Yeah, if you travel through a pre-clearance airport overseas (Dublin, Shannon, Bermuda, Nassau, Aruba, Abu Dhabi, and the major Canadian cities), you're released into the general horde when you arrive at your arrival airport in the States as if you were arriving from SFO or JFK. You've already cleared everything before you leave (this means that once you do that, of course, you're in a sterile part of the foreign airport and have to stay there until you depart, so keep that in mind). The fine folks that give you patdowns without warning want to ensure that it's only US Americans who do that prior to you joining the domestic air travel scene (the benefit if you're connecting in the US, of course, is that you've also cleared customs and immigration and can just go to your next flight).
If you travel overseas at all, I'd highly recommend Global Entry as it speeds up customs and gets you TSA pre-check.