Comment by arethuza
10 years ago
"I would love to know if people from the UK suffer the same sort of troubles entering the US"
I personally have had extended grief entering the US on a number of occasions - not in the last 4 or 5 years though. Worst was probably an extended session with me being asked why I went to Turkey so often from the UK (saying "it's a nice place to go on holiday" seemed to make them angry [maybe a lack of vacation days] - I think I must have provided 20 variations on that statement).
A friend who was a senior corporate lawyer had it much worse when he visited the US from the UK to attend a legal conference - extended stay and a "cavity search".
So do you think this is more of a policy problem or an attitude problem.
I have no idea - but I've traveled to a lot of places and in terms of friendliness of reception at the border the only place that was worse involved communists and large crew-serviced machine guns (NB crossing into Yugoslavia in the late 1980s by train from Italy).
Edit: For the avoidance of doubt, I really like the US as a place to visit both for business and vacation, but the experience at the border can leave a lot to be desired.
I'm a US citizen and I don't like having to return to the US from abroad. Sometimes you are lucky and get a border guard that actually acts like a human being, even a human being doing a mostly boring job, but many times you get power-tripping jerks. I often travel with my partner, who is a green card holder, so I get to see that whole barrel of nonsense as well. In airports without the new expedited entry system (forget what it is called) we often have to wait upwards of 2-3 hours to get through an immigration checkpoint.
I kind of doubt that your memory is correct. In late 80s you would see police and toll officers on Yugoslavian border crossings generally armed with pistols. Army did "protect" border, but I can't think of a place where they would be anywhere close to normal border crossing and they certainly did not have crew serviced machine guns there. Both sides used to have bunkers so maybe you meant those?
Otherwise getting across wasn't difficult, just annoying because of long columns of cars. It was worse for us locals, because there was general and usually correct assumption that we were smuggling something.
I can easily think of worse recent experiences (USA, India...).
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