px_eliezer_ To explain, NEXUS was a way for either a canadian or an american to cross the border faster, because of that easy of passage it had higher security requirements (such as fingerprints, interviews and other checks to verify the people were not up to some nasty stuff. Again to get that level of privilege to cross you had to, among other things provide fingerprints. For example at land crossings there is a NEXUS lane that NEXUS holders can get through much faster and with less questioning that a regular crossing. The point was that for the trade off of personal information you got better/faster service.
The US requires fingerprinting on arrival for other nationalities so I suppose its inline with that level of treatment of treating the rest of the world as an inferior class. Adds to the bottle neck at crossings, all those that wish to do more than 30 days will have to check in. From a boating perspective this means the few remote custom stations which are open will have to have fingerprint scanners added, all those on board will have to go through the process. Granted this is still far less hassle than what you have to do to check into some nations for durations less than a month.
IMHO it will again, (on top the ever growing list of reasons) reduce the amount of people that wish to visit or stay in the USA such as the snowbirds. Some may just sell and quit (if they had owned property - after all they are not getting younger, dealing with property after death is a PITA so this might be the trigger it is time to change) others that rented may not come, and still others will go through the new hoops erected before them and carry on. It certainly doesn’t encourage travel (or trade for that matter) but many will do whatever they have to do because they are used to going to such places and presumably enjoy it.
Of course for the low price of five million dollars one can literally buy their way in. It will be interesting if the “most transparent government in the history of the United States ever!” bothers to tell its own citizens who those sort of buy in people actually are.