I cannot believe what a nightmare American passport control and customs is in the United States, or at least Miami.
We flew over to Italy for an 8 day vacation. Getting out of the country wasn't much more difficult than taking a domestic flight. We get to Italy and it was a literal breeze. You scan your passport, they automatically take your picture, then the customs agent stamps it, and you are out. Took less than two minutes from start to finish.
So I get back into my home country and after a very long walk, get to passport control. The line for anything but an American passport is at least 500 people long, all crammed into a winding Disney type line. It never moved. It was something out of Dante.
We get in the US passport line, where there are 4 homeland security types checking passports. Our line that we get in has 12 individuals/groups in front of us, and they take, on average, 5 minutes to process. So just doing the math, we stand in line for an hour, just to get up to the customs agent. We finally get up to this guy, and he's surly, and just incredibly slow. He stares at our passports for a long while. Then scans them in a machine, that might have been new 20 years ago. Then he takes our pictures. Then come the questions.
"Where are you coming from?"
"Italy"
"Why were you in Italy?"
"Vacation"
"Why are you coming to the United States?". (He actually asked this)
"We live here."
"Where do you live?"
" Here in Florida"
"Where in Florida?"
We gave him the city. He confused it with another Florida town. We corrected him
"Are you going straight there, or anywhere else?"
I was getting pissed. What goddamn business of his is where we go after getting out from his punt fiefdom. But we said straight there.
Then he FINALLY started asking actual customs questions about food, or drinks to declare, etc.
Why is it take me more than an hour longer to get into my own country, with nothing to declare and a clean passport, than into a foreign country where I've never been?
It was so aggravating, the complete waste of time generated by the sheer incompetence and ignorance of our garbage system. What are they hoping happens?
Submitted December 15, 2023 at 12:53PM by burywmore https://ift.tt/4W82zrS
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