The Unwelcome Mat - How Not to Attract Tourists
I'm British. I visit the USA 2-3 times per year and travel elsewhere quite frequently. I would rate the "welcome mat" as rather less welcoming than Yugoslavia during the Cold War (a Communist dictatorship).<p>One annoying note: my wife and I did not change our names when we got married. On a couple of recent occasions we've travelled separately via different airports/on different dates, to rendezvous subsequently. If entering the USA separately on such trips, she usually gets the third degree: "why aren't you travelling with your husband?"<p>There's serious institutional sexism at work in the immigration system. (Not just the discrimination against middle-easterners that we all know about.)<p>One point to note is that ICE personnel live and work locally. So your reception varies quite dramatically depending on your port of entry. At Portland and Seattle, for example, they're generally polite, friendly, and about as reasonable as it's possible to be while working within an unreasonable framework. On the other hand, I actively try to avoid entering the US at Newark. The <i>least</i> annoying US immigration clearance experience I've had was in Dublin, Ireland -- the US immigration staff screen travellers by special arrangement on Irish soil (as on Canadian soil) and they've pretty much gone native. Alas, that means flying via Aer Lingus or Delta, which add other drawbacks ...