Delay on travel restrictions sought
By Jay Newton-Small
Bloomberg News Service
WASHINGTON — The United States' largest travel industry association called on Secretary of State Colin Powell to delay impending restrictions on foreigners traveling to the country, warning that the measures will deter tourism.
Advertiser library photo
The Travel Industry of Association of America, which represents more than 2,000 tourism companies, said in letters to Powell, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that the measures threatened to further deflate a struggling industry.
Flora Fajotina of Freeman Guards Inc. checks the passport of a passenger. New security measures call for machine-readable passports and facial scans.
"Inbound international travel continues to lag seriously," association President William Norman wrote. "The events of Sept. 11, taken together with a soft world economy, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued threat of terrorism and SARS have dealt a mighty blow to our efforts to attract more international travelers."
Norman said at a press conference in Washington yesterday that the $525 billion U.S. travel industry was threatened by State Department plans to require machine-readable passports, personal interviews for visas and biometric, or facial, scans of each visitor.
The State Department said the congressional mandates and timetables enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are necessary for national security.
"We believe in an open-door, secure border policy," said Stuart Patt, a spokesman for consular affairs. "But in order to make borders secure we have to change the way we issue visas."
Since 2000, international travel to the United States has declined by almost a third. While some of that is because of a weak economy, the association says security measures have aggravated the problem.
International tourism to the United States is the country's third-largest retail business, according to the association.
Last year some 40 million tourists spent $88 billion in the United States, $7 billion more than U.S. citizens spent traveling abroad.
Citizens of 27 countries can now travel to the United States without visas, and they account for two-thirds of all foreign tourists. Under a new U.S. law, all such foreigners must carry a machine-readable passport to be swiped upon entry by Oct. 1.
Since the two largest travel groups to the United States — the British and the Japanese — mostly use machine-readable passports, the association said it's more concerned with France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, which had only recently made such passports a requirement.
Airline officials responsible for checking passports and visas haven't been trained, according to the association.
"And yet it is the airline that will be fined and must pay the cost of returning the deported person home if they cannot enter the United States," said Elyse Wander, the association's vice president for government affairs.
On May 21 Powell sent out a directive to all embassies asking them to increase face-to-face interviews of visa applicants to 90 percent of those who apply. Patt said they can accomplish this with the help of new Foreign Service officers, whose incoming ranks have more than tripled to 468 this year from a decade ago.
The association argued that many embassies are ill-equipped to deal with a sudden rise in personal interviews.
The U.S. Embassy in Seoul issues about 500,000 visas a year and interviews 27 percent of applicants, said Rick Webster, the association's director of government affairs. He said each visa takes an average of two to five days.
"If they were to now interview 90 percent of those applying, private-sector analysts there estimate the embassy would only be able to process about 200,000 visas a year," Webster said.
The biometric scans being planned for all incoming travelers are scheduled to be put in place by Jan. 1.
In a letter to Ridge, the association voiced concern over the lack of money for such a project and the department's intention to photograph and fingerprint every person entering the United States every time, rather than just once.
"The idea of taking fingerprints and photographs of every foreigner entering the United States without adding extra staff and not expect enormous delays is laughable," Webster said. "To claim they can do this process for each person in 15 seconds is somewhat optimistic to say the least."
