US slams the visa door shut on foreigners

More than two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a thicket of new rules governing the granting of visas to foreigners is dissuading thousands of people from coming to the United States, and generating protests from research universities, medical institutions, multinational corporations and the travel industry.

Because of the new regulations, American universities have lost students and scholars; corporations have suffered production delays, friction with customers and personnel problems; and foreign tourists and conventioneers have decided by the thousands to take their business elsewhere.

Increasingly, US leaders in education, business and science are warning that the procedural obstacles thrown up to screen security threats have fostered a bureaucratic "culture of no" that discounts the benefits that foreigners bring to the United States.

Bush administration officials defend the new rules, saying they are keeping terrorists from entering the country. "In the post-9/11 environment, we do not believe that the issues at stake allow us the luxury of erring on the side of expeditious processing," Janice L. Jacobs, deputy assistant secretary of state for visa services, told a congressional committee earlier this year.

But many critics caution that by requiring foreigners to wait weeks or months for visas, Washington is damaging its efforts at public diplomacy. They say the United States is sending a hostile message to the world at a time that the Iraq war and other US policies have blackened perceptions of the United States.

"Our commercial, research and academic institutions have always benefited from the open exchange of people, knowledge and ideas," said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat, California.

"We need to protect ourselves. But we don't want to go too far and lose the rewards of an open society."

All 19 of the September 11 hijackers entered the United States on valid visas, most of them without being interviewed by an American consular officer. Mindful of that, the Bush administration adopted extensive new policies governing visas, the latest of which took effect on August 1.

The most significant include a requirement for face-to-face interviews for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers who previously were excused from such interviews, and the withholding of visas for certain categories of people until the FBI runs name checks to determine that they do not appear to be a threat. That process can take months.

The administration also granted the Department of Homeland Security control of most visa rule-making decisions, as well as vetoes over visas issued overseas, previously the exclusive province of the State Department.

Starting January 5, the government intends to fingerprint all visa-bearing travellers who arrive at airports and seaports. Next October, visitors who do not require visas - mostly people from Western Europe and Canada - will have to have machine-readable passports. In addition, people issued non-immigrant visas abroad will be fingerprinted when obtaining the visa.

The new regulations have created special hindrances and hold-ups for people from Islamic countries that are the subject of concerns about terrorism. Visitors from South Korea and Brazil, which rank among the top 10 countries sending people to the United States, have also faced weeks-long delays in applying for visas. Chinese and Russians, particularly in scientific and technological fields, have also met extensive difficulties in securing visas.

Even British citizens working for American companies overseas are facing waits of a month or two to obtain longer-term work visas for transfers to the United States, a process that once took less than two weeks.

Some recent examples:

– The Amway Corp., one of the world's largest direct-sale firms, ruled out Los Angeles and Hawaii as possible convention sites for about 8,000 South Korean distributors next year, in the face of a requirement that they all complete face-to-face interviews with US consular officials. The convention is to be held in Japan. Amway estimates that the distributors would have spent an average of $1,250 per person on US airlines, hotels and shops, meaning a loss of more than $10 million for the would-be host city.

– The UCLA Medical Center, one of California's elite teaching hospitals, scrambled to fill a staffing gap when one of its three paediatric heart surgeons, a Pakistani, was waylaid in Karachi for seven months awaiting a new visa. The doctor, Faiz Bhora, had just completed 10 years of medical training in the United States.

– Ingersoll-Rand Co., a multinational corporation with $9.6 billion in annual sales and 50,000 employees worldwide, has been waiting for nearly two months to ship a $2.5 million compressor to an energy concern in Sichuan province in China.

The hang-up: getting visas for five Chinese engineers and an interpreter for a one-week inspection visit.

"They think they can put in all these security processes and still keep business flowing, but it's not happening," said Elizabeth Dickson, who handles immigration and visa matters for Ingersoll-Rand.

"I see a culture of no because no consular officer wants to be the next one to issue a visa to a terrorist. But that means they're treating everyone as a terrorist." State Department officials and the FBI, which handles background checks for visa applicants, acknowledge it has been a struggle to implement new programmes, procedures and technologies put in place after the attacks of 2001. Months-long delays and backlogs for visa applicants nearly paralysed the system in 2002, many government officials have said.

Unapologetic

But officials insist that most of the worst kinks have been worked out this year, and for the most part they are unapologetic about the new rules and procedures.

In the effort to safeguard borders as well as open doors, the Bush administration has struck the right balance, they say. Much of the fall-off in the number of foreign visitors is due to the global economic downturn, they say.

The government has broadened the fields that trigger FBI name checks for applicants - a list of 200 scientific and technical specialties that now includes not only expertise in arms and munitions and nuclear technology, but also landscape architecture, geography, community development, housing and urban design.

Critics say the list is overbroad, and may actually make it more difficult to spot the terrorist needle in an ever-expanding haystack.

Because of the broader criteria, the bureau is now processing about 1,000 name checks per business day, twice the number it handled two years ago, despite a sharp dip in the number of travellers.

Jacobs, the deputy assistant secretary of state, and other officials argue that FBI name checks are not a significant drag on travel to the United States.

To help expedite these checks, the FBI has created a team of 40 agents. And in any case, the bureau reports that only a small percentage of the millions of visa applicants are subjected to the checks - scarcely over two per cent - and that most of those are completed in days.

Of 8,503 requests for the most common security ch