Let me tell you a true story. Last year my wife and I flew from New Zealand to Britain for a holiday. It’s about 24 hours flying so there is a 2 hour stop half way at Los Angeles to refuel. It doesn’t take 2 hours to refuel but unlike sane countries where you can wait in a transit area the USA makes you go through immigration even though you are going straight back into the same seat on the same aircraft.

No problem, I have an APEC card so I can bypass the queues. Nope, unfortunately I was holding a transit card so my wife and I were pulled from the very short APEC queue as the busy body official said if I was in transit I was not in the USA to do business and therefore could not use my APEC card.

So we join the first queue for biometric scanning. Half an hour later we have a ticket and go join the new queue. I’m a known traveler so apparently I can join a short queue but my wife has never been to the USA so has to join the normal queue.

The normal queue which is massive. After an hour we are only about one third done. I was expecting another 2 hours wait at the current progress rate. Before my APEC card, I had needed up to 3 hours to clear entry into the USA and missed at least two connecting flights that way. So half an hour before due departure the flight crew came looking for us.

We waved our transit cards and were pulled from the queue. We were taken to the APEC line to clear so we would not delay the departure on to London. The same queue I was thrown out of 90 minutes earlier. I hate LAX, it is the worst run airport on the planet.

I have traveled to Ukraine and I regularly travel to China both of which are super pleasant experiences relative to entering the USA. Coming home is still the best. I can arrive on an international flight at Auckland airport and from the time the wheels touch the runway to the time I exit the terminal can often be less than 30 minutes and the one customs officer I have to talk to will have a smile on their face and do their job in about 20 seconds.

If the USA wants tourists, they need to first start treating their visitors as human beings, not terrorists.

Custom officers lack a sense of humor.

The last time I went to the USA I got questions that were so weird that I, having a bent sense of humor, gave some weird answers.

e.g. They asked me if I had been in contact with livestock that had a disease. I replied that the last time I saw my wife she was in perfectly healthy condition. THAT was a trigger of phenomenal proportions. I was escorted to an interrogation room and was grilled for about two hours on my whereabouts.

My accent is very English, I worked in the UK for a few years among the rich people (worked in Solihull, near Birmingham as the private chef of a wealthy family, plus, my mother was English) and so my accent might sound a bit posh to some. That seems to be a trigger as well.

All in all, I made a phone call after that experience to my friends whom I wanted to visit. I told them I would take the first flight back to Amsterdam as I refused to stay in a country that treated me extremely hostile.