Enter the US at your peril

As a journalist working in Africa in the 1980s and reporting for a South African newspaper group, I was always nervous in an immigration line.

- Brendan Seery

As a journalist working in Africa in the 1980s and reporting for a South African newspaper group, I was always nervous in an immigration line. Some hacks posed as businessmen, but our policy was to declare we were reporters. That got me turned away on occasion, but it was better than using subterfuge and then spending time in a jail cell.

I remember arriving in London as a newly-married, bearded young man with my wife on my first overseas holiday. I was pulled over by immigration at Heathrow Airport because I was using an Irish passport...and given the third degree.