British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue

The US doesn't just let people wander in. The US-Mexico border is incredibly militarized, with multiple lines of checkpoints on either side and a massive amount of technology and manpower to support patrolling the desert between ports. It's closer to a conflict border than it is to a typical international border.

>The US doesn't just let people wander in. The US-Mexico border is incredibly militarized, with multiple lines of checkpoints on either side. [...] It's closer to the DMZ than it is to a typical international border.

Unless "multiple lines of checkpoints" actually means "multiple booths so visitors can be processed in parallel", this is most certainly false. Here's the San Ysidro boreder crossing in Tijuana:

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.5423767,-117.0289817,331m/da...

You can see a wide fanout to a bunch of booths, a secondary screening area north of that, and some administrative buildings. That's not "multiple lines of checkpoints". It's just one checkpoint. There might be more drug sniffer dogs than the average border crossing elsewhere, but for the typical traveler it's otherwise not that much different.

San Ysidro is a port, only a small part of a much larger system run by the US CBP that extends up to 100 miles into the US. Here's the map of checkpoints for San Diego sector where San Ysidro is [0]. You can see an outdated map of the commonly used checkpoints for the whole US [1]. There's also a bunch of invisible infrastructure hidden between these checkpoints, from ALPR to facial recognition systems, not to mention regular patrols by USBP. Each sector's run a bit differently in practice, depending on various constraints and the different kinds of crossing they see. Tucson sector uses more mobile checkpoints because of congressional limitations for example, while Yuma sector focuses more on deep-desert patrolling in cooperation with tribal authorities because that's a well-developed coyote route.

A reasonably similar system of checkpoints exists on the Mexican side as well, oriented against people heading north.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/GAO-05-4...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/USBP_Int...

Well maybe not but I was watching in mild amazement a bunch of Chinese cross the border in a 60 minutes segment. It's more hurry over through a gap than wander. https://youtu.be/M7TNP2OTY2g?t=38

I was thinking the odd nature of US immigration is probably down to it being more legalistic than other countries - more lawyers and courts. That could account for both the hard time with legal visitors and also the Mexican border in that the people in that video I think were relying on legal protections for asylum seekers and the like.

I think you have a point about the legalistic nature. In the video you shared, they had a detail about how it is much harder than in the past for Chinese people to get into the US via a port of entry because visas are scarce. So crossing at a fence gap, or with a ladder or tunnel is their “hack” to actually get into the country. I’m not knowledgeable about the details of the policy in the mentioned in the video that doesn’t allow the border agents to prevent someone from crossing.