A frisson of fear tends to run through non-Americans when they face immigration in the United States. For years, young Brits have been warned prior to their first trip: “When you meet the immigration officer, don’t make jokes!” To boys cultivated to be insouciant in Britain’s posher schools, this usually means approaching the booth nervously repeating, “Don’t say bomb, don’t say bomb” – hopefully under their breath.

However, I’d say the officers guarding America’s borders are among the most welcoming, and sometimes even funny, I’ve met – I’m excluding ICE, who sound awful. It’s often a surprise given I’m usually arriving from a country firmly on America’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list: Cuba.

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If American immigration is intimidating for Brits, imagine what it’s like for Cubans. My adopted home is, after all, an island from which many people have died trying to get north on small rafts. And it’s now a place to which émigrés are being returned in record numbers.

There used to be a “wet-foot/dry-foot” policy that meant any Cuban who stepped on to US soil could stay, while those picked up in........

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