July 7, 2003 -- With all the trouble and misunderstandings in the world right now, you'd think the US government would be encouraging Americans to travel abroad as informal ambassadors -- and that our government would encourage legitimate foreign tourists to taste American hospitality.
Sadly, over the past two years, the US government has been making it steadily more expensive and difficult for some foreign tourists to get into the US, causing a wave of tit-for-tat fee-raising which has made it more expensive for Americans to travel overseas.
The problem is visa fees. "Our fee worldwide for someone to apply for a visa 'to visit the US' is now $100," says Stuart Patt, consular affairs spokesman for the State Department. "It went up twice during 2002. The reason we had to raise the fee is a combination of declining applications and increased expenses due to increased security needs."
US law requires that our visa service pay for itself, so when fewer travelers come to the US, fees go up. Visa fees are also helping pay for our nation's increasingly intense security regime, and the costs there are still rising. "We are mandated to move to a biometric [code] on the US visa by next October, and that is not going to come without some expense," Patt says. (A biometric code uses body measurements, such as the distance between your eyes or the pattern of your fingerprint, to identify you.)
You Raise Mine, I'll Raise Yours
How does all of this affect US travelers? Other countries raise their fees in lockstep with ours. So when we make it more difficult for their travelers to visit the US, they make it more difficult for Americans to come to their countries.
There are still plenty of places Americans can go without visas. All of western Europe, North America, the Caribbean, many Central and South American countries, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Israel, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea are among the many lands where a US passport gains automatic entry for a short stay.
But elsewhere, our new visa fees have been met by reciprocal action:
- Brazil. The fee for US travelers rocketed from $45 to $100. "The Brazilians, yes, were responding to our $100 fee," Patt says.
- China. Shot up from $30 to $50.
- Russia. Jumped from $70 to $100.
- Ukraine. Raised from $75 to $100.
"People do say, wow, it's expensive now," says Maureen McCulloch, general manager of the San Francisco office of visa expediters Travel Document Systems. "But if people are going to travel, they're going to pay."
A Machine Readable Mess
Further complicating travel for foreigners to the US, as of October 1, all visitors from the 27 countries on the US' visa waiver program -- including top allies such as Great Britain and Japan -- will require new, "machine readable" passports to visit our fair nation, according to Patt.
(Canadians will not need machine-readable passports, because the love we have for Canada is a special and unique love. The official State Department reason is because "while some people mistakenly think Canada is part of the visa waiver program, the authorization for Canadian citizens to travel visa-free comes from other immigration laws.")
In an article on EyeForTravel (www.eyefortravel.com/index.asp?news=37234&src=nwsltr&emins1=%7BencEmail%7D&enc=1), a British Airways spokesman estimated that about 200,000 UK citizens lack the new passports, and so might be turned away at the US border if they don't get new documents fast.
To check if your non-US passport is machine readable, look at the bottom of your passport's photo page. If you see two lines of text or coded data (the data on my US passport starts with "P<USASEGAN<<SASCHA" for example), you're OK.
While we agree border security is important, raising financial and procedural walls between Americans and the rest of the world isn't the best way to make Americans loved. As travelers' advocates, we wish our government could find a friendlier way of funding necessary security improvements.
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