If you ever want a headache, try to figure out how customs & immigration works in Star Wars.
#they have /smugglers/ which means they must have /customs/#except how do you do borders IN SPACE#rogue one gave us the shield gate above scarif which I appreciate#but it’s clearly not the norm and meanwhile we have rebel spies landing on occupied planets without having to deal with any security#anyway mostly this is just silly complaining but I do think it’s reflective of who writes these stories#(and who in our own world crosses borders relatively unimpeded)#that this is an issue the narrative takes for granted #star wars #worldbuilding#writers problems #my posts
(tags from OP)
Ok I don’t know TOO much about Star Wars, but I totally agree that the writers are sort of hand-waving space customs. The thing is if you DO think about it for a bit, it’s actually really interesting!! And could make for some cool stories (some of which probably should have been in Rogue One, my favourite imperfect entry in the franchise).
Speaking very, VERY broadly, there are two reasons for an illegal border crossing. Either a person is looking to be in a different place (maybe because they are fleeing persecution), or they are looking to sell goods illegally there (in Canada there’s a huge market for illegal cheese, so that is my example). It’s easier to move a family of four refugees than a ship full of illegal cheese, but the stakes are much higher for the family if they get caught.
So, the problem as written is “how do you do borders IN SPACE”. Space is big, so how do you police it? Planets are big, so how do you make sure everyone on the planet is there legally, bringing legal goods?
The thing is, most of that big space is useless to the smuggler. Sure, they could move through empty space undetected, but nobody is looking to purchase cheese there. You would need to go to a city – or at least a settlement – to sell cheese. Even if you’re moving smaller cargo (say, cheese that might fit in a briefcase), you still need people to buy it from you. This would be particularly necessary on a planet like Tatooine, where it’s extremely hard for people to live outside a city because there’s no way of getting water otherwise. In theory you could land in the desert somewhere and haul your cheese in, but to counter that, border security wouldn’t need to police all of Tatooine – just its major settlements. They’d need some kind of check for people entering on foot, and policies for ships landing from space. (Because ships are Big, there would probably be designated landing areas for them – airports, basically. Starports?) Of course, some cities (depending on who controls them and how many resources they have) would have a much harder time checking everything, in which case you’ll end up with some cities that are very secure and some that are more lawless and therefore more tempting to cheese smugglers.
And in that case, you’re going back to the rules of traditional pirate smuggling. Earth pirates worked the same way: the ocean was big and hard to police, but eventually you’d have to bring your cheese to a port because whales do not have gold to buy cheese with.
I think the big difference in Space would be in the movement of refugees, or other people looking to move from planet to planet without tipping off the authorities. Unlike the smugglers you don’t necessarily need a city for this, if all you’re looking for is to start a new life – although even then you wouldn’t want to land in the middle of nowhere – but you do need to stay in that place, which presents a new series of challenges. Simply put, the differences in city size, city resources, and relevant regulations would mean that some cities would be extremely hard to sneak into and live in, particularly if there are patrols who Need to See Your Identification. Others, however, would eventually develop an extremely varied culture because of the movement of people. Again, Tatooine seems to be like this – there’s such a huge mix of alien races there and not a lot of regulation.
But all this variety has such potential for neat stories! In Space you could do anything from an Ocean’s 8 style pulp film about people trying to smuggle a briefcase of cheese into the most impenetrable city in the galaxy, to a novel about refugees in the hold of a smuggler’s ship, landing on a planet they are unfamiliar with, and trying to gain a foothold there without alerting the city’s ill-equipped and underfunded guard or its controlling crime families.
I fully expected roughly three people to comment on this post, so I am delighted to discover that Space Customs & Immigration is not as niche an interest as I assumed it would be.
But yes! The storytelling possibilities are endless and I do have actual nerd thoughts/headcanons on this subject, for anyone who’s interested.
