Maeve Higgins: The Philippines is a real conversation-ender at Fourth of July parties

It’s inaccurate to conflate Philippine experience with US customs and border protection agents in Irish airports, or extrajudicial American prisons on Guantánamo Bay, or the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican autonomy. But what these places have in common is that all of them are points on a deliberately blurred map of the United States. AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

When returning to the US from a visit home, I usually fly from Shannon Airport or sometimes Dublin Airport. Despite neither of them being in Cork, both are pleasant enough. And both offer the convenience of ‘preclearance’.

Preclearance means that after you check-in and pass through airport security you will — in fact, you must — pass through US immigration, customs, and agriculture inspections. This is handy because you don’t have to go through those inspections when you arrive. Instead, you just skip out into a US domestic terminal and pick up your luggage. It’s convenient but it also feels peculiar, lining up to speak to an agent from US Customs and Border Protection — a branch of US Homeland Security — as American flags hang inert along the walls of the purpose-built pre-clearance facility at Dublin Airport’s Terminal 2.