WASHINGTON -- More than two years after the 9/1 terrorist attacks, a
thicket of new rules governing the granting of visas to foreigners is dissuading
thousands of people from coming to the United States, the Washington Post reports.
The rules are generating protests from the travel industry, research universities, medical institutions and multinational corporations, according to the newspaper.
Because of the new regulations, foreign tourists and conventioneers, students and scholars and corporations have decided by the thousands to take their business elsewhere.
Some critics warn that the security procedural obstacles are fostering a
bureaucratic "culture of no" that discounts the benefits that foreigners bring
to the United States.
But 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 critics contend 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.
All 19 of the 9/11 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 Aug. 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 Jan. 5, the government intends to fingerprint all visa-bearing
travelers 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.
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.
State Department officials and the FBI, which handles background checks for visa applicants, acknowledge it has been a struggle to implement new programs, procedures and technologies put in place after the attacks of 2001. Months-long delays and backlogs for visa applicants nearly paralyzed the system last year, many government officials have said.
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 falloff in
the number of foreign visitors is due to the global economic downturn, they contend.
The government has broadened the fields that trigger FBI name checks for
applicants. 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 travelers.
To help expedite these checks, the FBI has created a special team of 40 agents. The bureau reports that only a small percentage of the millions
of visa applicants are subjected to the checks -- scarcely over 2 percent -- and
that most of those are completed in days.