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"Post-9/11 Visa Rules Keep Thousands From Coming to U.S." washingtonpost.com AUSTIN -- More than two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "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 Sept. 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 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. The new regulations have created special hindrances and holdups 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:
"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." The Government's Role 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 in 2002, 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 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 travelers. To help expedite these checks, the FBI has created a special 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 2 percent -- and that most of those are completed in days. Of 8,503 requests for the most common security checks for non-immigrant visa applicants received by the FBI in August, for instance, all but 373 had been resolved by Oct. 1, according to the bureau. Most were resolved in a few days, it said. Officials also report that the portion of applicants who are refused a visa, about 25 percent, has remained virtually stable over the past three years. FBI officials say the intensified screenings, which also include name checks for most male applicants from a list of 26 predominantly Muslim nations, have turned up an unspecified number of "persons of interest." "It's not a foolproof system, but at the same time it does identify people," said David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI's Record-Information Dissemination Section. Officials do acknowledge, however, that the requirement for in-person interviews has created long delays for hundreds of thousands of visa-seekers. In some countries where securing a visa once took a few days, people now routinely wait weeks for an interview. The State Department is adding 79 consular officers to the 843 positions it already has, but the delays persist. "The problem is that the administration has made all these new requirements for face-to-face interviews and adding background checks but has not provided adequate resources to fund them," said Waxman. Students and Scholars Educators have expressed anxiety that the new visa rules are discouraging international students from studying in the United States, depriving American universities of a vital source of diversity, intellectual energy and tuition. The universities are being put at a competitive disadvantage against institutions in Canada, Britain and Australia in the contest for top-flight international students and scholars, they say. In recent decades, the influx of foreign students has been crucial to the strength of U.S. universities and technology companies. Nearly 40 percent of engineering faculty members in the United States are foreign-born, as are a third of American Nobel Prize winners. In addition, "Foreign students are important because many go home and bring back an understanding and appreciation of the United States and often become leaders and help establish business relationships," said Peter Spear, provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Spear said that at his school, where more than 10 percent of the 41,000 undergraduate and 8,800 graduate students are foreigners, undergraduate applications from overseas dropped by 14 percent this year, partly because of new visa rules. "There's some evidence that people who are worried about the climate here or getting their visas on time are starting to avoid the U.S.," he said. In interviews with more than a half-dozen officials from major research universities, none said they knew of any case in which drawn-out security checks of foreign students and scholars yielded information tying them to terrorism. And the officials expressed frustration that in the minority of cases that get stuck for months, they are unable to learn the status of the security check or do anything to hasten it. In a case this year, Dennis Eremin, a 28-year-old Russian physicist, had to wait 10 months to reenter the United States to complete his work for a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He had already spent five years in Texas before leaving in 2001 to get married. "I had two theories," said Eremin. "The first was the reluctance of [U.S.] consular representatives to attend to my case, or the sheer ineffectiveness of their work. The second one was paranoia." University officials acknowledge that visas are granted relatively quickly for most of the 1 million foreign students and scholars in the United States. Nonetheless, they say cases like Eremin's are too common. "If you're stopped by a policeman, they check the database in their laptop in the car in maybe 30 seconds," said Larry Bell, director of international education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "These are maybe larger and more sophisticated [FBI] databases, but it's a large leap from a 30-second check to a six-month check." Business and Medicine The Bush administration's new visa policies have also exasperated one of its traditional constituencies: big business. In blunt language, corporate leaders have stressed that the smooth conduct of business is threatened by visa delays, and they chafe at what they regard as the government's reluctance to deploy adequate manpower to handle the additional requirements. Some top business associations have publicly questioned the State Department's insistence that the large majority of travelers are not badly inconvenienced by the new policies. "State controls the numbers, so who knows?" said Randel K. Johnson, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "But companies that aren't ordinarily critical of the government are having lots of problems, and they're willing to say so publicly. I don't think things are getting any better." The institutions affected range from huge industrial concerns to some of the nation's most renowned hospitals. The nonprofit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has been plagued by delays in visas for foreign doctors and researchers, which has made a mess of day-to-day appointment schedules, according to Bruce Larson, director of the clinic's International Personnel Office. Foreign physicians and scientists at the clinic have also been prevented from traveling abroad for professional conferences. In the past two years, visa problems have contributed to the Mayo Clinic's loss of hundreds of foreign patients, particularly from the Middle East, many of whom have chosen to seek treatment in Britain instead, officials said. "We've had cases where children were granted visas for medical treatment, but their parents were denied," said Misty Hathaway of the clinic's Office of International Relations. "Previously patients were able to get visas for medical treatment in a matter of days. Now it's weeks and sometimes months, and some of the patients are quite ill." Major corporations and the tourism industry have cited South Korea, the United States' sixth-largest export market and the fifth-largest source of foreign visitors, as especially hard hit; South Korean travelers spent $21 billion in this country last year. With the introduction of the new policy Aug. 1 requiring consular interviews for most visa applicants, people have waited up to two months for those meetings in the South Korean capital, Seoul; even in the current autumn lull, it is taking about a month. Calling the new regulations ill-coordinated and poorly communicated, American business leaders said they are certain to do damage to U.S. interests there. Researcher Karin Brulliard contributed to this report. C 2003 The Washington Post Company This file was updated on November 12, 2003 |
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