM on February 20 [4 favorites]

My mother put my eldest sister on the Montreal-Boston bus when she was fifteen years old, and sent her to attend school there in 1970. She probably didn't carry any ID, but likely had some paperwork from the school. That first fall that she was at school, her roommate adopted a kitten that was part of a litter that had been abandoned at the school library, and then went home for a two week Christmas break, leaving that kitten in their shared room. The next day when it was time for my sister to go to the bus station to come home for the holiday, she knew the kitten would die if she left it, so she found a cardboard box, poked some holes in it, taped it shut and brought the kitten back to Canada with her. She had no trouble getting it over the border. A kid with a kitten? Sure. They waved her through.

While she was at school she was given a part time job, working in the cafeteria, to help defray some of her tuition fees. No green cards or any such thing was required, tho she did have to fill out a US tax return, I think.

Over the next two years, my mother first put my other older sister and then me, on that same bus and sent us each to take a holiday, by crashing with my sister at the student co-op where she was living. We didn't bring any particular id or permission slips either. We did have return tickets though and I think we had medicare cards.

It was probably about 1974 before my Mum decided that a note in adult handwriting should accompany us, lest they presume we were a runaway, and make us get off the bus. But this only happened after my twelve year old sister HAD run away. It didn't occur to anyone until then.

Remember, before there were computer databases to check no one could look you up without it taking a few days. They wrote down your name as they moved through the bus asking everyone who they were and where they were going and why; probably someone then typed up a list from the handwritten form. But faxing didn't come in until the later 1970's, so chances are a typed carbon copy got mailed to the border services head office, and filed, and if someone wanted to know when or if someone had entered the country they had to go into a filing drawer and read every one of those lists to see if the name they were looking for was on it. That was a lot of work. They didn't do it for random students and tourists and things who might be overstaying their visit. So random students and tourists could stay in the country indefinitely.

You could get away with EVERYTHING, and because they knew you could get away with it, they didn't make any effort to prevent it. Prior to 1968, children normally did not have ID's. If you were taking them abroad there was a page at the back of your passport where you could enter all your kids' names, yourself, and that counted as all the ID they needed to be taken overseas.

Picture ID's were not remotely universal, nor were they required. Birth certificates were valid ID. You could easily borrow a friend's birth certificate. It would be a sheet of paper, manually typed on paper form, possibly with an embossed seal stamped into it. That was the basic ID everyone had, and was good for any purpose. If you didn't have a complaisant friend with a spare copy of their birth certificate willing to loan it to you, you could just write to the City Hall of any city and request a copy of "your" birth certificate, by signing the name of the person whose certificate you wanted, and paying a small fee. Of course this was fraud and it was rare... but it was so easy, if you wanted to do it. My cousin won't loan me her birth certificate? Fine, I'll just get a copy without asking her.

Resident alien cards for foreigners living in the US were first issued in 1977. They had started having cards for people who wanted to work in the US in 1940, but if you weren't someone they would want to deport, you could get away without having one. Let's say you were a surgeon working in the US, but who had never gotten US citizenship. You could file taxes and you were in the clear. They'd only want to deport you if you were evading paying taxes. In the 1960's the unemployment rate in the US ranged between 3.4% and 6%. They weren't worried about illegal immigrants taking US jobs. They were worried about communists. They liked having lots of migrant farm labour that was unregistered, because if they were unregistered they could pay them under the table less than the legal minimum wage and that meant fruits and vegetables were cheap and Americans didn't have to do those jobs.

Earlier than all this, around 1958, my father, who was active in the Communist Party, had reason to be concerned that the RCMP in Canada might be intending to arrest him. He had been involved in handing out leaflets and attend Ban the Bomb rallies, you see. He didn't know if he needed to go into hiding or not. But there was a simple way to find out if there was an arrest warrant out for you, that didn't put you at risk of being arrested. You simply applied at the US embassy in Montreal, to get a visa to enter the US. Of course you didn't need one to enter the US, and ninety-some percent of people didn't get them, but they still existed. The US embassy was regularly given a copy of the RCMP's local wanted list. They checked the list, didn't find my Dad's name on it, and issued him his visa... and since he had the visa, my dad went and spent a couple of weeks in Pittsburgh, visiting some of his cousins there, who were working in the US, in entertainment. His uncle was a nightclub comedian, and the girls sang. His boy cousin, alas, got into crime, and so was deported after a short stay in a State prison. He'd grown up in Philadelphia, so he was deported back to a city and a country he really didn't know. He'd been sent to school and worked in Pittsburgh without anyone ever applying for him to get US citizenship.

One really common dodge was to sign up for things with a variation on your own name. We had a tenant in the late seventies who ran up his gas bill under the name Michel Bedard, Michel Besard, Michael Bedard, Jean Michel, and J. Michael Battard, all without ever moving. He would just claim to be the new tenant and open a new account without paying the old ones. But without a computer database to compare the name of the previous tenant with the old one, they had no idea.

