went again in february this year. 3 guys checking passports of hundreds of travellers. another 1.5hrs wasted.
meanwhile back in london i just scan my passport and go thru the automated gates. why can’t the US solve this issue? is it unions? is it federal government? what’s going on?
> back in london i just scan my passport
Presumably your passport is a UK passport? Generally it's much quicker for a country's nationals to enter a border than foreigners.
The UK is somewhat unusual in letting nationals of a number of countries, including the US, simply scan their passports at an electronic barrier and pass through without speaking to anyone, essentially the same as their own nationals; it usually just takes a few seconds. Many EU countries do this for EU and sometimes other European nationals, but rarely for the US.
The US is rather unusual in having their own nationals need to go through a non-trivial border control process, even with Global Entry. However, this is in part because many European countries have separate border control and customs processes, with border control before baggage reclaim, while the US tends to have them combined.
EU countries are expanding this. France lets Can/US/Aus/NZ and probably others use the e-gates.
Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal and others do too with different eligibility lists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_border_control_sys...
Some other EU countries too, but only on exit.
(No physical exit controls are a nice thing about US/Canada, but in my EU experience, the rate limiting step is really security, not exit controls).