But yes, I just traveled from Shanghai back to my home in the US. The queues in China were much, much shorter than those in the American airports. PVG posted a "25 minutes or less" target for all travellers to get through security and immigration. And they hit it, even at peak travel times with huge volumes of people. At American airports if you arrive less than an hour before boarding they might not allow you in until you rebook on a later flight.
You could see it in the architecture of their systems: The American facilities have huge snaking queues designed for as much capacity as possible, which lead to obvious bottlenecks. And when you arrive at the front of the line, a gruff immigration officer in tactical gear doesn't look at the line except to say "No line jumping!" while they're taking 10 minutes on one individual. In China, there's just not enough distance in the line to allow a long delay to form, there's no single point bottlenecks to slow down the system, and helpful people direct you to the shortest lines.
Never been asked to show electronics. Never been to a special room. Most of the time they ask one or two questions, take my fingerprints, and welcome me to the country.
Now that my passport has a US address in it, even though I'm technically not a resident, they politely say "Welcome Back".
Last time I entered was on Monday. The lady was extremely polite, even smalltalked a bit while the computer was giving her trouble because my visa is in an old passport and my new passport is 7 days old. Guess she had to sync up the system.
Time from entering the queue to being in the country was 24 minutes. I ran a stopwatch.
That said, my visa process did involve checking my social accounts and internet activity because I explicitly listed it as an argument for why I qualify for an O-1.
Anecdata, I know. But that's my experience. I'm white and from eastern-ish europe.
No random searches here either, though, but I haven't been to the US for at least a year.
The time when I said "Oh just coming back from vacation" before the lady saw my visa ... well, she was much less nice about it.
A difference between 24 minutes and 1 hour is only slightly more than 2x, so it's not extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. Security lines on domestic flights can last longer than 24 minutes.
Anyway yeah, I had to collect my luggage and they then opened it up and rummaged through it. Asked why I wasn't taking a video game console despite ostensibly going to a video game convention. My response was of course that this would be quite impractical.
They then demanded access to my phone and read through my messages. They couldn't find anything other than my friend asking when my flight would arrive and a photo of him holding up a bottle of vodka (he was under 21). I think they just gave up at that point and let me through.
Fortunately I narrowly managed to make it to my connecting flight but it was such a stupid thing to have to go through.
The first time was more difficult, because I said something (technically correct) about my documents that confused her (understandably) for a while, so she had to lookup some extra stuff. She also asked my wife a lot of questions, because she was under the (wrong) impression that her school was blacklisted. That was seriously incompetent IMO, but she apologized after her supervisor (or some other superior) explained things to her. She also marked that we needed to go through customs, which the first time I've had to do that in almost 10 entries. I chalked this as a negative experience because of the customs thing, we felt she did that just to inconvenience us in some way. I cannot link this in anyway to President Trump, however.
Both times, we were one of the first people to be off the plane's economy section, but the wait before we got to the counter was 1+ hour. SFO is ridiculous.
My worst experience came when entering during President Obama's tenure (but nothing to do with his policy) in 2016. The agent went through my entire 9-year old passport, asked me why I had visited country X in 20YY, why I lied to my visa officer back when I got a F1, etc (that I'd go back home after studies. I did not lie, I happened to get a job and the employer happened to want to apply for a H1. I did not even know back then that there was a real or fake "shortage" in tech workers).
Hopefully more anecdata helps. If you're on the fence about visiting the US as a tourist I hope you end up deciding to come!
https://nl.usembassy.gov/embassy-consulates/amsterdam/access...
*It used to be no electronics, but now you are apparently allowed to bring a mobile phone provided you turn off Bluetooth.
Contrast with for instance the Germany and France consulates a few blocks over (they're in a single building), where as far as I know no such rule exists.
I understand that it was not decided, that it's just a proposal (a terrible, stupid, terrible proposal — but just a proposal).
I'm sure I'd be fine: I've been fine a dozen times before. That was before they decided that it was OK to demand passwords and so on. Maybe now it would be worse. Or maybe my skin colour lets me off the hook.
Regardless, I'd rather just not waste jet fuel on flying to a place that treats anyone this way.
Your phone/tablet/laptop is, for better or worse, a gateway to your entire life. It contains your photos, bank account credentials, messages between friends, messages between you and your wife, photos between you and your wife…
Random border thugs absolutely should not have the right to rummage through it in another room.
There are plenty of ways to do meetings remotely. There are plenty of places in the world you can travel to for work meetups that aren't the US.
Just don't travel there.