An Australian was denied US entry for bizarre reasons. He’s not alone

“You’re welcome. Have a nice day.” It’s a familiar, cheery, if not at times cheesy, courtesy traditionally issued by Americans to foreign visitors.

But in the much less civil era of today’s politically fractious America, such niceties are ringing increasingly hollow, particularly for unsuspecting travellers landing at the nation’s borders.

“Enhanced vetting” is seeing some travellers turned away from the US at the border for unusual reasons.Credit: Getty Images

Across the globe foreign visitors and their governments are now asking just how welcome travellers really are in the States these days. The land of the free could be morphing into a home for only the braver tourist.

Indeed, in an outbreak of border insecurity, there’s a growing number of reports of ordinary visitors to the US being detained for hours on arrival at US airports, or worse, 19 days (in the instance of one young British woman sent to an immigration detention centre).

The catalyst? The Trump administration’s order, in a classic case of euphemistic American-speak, to subject more foreign visitors to the process of “enhanced vetting” of travellers at its borders.

Such a procedure involves additional levels of questioning and searches by immigration officials, chiefly at airports, who even before these latest incidents have never been known for their customary American civility. The US government denies the increased scrutiny is designed to target anti-Trump sentiment.

One Traveller reader has vowed never to return to the US after he was detained last month for eight hours at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, while his laptop and smartphone were examined by US border guards. He was finally deported back to Australia.

His “crime”? Taking a more circuitous route to the US to save on his airfare, though he stresses he was not accused of any actual “wrongdoing”.

“I feel like returning to the US under the current administration would be the equivalent of going back for your hat after escaping a devastating house fire,” says the reader, an Australian citizen who asked not to be named. “I have no wish to be burnt again.”

He arrived in the US following a 24-hour flight from Sydney to New York via Hong Kong, with Florida his planned final destination. From there he intended to board a cruise and says he is now $15,000 out of pocket due to the cruise line’s refusal to refund his fare.

The reason he believes he was detained and then deported was not due to any visa irregularities but for what he considers a perverse justification.

“Eight hours later, after three interview teams and extensive examination of my laptop and iPhone, [the decision of US immigration] was that I had come to the US on a very unusual route from Australia via Asia (I flew premium economy and Cathay Pacific had the cheapest airfare).”

Although the governments of several Western nations, including the UK, Germany and Canada, have updated their travel advice for the US in the past few weeks, Australia’s equivalent, Smart Traveller, last did so on February 3, weeks before reports of travellers being detained or deported began to surface. (Though the site does warn that “US authorities have broad powers to decide if you’re eligible to enter and may determine that you are inadmissible for any reason under US law”.)

For the US economy, much is at stake, with the inbound travel market a major revenue-earner worth $155 billion in overseas visitor expenditure, and with millions of Americans employed in the tourism industry.

In 2024, before the Trump administration took office and introduced its extreme version of enhanced vetting, more than 710,000 Australians visited the US, a nearly 17 per cent increase on the previous year.

Now the giant French hotel multinational Accor has warned that bookings from Europe to the US for this northern summer’s high season are down 25 per cent. Airlines such as the UK-based Virgin Atlantic are also sounding the alarm to investors.

That comes amid tense relations between the US and European countries and increased travel warnings regarding stringent border treatment of its citizens when arriving in the States.

Extraordinarily, in the past week, experts, via the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, have been recommending that foreign travellers at least delete “anything you wouldn’t want someone to read or see from your device before visiting the US”.

One pundit even advised visitors to the US to leave their laptops and other devices, including tablets, at home entirely and opt to take a “burner phone” (a cheap, prepaid model) to the US rather than your possibly incriminating personal phone.

Suddenly, with the goodwill that has traditionally driven tourism evaporating in the US - for decades among the most cherished holiday destinations for many Australians - has become much less welcoming with the experience for some travellers far from, well, nice.

All in all, if overseas travellers to the US continue to endure such treatment, the US could face an unwelcome tourism downturn to rival that provoked by September 11, 2001; a day and time when the States really did, for once, need its foreign friends.