It was a completely different era.
posted by Jane the Brown at 10:27 PM on February 20 [28 favorites]

Another adjacent N=1.
In 1981, I also made an illegal crossing of the US-Canadian border. My boss and I were on a field trip in the big old Ford Galaxy [a bit like Thelma and Louise without the cliff-edge ending] from Boston up north to Montreal, Trois Rivières, Québec, Bangor, Augusta and so home. We spent one night in Edmundston, NB fossicking around gathering data. Boss had spent a few teenage years just down the road in Caribou, Maine and so was quite at home. He suggested that we stroll across the St John River and get a bite to eat in Madawaska ME. We presented ourselves to the US Customs and Immigration with a strong waft of The Patriarchy about us. The official at the desk waved us through, we loafed around, had dinner and then walked back to our temporary digs in Canada. The US Visa on my UK passport clearly said, Student and Multiple Entry and I was definitely cleared for Canada, so we thought no more about it.

The next morning we were back again, this time with the car, the same official was unaccountably delighted to see us. It turned out that he'd got a bollicking from his supervisor the night before for allowing an undocumented alien to cross the border even if accompanied by a [patriarchal] US Citizen. According to the official record, the said Alien was still in the USA doing who-knows-what. My miraculous re-appearance from the Canadian side allowed him to balance his books. Seemingly, he should have made me fill out Form 1032/A/56 so that the number of Multiple Entries on my visa could be clocked for statistical purposes. Those were much easier pre-9/11 times especially to-and-fro to Canada.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:59 PM on February 20 [4 favorites]

I grew up in Seattle, and had a summer job for a medical insurance company where my mother worked. She did courseware on mainframes via 3270 terminals, and she had to do an entire module on The Alaskan Highway.

By treaty (at least at the time: I've not lived there since the 90s), all US citizens were permitted to travel between Washington State and Alaska unimpeded through British Columbia. This one specific route was patrolled by the RCMP, as well as both WA and AK state troopers, and anyone making specific journeys was considered to be "In the US" for certain purposes.

This meant that if someone had a medical problem while driving from Anchorage to Bellingham, pulled over to a rest stop, and was whisked away by ambulance to a hospital in Vancouver, that might be billable as a domestic US claim (despite all the currency changes and bureaucratic complications).

It's not quite as dramatic as driving to West Berlin in the 1980s, but definitely a novel situation for national borders.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:36 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]

I remember my parents taking us to Expo '86 when I was in gradeschool, by the way. I know I didn't have a passport at the time.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:37 AM on February 21

^rainy day girl, the writers didn't originally envision the character as French Canadian -- after hiring actual French Canadian Jessica Paré, that changed.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:08 PM on February 21 [2 favorites]

My (Canadian) father worked his way across half the US in the early 60s with nothing but a Canadian driver's license. At least part of that time for Motel 6 in California/Nevada (and would have been Hawaii if he would have got on an airplane). People were paid in cash, transactions were in cash, and while a big (small at the time) employer like Motel 6 might have withheld taxes he wouldn't have filed a return. He got the job in the first place by chatting up the owner in a diner; there wasn't any extensive background check or vetting of eligibility. I don't think my father ever had a passport.

As far as getting there or back for the most part you just went across. Even as late as the 80s it wasn't unusual to just be waved through in both directions if you weren't part of a profiled group. If they stopped you they rarely asked anyone but the driver for ID and anyone under 16 usually didn't have anything -- maybe a paper birth certificate.

Heck in 1990 I crossed into the states at xmas time in the middle of the night with a US citizen.
And while they gave me the fifth degree trying to get me to prove I wasn't going to the US for work (how do you prove a negative) the agents took the barest glance at my travel companion's paper baptismal certificate filled out by a priest 25 years before and made him go sit in in the corner with a "We don't care about you, you're American and can cross whenever you want". I only had a couple grand in cash and a Canadian driver's license and those weren't restricted to citizens (still aren't) but grilling notwithstanding they let me cross.
posted by Mitheral at 4:56 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

First, it's important to remember that land crossings and plane crossings are very different.

I think it's "always" been the case that you "needed" a visa to work. The example above of the girl going to school in Montreal probably had a student visa, which usually allows some work, with conditions (a common one being you can only work for the actual school, which it sounds like the girl did). Of course whether you were legally required to have a visa and whether you were actually required to have a visa to work are two different things, even today. My parents came to Canada and were able to start working under the table, I assume, while their landed immigrant applications were pending. This was in the 70s. They arrived by plane with visitor visas (yes, even in the 70s you couldn't just show up with no visa).

