It shouldn’t take an act of Congress to visit Peace Garden
POSTED: June 2, 2008
Sometimes change for the greater good brings ill effects where it’s not intended.
Somtimes that needs remediation.
That seems to be the case regarding the rigamarole people have to go through post-9/11 to visit the International Peace Garden north of Dunseith, located between the U.S. and Canadian borders.
While the Peace Garden itself does not require identification for people to get in, coming from North Dakota one physically leaves U.S. soil to get to the Peace Garden and upon re-entry comes the rub.
Required to get back home are either a government-issued ID and birth certificate, or, a passport.
The good folks at the Peace Garden are stuck in the middle, geographically, and between a rock and a government bureaucracy in another sense. Let’s hope visitation doesn’t suffer much as this goes on. It presumably would literally take an act of Congress to come up with some sort of daytrip pass for people who simply want to visit the Peace Garden for a few hours and not venture into Canada.
Lucky for us, we have three members of Congress who are not caught up in sex scandals or too busy trying to shake down oil companies to explore possible solutions.
We’re all in favor of border security, but not quite willing yet to shackle ourselves to documents meant to prove citizenship. And we sure don’t want access to a “peace garden,” of all things, to suffer as this nation struggles to keep out terrorists and other illegals.
