[baby]

I lived in both China and the US and the experience at the border are very different.

I wouldn't say the experience of getting into China is the best, because you still need a Visa to study/work there. But I'd say that it might have been the easiest Visa to get.

On the other hand I've never been through so much aggressiveness and difficulty with the American border. It probably is the worst border in the world (or at least that I've been through).

[sjwright]

The US border might be the worst if you have any reason to attract interest, but as a boring tourist with an Australian passport, I've found the US border staff to be perfectly nice, like most other countries I've visited. Slow, boring and drab, but with a smile.

(In my travels to various unremarkable destinations, there's one country that stands out as having far and away the grumpiest, officious, unpleasant and sour people in immigration: the UK.)

[Veratyr]

To contrast, I'm also an Australian passport holder (though I'm on a working visa) and the US is so far my absolute least favourite country to enter or travel to (out of Australia, Malaysia, Turkey, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Mexico and Russia).

Some of my experiences:

- ~2013 on an Australia -> US (1 month) -> Mexico (1 month) -> Australia via US stopover (~8h) trip, I was detained by customs at the stopover for ~3h and had all my luggage opened and unpacked in front of me for no reason that I can tell other than that I was coming from Mexico and looked tired. About 2h of the 3h were spent waiting in line and nobody told me why I was in line or what to expect.

- Mid 2014 on an Australia -> Malaysia (6h) -> Turkey (2w) -> US (2w) -> Australia trip, I was detained on the way into the US for ~2h by immigration and was asked the question "did you ever step foot in Syria" about 10 times (I wish that was an exaggeration). Again, nobody was friendly, nobody told me what was happening and I spent most of the time waiting and wondering whether I was about to be denied entry for some reason.

- Late 2015 on a US -> France (3d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside prior to boarding the plane because I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass, which meant I was one of the 10% "randomly" selected for extra screening.

- Early 2016 on a US -> Switzerland (8d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside in Switzerland because once again I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass. This was the second time in a row.

- Late 2016 on a US -> Germany (3d) -> US trip, I was again had an SSSS mark, for the 3rd time in a row.

Aside from my travel history which I don't think is particularly out of the ordinary, I don't believe there's anything else particularly interesting about me. I'm a young white male with a bachelor's degree, my father works for the Australian government, my mother is a nurse and I've never been a member of any major religious or human rights organization.

[nasalgoat]

I'm the definition of boring, being a white male Canadian, and I get no end of hassles at the US border.

YMMV.

[LorenPechtel]

Of the ones you've been through.

I've been in most of the Iron Curtain countries--most of which searched us in far more detail than anything I've gotten from the US.

And I've been subject to some fairly through searches in Africa looking for anything that carried those forbidden words "Product of South Africa". Never mind all the stuff written in Afrikaans with the forbidden words blacked out.