I presume passport control is PART of immigration clearance because the overall process also includes customs clearance too? Or is AQIS (is that the right term still?) separate to ABF? I always considered them part of ABF.
I've always thought of arrival processing as a two stage step of clearing passport control and then customs - I suppose technically though one is landed if accepted by passport control - as in the border is at that point - customs issues are separate I guess.
As for outbound, what we as pax see is the passport control (or smartgates) process point. I do agree that technically it should be called emigration. Almost nobody in practice would say "You need to go through emmigration"(and it sounds so similar to immigration that can be confusing). mostly it's passport control or even just "international departures."
As we know in some other places, like the US, that process is not explicitly handled at that point, but more or less done in the background when we check in for our international departure, and the airline (or ship or whatever) swipe passports and that, I assume, gets processed by CBP as an official record of departure from the country (one presumes the final record is sent to them once the actual flight has departed). In that sense there's no passenger facing "passport control"
as a side note though, at DFW the other week when departing on QF22 for MEL, they had facial recognition scanners at the gate. it was a fail for me but the agent was like "oh don't worry about that" (and this was after a manual inspection of passport, and at the actual gate reader, so they just scanned manually). I presumed that was to avoid manual BP scanning rather thn any CBP formalities. First time I'd come across it at the point of boarding and it was.. different. I wish it had worked for me!
