Customer Service

by digby

It looks like the big money boyz are starting to get nervous:

The United States ranks worst in welcoming foreign business travelers and tourists, due to bureaucratic headaches and rude immigration officials, a survey showed.

The survey by the Discover America Partnership, a business group from the travel and tourism industries, said the cold welcome for visitors could hurt the US economy.

“The US entry process has created a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers from visiting the United States — and damaging America’s image abroad,” the group said in a statement.

The study was based on a survey of more than 2,000 travelers worldwide, asked to rate their experience in 16 countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, in addition to the United States.

However, it also found that those with experience visiting America are 74 percent more likely to have an extremely favorable opinion of the country versus those who have not visited recently.

“This study should be a wake-up call for the US government,” said Geoff Freeman, Executive Director of the Discover America Partnership.

“Visiting the United States and interacting with the American people can have a powerful, positive effect on how non-US residents see our country. Unfortunately, perceptions of a ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ entry process are turning away travelers and harming America’s image.”

The survey found that the US entry process is considered the “world’s worst” by travelers, by more than a two-to-one margin over the next-worst destination area.

The US ranks with Africa and the Middle East when it comes to traveler-friendly paperwork and officials, the survey concluded, with 54 percent of international travelers saying that immigration officials are rude.

The survey found that two-thirds of travelers surveyed feared they would be detained at the border because of a simple mistake or misstatement.

“Foreign travelers are in agreement: the US entry process is unpredictable and unfriendly to foreign visitors, it is hurting America’s image abroad and deterring many from visiting the US,” said Thomas Riehle, partner, RT Strategies, which conducted the poll.

“These survey results help to explain the 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the US over the past five years and the 10 percent decline in business travel to the US over the past year.”

I heard recently that a lot of financial industry business is shifting to Europe because it’s just too much trouble to get into the country. The visa process is a nightmare even for people who come back and forth regularly. And treatment at the airports is downright frightening. I’m reminded of this story:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.

Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.

[…]

The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.

“I’m here to do some interviews,” I said.

“With whom?” He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. “So you’re a journalist,” he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. “I have to refer this to my supervisor,” he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be “processed”. Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I’d have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, “It seems that we will probably have to deport you.”

I’m not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? “Why?” I asked, incredulously.

“You came here as a journalist, and you don’t have a journalist’s visa.” I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media (“You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program”).

My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. “You don’t care, do you?” I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be “interviewed”, and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”

“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Nobody cares about foreign journalists, of course, and nobody in our current government is going to stand up for the principle of a free press.(They have reportedly streamlined the journalist visa process, at least.) These are people who are investigating the NY Times for publishing leaks, after all.

But now our terrible image and rude tactics are really starting to interfere with business — and that’s a problem that’s going to get some attention. I’m sure Karen Hughes is out there feverishly chatting up all the soccer moms on the planet telling them they shouldn’t hate us for our freedom, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to help. Being hated all over the world is not just bad for our physical security it’s bad for our economic security too.

I’m wondering if there’s any aspect of life in America (or the world, for that matter) that hasn’t been adversely affected by the Bush administration’s blunderbuss approach to governance. The American big money boyz were very short-sighted when they backed these people. But then, that’s one of their trademarks, isn’t it?

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