The first one being that everything we see onscreen implies that there ARE space borders, even if we don’t actually encounter them in the movies. The whole political setup of the galaxy is like the most literal possible illustration of the core-periphery model in dependency theory, with the Outer Rim dominated by extractive industries & shafted by unequal trade relations while wealth and political power is concentrated in…uh…the Core. There is approximately zero percent chance that citizens of a planet like Tatooine don’t need some sort of visa to travel to the likes of Coruscant or Alderaan, or that these visas are not increasingly difficult to get the poorer & the further from the Core & the less fluent in Basic and the more furry/green-skinned/three-eyed you are (because anti-xeno prejudice is canonically a thing). Once the Clone Wars break out and the Senate starts flinging increasingly autocratic emergency war powers at Palpatine like candy there is no way that travel from Separatist planets is not restricted, and once the Empire arrives on the scene there is no WAY your average citizen can move freely from planet to planet under the rule of the actual totalitarian dictatorship whose propaganda all centers on “bringing peace and security to the galaxy.” No way.
But how is this actually enforced? It’s kind of a plot point that – before the events of AOTC – the Republic has no real centralized military (apart from the Judicials and local planetary defense forces) and basically outsources state security to the Jedi. Personally I’ve chosen to follow this idea to its logical extreme and assume that the Republic was also outsourcing galactic border security/hyperlane policing to private security contractors, because (1) it’s my party and I’ll yell about politics if I want to, (2) this is after all the universe in which nobody batted an eye over stuff like the Corporate Sector or cloned slave-soldiers getting sent into battle against droids holy crap even BEFORE the space fascists took over, so I feel entirely justified in headcanoning casually-horrifying-dystopia, and (3) there’s actually vague canonical evidence for something along these lines (and Tarkin was involved, so you know some authoritarian bullshit was going down). Later on the Empire and/or their planetside proxy governments probably take over, with varying degrees of intensity depending on how hard they’re laying down martial law in the system in question.
Anyway my working theory for how space customs actually functions is that if you want to land your ship in an actual spaceport, you first have to get cleared by some sort of space traffic control station (a la the Scarif shield gate, or the Star Destroyer that clears our heroes to land on Endor in ROTJ).
This
neatly routes interplanetary space traffic through fixed checkpoints, which lets you keep an eye on arrivals and departures even without a planet-wide defensive shield or some sort of blockade. It also explains why – the one time we see the Millennium
Falcon try to actually land in a spaceport (on Bespin in ESB) – Han gets
aggressively hassled by Cloud City sky cops for not having a landing
permit.If you are on the run for some reason, these checkpoints are probably where you’re going to run into trouble; the powers that be may not be able to track you through hyperspace, but they can sure send out an all-points bulletin for local authorities to look out for [X type of ship] coming in from [X location]. The authorities can then shoot you down, or board you, or (probably worst of all) act like nothing’s wrong and give you a landing permit, only to meet you at the spaceport with a bunch of stormtroopers. You can avoid them by landing in wilderness areas rather than spaceports, but then you gotta (1) find a good spot to land, (2) hike out to civilization, and (3) hope nobody checks your documentation and finds out that you haven’t had your space passport stamped. You can also falsify your ship’s registration and/or the electronic logbook to throw the authorities off the scent, but this takes a certain amount of skill.
Probably smugglers like Han spend more time lying on their cargo manifests and storing contraband in hidden compartments than actually physically dodging the authorities. Probably the average spacecraft used by the Rebel Alliance has been modified so there IS no electronic logbook and/or the navicomputer erases old data as soon as it exits hyperspace, which on the one hand renders such ships inherently suspicious (they’d need a different solution for spies trying to pass unnoticed) but on the other hand keeps the Empire from working out the location of rebel bases from captured spacecraft.
It’s still freaking wild that a bunch of Rebel spies manage to land on Jedha – an active war zone – and Eadu – site of a top-secret Imperial research facility – essentially unchallenged. But in fairness, parking a Star Destroyer over top of a city is kind of the ultimate restricted airspace, and Jedha City doesn’t exactly seem like the sort of place you can just stroll into. Possibly we are meant to assume that clever spy shenanigans were involved in getting them into the city itself. And that the Empire was relying on Eadu’s lousy weather/the extreme unlikelihood of somebody visiting Planet Seasonal Depression in the first place and then showing up at the exact spot their facility was located to be more covert than a bunch of intense (and attention-grabbing) security around the planet itself. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
reblogging for great headcanon and, as a person who picked up a brown paper bag of perfectly legal cheese from an unmarked van behind an (unoccupied) highschool football stadium at dark pm in the evening, I snickered at the ongoing cheese smuggling scenario.
I want to stress that it was perfectly legal cheese and a long time ago. I’m sure the statute of limitations is up. Plus all the evidence was eaten.
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