Flying into the US at Newark International Airport last Monday after having been away from this country since last October 1 was a shock.

Over the 55 years my musician wife and I have been together, we’ve spent eight or portions of eight living abroad, and have also made many more short trips abroad for work, so we have had long experience with flying into a big US international airport and then dealing with the inevitable arrival hall lines and waiting to reach the passport control window where our passports and travel history are checked out and we are allowed to step back into the United States.

It has always been a hard part of the trip and never a pleasant one. Coming from Asia, where we spent considerable time, the flight used to take 14 hours, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which US civilian flights could use the shorter polar route crossing Siberia to reach China, Japan and Hong Kong. But even from the UK or Europe, the flight home to the US was and still is 7 or 8 hours. At that point the traveler is sleep deprived, jet-lagged from the time change, and stiff from being seated for so long, only to then face with a long line of similarly tired, sore and grumpy fliers all anxious to get to a comfy bed. Instead, though, they find themselves forced to shuffle slowly along through a snaking cattle chute for an hour or more before finally finally reaching a passport control counter.

But this last trip was different. Arriving from London Heathrow on time at 7:30 pm on a big British Airways Airbus at Newark International Airport, we deplaned and made our way to the cavernous immigration hall. But the scene we came upon was strange. Instead of a bustling throng of people making their way through long snaking lines and all complaining about the process or talking about where they’d been, the huge hall was nearly empty, with the few people there talking in hushed tones if it were a library or a funeralwae. There were no lines to be seen either at the section for US citizens and Green Card-holding permanent residents or the section for foreign passport holders — just a small clutch of bleary-eyed people at each of the several open and staffed passport inspection windows. At the section of passport control windows for US citizens and Green Card holders, an older man tasked with crowd control apparently, dressed in a bright red sweatshirt, who had nothing to do because of the paucity of passengers, barked commands: “Pick up that knapsack! No phone use in the hall!, keep moving!” All of it without a single “Please” or “Thank you,” a friendly “Welcome back!” or even a smile. Only the woman who checked our passports finally offered a brief, almost furtive smile and said, “Welcome home!” to us.

I found myself thinking, “Not for long, if we can help it!”

There is a reason that the Newark Airport immigration hall was so empty on an early Monday evening: People, even American citizens and Green Card-holding immigrants, are avoiding traveling back to America. are delaying, if they can, a return to their home country. Green Card holders are especially anxious about the “welcome” they might receive at the border, with ICE agents reportedly pulling aside legal residents who might have had a minor traffic stop on their record and paid a fine even years earlier . Some such people have reportedly ended up being sent to a detention center hundreds of miles away. This kind of thing especially happens if they were males and were found to sport tattoos, making them ‘suspected alien gang members and invaders” by default in President Trump’s new dystopian AmericKKKa.

Reports from tourism trade organizations show US tourism figures, which typically rise year........

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