When a visa becomes a headache
(The New York Times Feb 6, 2007)
Last summer, Dimitry Smirnov, a sales director in Moscow, was planning to attend a conference in New York City being held by his employer, which is an American company. To get a visa, Mr. Smirnov made an appointment at the United States Embassy about four weeks before his meeting for an in-person interview, a requirement introduced after Sept. 11, 2001. It was when he showed up, he said, that he became frustrated.
“The embassy wanted to hold my passport while they waited for the visa to come through, but they couldn’t guarantee I’d get the visa,” he recalled. “In the meantime, I wouldn’t have been able to travel and I didn’t know if I’d get the visa or not, so I decided to cancel my trip.”
Mr. Smirnov is hardly the only executive to have been thwarted by stringent requirements for entry into the United States. Travelers from emerging economies like India, China, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe are required to have visas to come to the United States and many complain that the process deters them from traveling here.
In November, the Discover America Partnership, an association of travel industry executives, surveyed more than 2,000 international travelers and found that the United States was considered the least welcoming destination, thirty-nine percent of respondents selected the United States as having the “worst” entry process.
Geoff Freeman, the executive director of the partnership, said that just 2 percent of survey respondents ranked Canada as the worst. “I find that especially telling,” he said. “You have two countries right next to each other, very culturally similar, both threatened by terrorism, and one appears to be finding a way to strike a balance between security and entry that is far more appealing to world travelers.”
“We talk about security,” he said, “but if people can’t come here for meetings or to look at U.S. products they want to buy, and so choose to do business with another country instead, that’s a threat to America’s economic security.”
United States government officials, however, insist that the process has improved greatly in recent years. “ We now have an expedited service for business travel visas in place in every U.S. consulate and embassy in the world.” said Maura Harty, assistant secretary for consular affairs in the State Department.She urged people who haven’t applied for a visa in a few years to come back.
But Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, disagreed. He said that his foreign attendees described the visa application process as “demeaning.”
There is some evidence that such restrictions are discouraging business travel. In November, a research firm found that the number of business arrivals in the United States fell 10 percent from 2004 to 2005, while the number of such arrivals in Europe grew 8 percent over the same period.
While many complained of American travel policies, especially the difficulty in obtaining visas, some people would continue to come to the United States.
