The bit where a bored person checks your papers and maybe asks a basic question to gauge the awkwardness of your response is the norm for the civilised world and many other parts too, and doesn't seem less secure than shaking down arrivals from sketchy parts of Iraq for $200 but having no incentive (or other staff) to do anything else afterwards...

But for countries with obsessive security operations and deportation targets, the incentive to pass the possible criminal onto the next stage of the process involving different sets of border guards doesn't disappear after you've helped yourself to their petty cash. Indeed if they're not outraged, that's a pretty good indication they're hiding something and you're doing great detective work, and if they are, maybe you just find their comments and threats annoying and want to send them to the deportation centre to know what real mistreatment looks like.

Look I don't expect to convince you at this point because we obviously come from two different realities.

Mine is I've both been robbed, and "not" arrested (but jailed) by border patrol. It doesn't play out how you've claimed. The robberies are swift and then they eject you so they can rob the next guy. The jailings eat up their resources for hours. No one that can rob more innocent people is going to waste their time on a long-shot arrest of the innocent when they could be out there robbing 10x more people. The jailers will actively actually complain to you while you're arrested that it's eating up their time.

Now I'm just some guy on the internet, so I don't expect you to believe my actual reality over the ideological theories you have in your head. So all I have to say is if you keep crossing borders I expect some day you'll learn it the way I've learned it. I didn't come to my conclusions through theory but rather seeing just how much fairer robbery is in real life and how it is better at producing positive incentives.

I'm perfectly happy to believe that in your actual reality the world's most paranoid, politicised and expensively resourced border control had more time to make your life a misery than frontline guards (apparently without any backup to deal with jailings) in another country whose interest in foreigners began and ended with the assumption most of them had more cash than them. I just don't believe the theory that if only US frontline border control staff were given leeway to pinch the contents of wallets they'd completely forget the national 'security threat' obsession, and all those people hired specifically to deal with alleged smugglers and terrorists sent to them by frontline staff would sit and twiddle their thumbs and absolutely nobody would care at any level.

Or even less your first theory about how a bribe based system is necessary for an immigration system to "bring in good productive people" which frankly is a 180 degree pivot from a story about border guards indiscriminately thieving from everyone, as well as obviously falsified by the many countries where border staff neither demand unofficial payment for entry nor routinely assume that anyone who looks a bit funny is an illegal alien or a drugs mule.

I have a genuine question -- how do these "non-paranoid" countries incentivize their staff to let people through while still catching true threats? That's ultimately the problem we're trying to solve. The 3 main models I've seen thus far are following

1) US model, guards only rewarded for catching criminals or deporting. Lots of false negatives at no cost to guards so they fuck with you a lot for no apparent reason. Canada somewhat similar.

2) LatAm model, bribes/theft to incentivize the to not burn up time with false negatives, but they sonetimes are rewarded enough for true positives to not just let them go.

3) "Swedish" model. Straight salary and then not give a fuck. Seems everyone gets through with not much thought.

LatAm model seems most practical of what I've seen but I haven't spent much time in Europe or Asia, mostly middle east, the Americas, and southeast asia.

I mean, "Swedish" model works pretty well for the majority of travellers, especially since the US and Mexico famously don't succeed in stopping drug trafficking across their borders anyway. If you want border staff to be more thorough in vetting threats, you hire for competence rather than corruption.

LatAm model where they're too busy robbing people to care about actual threats (who are generally particularly happy to pay them off, including offers of recurring payments) seems like obviously the worst of both worlds. Though frankly my own LatAM border highlights were watching Ecuadorian airport staff meticulously searching the multiple suitcases every local family brought with them from Colombia and then not even bothering with a token gesture at my bag, and having no real issues at land borders despite crossing them with a strikingly different-looking temporary passport. Apparently the Bolivian border guard was enthusiastic enough about his job to give US Americans a lecture on why they had to pay to arrange a visa-on-arrival everyone else got for free