I've been through many times as white British person (both as a visitor and on various visas) and have never had a bad experience. I'm not denying that people do have bad experiences. But I find it kind of hard to believe that as a US citizen, you've never once had an experience of re-entering the country that didn't involve the customs agent asking you a couple of simple questions and then sending you on your way.

I'm a US citizen living abroad, and when I flew into Newark once, an agent turned me away because I could not give him an address for where I was staying, since my mother had just moved. I believe his words were "no, no, no, I can't deal with this right now" and he yelled at me when I tried to explain. There was literally nowhere else for me to go.

After walking around flustered, I decided to try another kiosk and that guy let me through. That's how stupid and arbitrary the process can be for an arriving citizen.

Yikes. Just FYI in case it’s useful in the future, as a US citizen you have an absolute right to enter the country. They cannot keep you out, period. They can cause you a great deal of trouble first, but they can’t outright turn you away. Hopefully you never have occasion to use this knowledge!

Customs agents everywhere freak out if you don't have $INFORMATION to hand. That's not something unique to the USA. If you travel a lot, you learn to have this sort of information readily available whenever you cross a border.

That is exactly what the experience is most of the time. It’s unpleasant because they’re not nice and they have way too much power, but it’s not a big deal. Again, my point is not that it’s completely awful, but rather that this minor unpleasantness still manages to be the worst thing on these trips.

I guess I don't understand what level of "niceness" you're expecting. Most of the time they've been friendly and polite (to me). Given that they're humans doing a basically crappy job, I don't expect any more than that.

Friendly and polite would be nice. I don’t think I’ve ever had that from US immigration, although it’s the norm elsewhere.

I guess there's not much point in just trading anecdotes, but that's really not my experience. I've generally found US customs to be friendlier than British customs, for example (and I'm British).

I get more polite service from minimum wage workers at Burger King or a regional grocery chain.

Since they have to let US citizens in, you likely don’t have to answer questions unrelated to the goods you’re bringing back.

But the pressure is obviously there to answer anyway.

They have to let US citizens in, but they can detain you for a reasonable amount of time while they investigate you, which could be days. They also don’t have to let your stuff in. If you don’t answer their questions, you are very likely to get into the country late and without your possessions, so only do this as a last resort.

(This is in contrast to interacting with police within the country, where they can’t search your stuff against your will or hold you without probable cause, and not answering questions is a good default.)

Curious...is your wife from a country that is not on good relations with USA? Have you traveled to the likes of Iran, Syria etc? Do you think your name has the equivalent of an asterik next to it?

They have so many people to process that unless you "piss them off" (as judged by them) and you are a US citizen with all docs in order they don't usually pick on people.

She is from China, hence all of my trips there. I don’t think I set off any red flags. I know they don’t usually pick on people, and haven’t picked on me or my family aside from that one incident, but the odds of being picked on by USCIS are way higher than the odds of being picked on by Chinese police as a foreign tourist.

I got searched a lot by customs in Seattle on my trips from Beijing when I started working there. I think they were looking for pirated DVDs or something; joke was on them since my bag was always mostly empty coming to the USA (I would fill it up coming back since shopping in the states was much cheaper than in China). They weren’t rude though, I found it just annoying to be searched.

Chinese police...well, I mean, there is crap you have to put up with as a foreigner. Finding the right amount of paper work to register at the local PSB (and sometimes needing to drag your landlord along), and having to re-register after a foreign trip. Then the random checks when they come to your apartment to check your paper work... Chinese police aren’t bad by any means, but if you are a foreigner living in China, there will be some friction.