EDITORIAL
Visa restrictions are taking a toll

Three months after a face-to-face interview requirement was imposed on travelers who need visas to enter the United States, Hawai'i's tourism industry is feeling the sting.

Common sense tells us that if you step up visa requirements, embassies and immigration offices should increase staff or hours to handle the additional load.

But we're hearing that these agencies lack sufficient staff and resources to keep pace with increased security demands, which means many prospective visitors, particularly those from China and Korea, must wait weeks or even months to get visas, and some miss their trips.

Travel from China dropped from 3,419 visitor arrivals in June 2002 to just 706 this June.

The restrictions "have caused a significant backlog and it's had a really terrible impact on us," says Ted Liu, director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

For example, Liu says, 60 venture capitalists from China who wanted to attend the Wayne Brown Institute's Fifth Annual Investors Choice Conference at the Turtle Bay Resort last month missed the conference because they could not get their visas in time.

Certainly, most visitors to Hawai'i are from the Mainland, Canada or Japan and enjoy the benefit of visa waivers. But in the long run, it would be smart for Hawai'i to diversify its visitor base, and tighter visa restrictions make that tough.

The state was close to winning a pilot program for a Hawai'i-only visa for travel from China, but that was shelved after Sept. 11.

DBEDT and Gov. Linda Lingle's tourism liaison, Marsha Wienert, are apparently working on a strategic plan to ease travel that they expect to present to the federal government next month. Among the proposals: a visa allowing longer stays or multiple entries for frequent business travelers from China or Korea.

Obviously, a certain level of scrutiny is prudent.

But if it cripples our economy, haven't the terrorists sort of won?