In 2012 I crossed into the US with no valid passport. I had a flight booked and then realized my passport was expired. I had a friend drive me to the Buffalo airport and flew out from there instead. The border guard asked me to show him something that proved I worked for [my employer]. I showed him a magnetic door card which had the name of my employer but not my name and he waved me through, without even mentioning the expired passport.

In 2006 I adopted a dog in Buffalo and brought him across the border. they didn't ask if I had a dog in the car, so I figured no need to mention it.

On the other hand, I once went to give a talk at a university in the US and was held up at the border by guards who thought this counted as work. THey googled the university's colloquium website to confirm I was really going there. They kind of had a hard time believing anyone would do this for free and I tried to explain "networks....citations..." but this was kind of foreign to them. When I said they WERE paying for my hotel, it turned into a whole thing about whether they would pay the hotel directly or whether I would pay and be reimbursed. I didn't even know the answer to that question since it would have been kind of tacky for me to have asked my hosts that.

But by by plane is a whole other story. That time I crossed the land border with an expired passport i assumed I'd be able to fly back because an expired passport is still legally proof of citizenship and as a citizen I have the constitutional right to enter the country. The airline said I have the right to enter the country, but they have no obligation to take me across the border and that they are fined for flying anyone without a valid passport, so no go. I had to fly back to Buffalo and cross by land again.

So I think the answer is it used to be a lot looser, but it's still kind of loose sometimes, especially at land crossings.

Oh, and there was that other woman who just went into the US and worked on a visitor visa.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:37 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

When did we start needing work visas? How easy was it for a Canadian to move to the US?

My great-grandmother was widowed with four kids in New Brunswick in about 1910 and eventually made her way to Rhode Island to keep house for a man there. The kids were left behind with her sister and she had a permit to work in the US (I vaguely remember seeing it in some papers). She eventually moved back to Canada.

Her daughter (my great aunt) eventually moved from New Brunswick to Boston to find work. She was a legal resident and eventually a citizen and was never actually a Canadian citizen since she left prior to 1947.

This was all above board, but the entry requirements were far less onerous. As mentioned in a previous comment, there wasn't the ability to keep track of people as much, so they just couldn't.

I have a copy of another great aunt's delayed birth certificate issued in the 1960s for a 1904 birth. She definitely crossed the border multiple times without having that documentation.
posted by TORunner at 9:18 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

In contrast to most of the above, in the 1980's my dad's Canadian partner had to apply to and attend grad school at NYU to be able to get a visa to live in the US with my (American) dad when he was transferred back from Toronto to New York.
posted by DarlingBri at 4:30 AM on February 24

Mod note: Just letting y'all know that this post was able to cross the border just fine and arrived safely on the Sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:54 AM on February 24 [3 favorites]

But by by plane is a whole other story. That time I crossed the land border with an expired passport i assumed I'd be able to fly back because an expired passport is still legally proof of citizenship and as a citizen I have the constitutional right to enter the country. The airline said I have the right to enter the country, but they have no obligation to take me across the border and that they are fined for flying anyone without a valid passport, so no go.

I felt the relationship was best summed up by what happened in the mid-2000s when a coworker forgot his passport on the way to a conference in Canada. He worried about Gitmo half the flight, but a very nice woman at customs scrutinized his California driver’s license, checked his photo on the lab website, and told him that it’d be a very good idea not to show up at US Customs without a passport for the flight home. Less hassle than our accounting department used to give grad students for not having itemized receipts in case their $20 dinner claim included a beer.
posted by adamsc at 6:46 PM on February 24

I just realised that saying my mother "did" these courses was a little ambiguous: my mother wrote courses on a CICS system. A lot of them were for simulations of actual 3270 screens, so that people could practise data entry for certain situations, but there were more general topical modules as well (such as the corner-case of the Alaskan Highway through BC).

But this leads to the hilarious point that my mother did EBCDIC Art for a living. She had to spice up some of the slideshow-style instructional screens somehow, and the technology afforded her very few tools.

I distinctly remember printing out some sections of an ASCII-Art UseNet FAQ that analysed some of jgs's artwork. My mother then took my dot-matrix tractor-feed ASCII art printouts to work, so she could convert some of the techniques to EBCDIC. The early 90s were wild.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:06 AM on February 26 [2 favorites]

I crossed the Canadian border into the US, in an old van, in Sept 2000 with a few friends who had very punky queer anarchist aesthetics, headed for a short arts gig. One of my friends is trans, with a passport that's marked with a different sex than their presenting gender. The border guards didn't even bat an eye or notice. It was totally no big deal and the guards were just bored and glanced at us - and actually I'm not even sure all of us even had passports in hand, and I found out later one of my friends also had some substances with them. Looking back I'm shocked at how easy and lowkey it was. I think it was helped that that group of friends were all white and conventionally attractive (well conventional looks plus alternative style), but mostly I think it was just that pre 9-11, things were way simpler.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 11:56 AM on February 28