There are already some kind of US passport exit controls: DHS questioning of people in/near a jet bridge/gate area for a flight departing internationally (which is, more often than not, a fishing expedition for money or other financial instruments); government requiring US citizens to depart the US on a US passport; government requiring US common carriers to supply DHS with a list of departing passengers' passport details and other PNR-type info.
If/when US passport exit controls get formalized in the manner that is quite common in civil law countries -- like most of the EU -- expect the situation of dealing with DHS to be closer to the relative nastiness that exists in the dealings between bureaucrats of some less developed nations and their own "subjects" at departure passport control desks.
Originally Posted by
ESpen36
By contrast, in most other countries (Europe, Asia, etc), when departing on an international flight, one clears exit immigration and is then in a no-man's land in the gate/lounge area, having legally been stamped out of the country. At this point, the traveler has no way of leaving the sterile departures area except by boarding the international flight. In other words, he cannot just walk out the exit door because he has already crossed the border and is no longer in the country.
The above strikes me as reading like work of fiction. There is no "no-man's land in the gate/lounge area"; and the post-"exit" passport control "sterile departures area" can be left in almost all countries in Europe and Asia without boarding the international flight.
In every single EU Schengen country, it's well possible to leave the "sterile departures area" by means other than boarding the international flight -- I do it a few times a month on a US passport, and I'm including even those former-Communist countries that are now EU Schengen countries.