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Time travel is common. Some would say "out of control."
The desire to stop immigration is of course based mostly upon political feelings and motivated by preferred belief. But, whatever the reason, humans are often anti-immigrant, and the future is no exception.
Enforcing time-travel immigration law, though, is problematic. The questions about "where are you from" are simple compared to those about "when are you from." For one thing, faking a passport for travel into the future is easy — you just have to make a brief, discreet visit a little bit further into the future, where passport-faking is more advanced.
For this was developed the Anachronometer.
The primary reason for moving to the future, of course, is to get away from work.
Many people in the early 21st century still believed that work is important. This ideology forced many people who didn't feel the same way into a kind of slavery, working just to live. For many, the practical effect of this "employment" was money earned for being somewhere that they didn't want to be.
With conditions progressively humane and reasonable — with a decreasing obsession with compulsory labor — the appeal of the future was undeniable. Time-travel migration was compelling.
The anachronometer is a device with a fairly simple voice-recognition / text analysis algorithm.
Its unique ability is that it refers to an extensible index, a library of recorded voices dating back to the invention of time travel. Expressions and accents become definitively metric — one's way of speaking an identifying signature of native chronological residence. Phrases are points on a cultural fingerprint. Any statement is a three-dimensional shibboleth.
With a basic-model handheld anachronometer, any flatfoot can usually identify a time-traveler with 99th-percentile accuracy within five or six words. It's a rare newcomer who can utter a third phrase before being escorted to the station house.
Of course, the future needs immigrants, too.
But, ignorance has a vote — and the law is the law.
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