Coming to America

Back in the olden days, American immigration protocols were little more than a punchline for the bien-pensant: the way that you always had to answer the question about whether you were, or ever had been, a member of the Communist Party. You ticked the box saying no, you entered the country, you got on with your life.

Things are very different now. People who follow immigration issues closely already know this, but it seems to me at least that most of the recent changes in the law have generally gone unnoticed.

Many of the changes seem designed to maximise inconvenience. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, no longer exists: it has been moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security, and its name has been changed to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, or BCIS. The old enforcement role of the INS didn't move to BCIS, however: it's now a different part of Homeland Security, called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Meanwhile, the arm of the government which actually issues visas remains the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, although State seems to have much less control over what it does and how it does it than it used to. Unless you come from one of 27 countries, you always need a visa to visit the US, but until now individual consulates have had a lot of discretion in terms of the hoops they may or may not force people to jump through before getting one. Starting tomorrow, however, every single visa issued for entry into the United States will have to follow a personal interview between the applicant and a consular offficial.

It's not like the system is working smoothly at the moment and will easily be able to cope with the extra workload. Back in May, when the system changed and most people started having to have interviews, the State Department said that

Visa applications are now subject to a greater degree of scrutiny than in the past. For many applicants, a personal appearance interview is required as a standard part of visa processing. Additionally, applicants affected by these procedures are informed of the need for additional screening at the time they submit their applications and are being advised to expect delays. The time needed for adjudication of individual cases will continue to be difficult to predict. For travelers, the need for an interview will mean additional coordination with the embassy or consulate is needed to schedule an interview appointment. We recommend that individuals build in ample time before their planned travel date when seeking to obtain a visa.

Now, things are only going to get worse. Whole classes of visitors, like South Koreans over the age of 55, who were not interviewed until now, will have to start waiting for appointments. (The Seoul consulate is the most overworked in the world: since South Korea isn't part of the visa waiver scheme, every Korean in the US needs a visa, and there are a lot of Koreans travelling here.)

It's not just Koreans who are going to be inconvenienced, however. The waiting time for obtaining a visa in Delhi is already legendary, and even America's best friends, the Israelis, have to go in for a personal interview if they want to be able to travel to the United States.

You even need a personal interview if all you're doing is changing your visa. Here's a true story: a Turkish journalist was working for a US news organisation on an H visa, and then switched jobs to work for a Turkish news organisation. So he applied for, and received, a change of status from the Department of Homeland Security: they approved his change from working on an H visa to working on an I visa. (These things are incredibly important if you're a foreigner in the US.) The journalist then was sent down to Venezuela to cover the demonstrations there, whereupon he learned that he wasn't allowed to return to the US. He had his authorisation from Homeland Security, but he didn't have his actual new visa, from State. To get that, he had to fly from Venezuela to Turkey, apply for the visa in Istanbul, get the piece of paper in his passport, and then, finally, go back home.

While all these things are justified in the name of increased national security post-9/11, most of the inconveniences with the system seem to be bureaucratic snafus rather than anything justifiable on the grounds of the war against terror. It's hard to understand, for instance, why I would need to register with the State Department just to be able to get a driver's license, and only because I'm a journalist.

And things are going to be getting worse for the foreseeable future. By October 26 next year, for instance, all US visas will have biometric information embedded in them somehow – the State Department isn't entirely sure how, yet. There will certainly be a photograph, and probably a fingerprint, or maybe some kind of retinal scan. Once I get my next visa, I'll probably have my fingerprints or irises checked every time I come into the country. There's no way that that is going to speed up the lines at JFK.

I'm lucky, however, that I'm from one of the 27 visa-waiver countries, rather than one of the 27 NSEERS countries, since citizens of those countries are already fingerprinted and photographed every time they enter the US. (Since State does visas and Homeland Security does immigration, the two programmes are completely separate, and soon visitors from these countries are going to have to be fingerprinted twice before they enter the country: once when they apply for their visa, and then a second time at the airport.)

NSEERS, which stands for National Security Entry Exit Registration System, is by far the most Big Brotherish of the government's programmes. It's expanding fast: it started with just Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria – the countries you can imagine that the US would be most worried about. Soon men from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen were added to the list: it seems that the US was keen to cover pretty much the entire Arab world. Next came Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, followed by Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Kuwait.

Yes, all men from friendly, secular Muslim countries like Egypt and Indonesia now have to get fingerprinted upon arrival in the US, and then need to report to the authorities after being here for 30 days and then every year thereafter. If they arrived here before the rule was enacted, they need to report to an Immigration Office anyway. And if anything is found to be amiss with their status, they'll probably be deported.

It gets worse. It's not only INS (sorry, BCIS) agents who are going to be wielding this kind of power – after all, they've been doing that kind of thing for years. But here's John Ashcroft, announcing the scheme:

When aliens violate these rules, we will place their photographs, fingerprints, and information in the National Crime Information Center (or NCIC) system. The nation's 650,000 police officers check this system regularly in the course of traffic stops and routine encounters.
When federal, state and local law enforcement officers encounter an alien of national security concern who has been listed on the NCIC for violating immigration law, federal law permits them to arrest that individual and transfer him to the custody of the INS.

In other words, get caught speeding – or even just get stopped as part of a routine traffic stop – and you could be deported. And if you're burgled, or assaulted, if you're being abused, or being paid less than the minimum wage, don't even think about going to the police. If John Ashcroft was deliberately trying to create a scheme where immigrant communities would be cut off from the rest of society and pushed into taking the law into their own hands, he could hardly have designed it better.

What's more, the government isn't going to stop now it's covered the entire Muslim world. Notes Ashcroft: "Congress has mandated that, by 2005, the Department of Justice build an entry-exit system that tracks virtually all of the 35 million foreign visitors who come to the United States annually."

So along with their biometrically-enhanced visas, some 35 million visitors a year to the Land of the Free are going to be tracked by the Department of Homeland Security. Here's Ashcroft again:

We are an open country that welcomes the people of the world to visit our blessed land. We will continue to greet our international neighbors with good will. Asking some visitors to verify their activities while they are here is fully consistent with that outlook.

So just remember, next time you're asked to "verify your activity", that in fact you're beeing greeted with good will. There. It doesn't seem so bad, now, does it?

Posted by Felix at 13:47 EST