Well, on that journey I had tickets for the connecting flight which was already boarding and the flight back, not to mention a paid for room in a posh hotel (in Canada) and plenty of accompanying documents from the main Canadian broadcaster. None of these documents were chewed by the dog and a sensible human being could use common sense to see that everything was legit.

However, for someone with a gun on their belt, having got their education from Hollywood films and with a government that snitches on the world to lock up dark skinned people in Guantanamo I guess this jobsworth mentality makes sense to them.

Upsetting people who have good money to spend means they don't come back. You don't want to be treated like garbage by imbeciles that insult your intelligence. It is taken personally. The U.S.A. is not that special, it is just full of entitled people that think they are special.

If your worst border crossing experience ever is being sent to the back of a queue to fill in a form again, then i suspect you have no idea of what an actual bad immigration or customs interaction might involve.

I would argue that it is in no way a formal part of the process but rather a symptom of the culture in that industry. There is no written policy that says they have to be disrespectful. They dehumanize people and see themselves as superior, this is the result of essentially giving a group of people extreme power in much the same way as the Stanford prison experiment. They have very little limits on their power within 100 miles of the US border, essentially able to do as they please. If they overstep their bounds, their is generally no punishment.

There is no reason they cant do the same job while treating everyone with respect. When you work with a group of people that see themselves as hammers, everyone else is a nail.

A border guard banging on for 5 minutes about "anchor babies" is part of the procedure?