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Email9/27/05, Maura Harty, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, House Committee on Government Reform Testimony
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform
Testimony of Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs
Maura Harty
September 27, 2005
2:00 p.m.
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Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman, distinguished members of the Committee:
I appreciate this opportunity to discuss the efforts of the Department of State and in particular, the Bureau of Consular
Affairs, to balance border security objectives with our commitment to maintaining the openness of the United States to international
visitors.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice summarized this commitment when she stated during her confirmation hearings that, “Our
interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue, and America must remain open to visitors and
workers and students from around the world. We do not and will not compromise our security standards, yet if our public diplomacy
efforts are to succeed, we cannot close ourselves off from the rest of the world.”
The Secretary’s words give purpose to what the Department of State recognizes: that this nation is stronger when we remain true to our finest principals, to our history and our common ideals. America is a nation of immigrants, and has always welcomed visitors from all over the globe. We must remain open to protect what we have always known: that we are stronger as a nation when we draw strength from the contributions of the world’s best and brightest.
That goal must always be attended by our absolute commitment to the security of our nation. The context for today’s U.S. visa policy is, quite simply, September 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath, the U.S. Government moved quickly to shore up our nation’s border security and reassure American citizens and international visitors alike that our nation was safe and secure. After conducting a top-to-bottom review of visa procedures, we still work ceaselessly to make sure that we have in place as strong a shield as possible against those who would do us harm.
It is our fundamental commitment to balancing our security needs with the openness of the United States that the Department of State is striving to maintain. The Department is cognizant of the economic benefits to the United States generated by international visitors. Travel and tourism contributed $93.7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2004. One out of every eight civilian employees in the United States is engaged directly or indirectly in the travel and tourism industry. International students contributed $13 billion in revenues to our nation’s economy. Beyond the economic benefits, the Department of State understands that the United States is preeminent in business, academia and scientific research because we attract talented people from the far reaches of the globe.
Few relationships are more important to the United States than those with India and China. With educated, dynamic populations, growing economic power, and enormous strategic importance, both India and China are emerging as confident and assertive global and regional forces that increasingly perceive the United States as a partner in securing peace and stability in South Asia. India and China are key contributors of business, academic and research talent. Consular operations in these two nations continue to pose special challenges to the Department of State, as well as offer unique opportunities, due to their strategic and economic significance to the United States and the enormous growth in workload for the Department’s consular operations in these nations.
As a result, people-to-people links between our two countries are growing at an exponential rate, through business, tourism, and academic exchange. The links also include the flow of immigrants to the United States, which in India’s case is the United States second biggest source of legal immigration and naturalization. At the same time, more Americans travel and live abroad, especially in China. The impact of this growth has been directly felt in a rapidly increasing demand for immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, as well as for American Citizen Services.
As we address these trends with post-9/11 visa security requirements, we have witnessed skyrocketing consular workloads. Consequently, the Department’s four consular posts in India and five in China have become some of the largest consular missions worldwide. The Department of State has devoted particular energy and resources in addressing the challenges facing posts in India and China, especially with regard to explosive nonimmigrant visa demand. I would like to discuss these efforts in some detail.
U.S. Mission India
The United States Government adjudicates visa applications in India at the Embassy in New Delhi, and at our consulates in Calcutta, Chennai, and Mumbai. In India, a burgeoning nonimmigrant visa workload placed immense pressure on existing Embassy resources and is the greatest future management challenge mission-wide. Take Consulate General Chennai as an example. In 1999, there were five officers providing consular services in Chennai. At the time, they relied heavily on judicious alternatives to personal interviews to address what was already a significant nonimmigrant visa processing workload. As of 2005, the Department has assigned 20 officers to Chennai to address not only the new interview and biometric collection requirements, but also the 30 percent annual increase in nonimmigrant visa demand. Even if experienced, language skilled officers were to fill each of the 53 consular officer positions that exist India-wide, the Department would still struggle to cope with nonimmigrant visa demand in a timely manner.
In order to address this issue we have undertaken a number of innovative management and processing initiatives. Mission India’s first creative approach has been to reexamine the appointment system itself. One problem with the current Internet-based appointment system is that it encourages applicants to manipulate the system by scheduling multiple appointments. Based on the rate of no-shows for visa interviews analyzed by our colleagues in India, the Department estimates that about 35 percent of the appointment backlog is made up of “ghost” appointments. Upon discovering this loophole, the embassy and consulates immediately took steps to close it by contracting out the appointment program with a company that also collects the nonimmigrant visa application (machine readable visa or MRV) fee up front. By attaching a financial cost to each appointment made, the Mission hopes to see the backlog quickly fall.
The new appointment system will also allow the Embassy and consulates to better prioritize student and business visas, by identifying relatively routine or urgent cases, and scheduling them appropriately. All consular posts in India already have mechanisms in place to give priority appointments to humanitarian cases, students, and for urgent business travel. An additional web-based “emergency appointment” system allows up to 120 appointments a day for humanitarian cases, including students, business, and soon H and L visa applicants with unforeseen travel needs.
Another innovative program has been the introduction of the Business Executive Program (BEP), which relies on a cooperative relationship with the local American Chambers of Commerce to identify large, important, and legitimate businesses and their executives who regularly travel to the United States. While the American Chambers do not take the place of officers when it comes to vetting the eligibility of their members for U.S. visas, the system provides a useful mechanism for information sharing about U.S.-India business relations, to help prioritize them appropriately, and to allow consular officers in India to focus anti-fraud and other consular resources on higher risk applicants.
Looking forward, we have also begun to expand our physical facilities in India. Construction has begun on a new consulate compound in Mumbai and a major addition to the embassy annex in New Delhi. Recent renovations to the consular facilities in Chennai have added critical space, but more is still needed.
The results of these efforts are encouraging. Despite record backlogs, our posts in India reversed a three year decline in student visa issuance this past summer and will issue almost ten percent more student visas this year than last year. Despite the backlogs, Mission India was able to give every legitimate student that it was aware of an interview in time to travel to the U.S. before the start of their school term. Providing priority to business travelers has been more difficult due to much greater demand, and admittedly there is still room for improvement. With the introduction of a new appointment system, we hope the consular sections in India will have enhanced ability to meet the vast majority of business demand for visa appointments in a more timely fashion.
The Department anticipates, however, that overall demand will continue to exceed staffing and space capacity for some time to come and that backlogs for non-priority travel will continue. It is clear that more resources, personnel, and interview windows alone will not solve our current and future visa challenge. Looking at Chennai again, over 50 percent of its nonimmigrant visa applicants are business travelers, students, or temporary workers whose expeditious processing is vital to the United States economy. The student visa workload itself is the highest in the world. Yet despite prioritizing business and student visas, the appointment backlog for these two categories still ranges from 48 to 123 working days. The Department is exploring creative, long-term ways to address the growth in consular services to ensure that consular services form a platform upon which the important elements of the U.S. bilateral relationship with India can confidently rest.
One option is to consider opening a new consulate in a fifth Indian city. The Embassy in New Delhi has proposed, and the Department of State’s Office of the Inspector General has recommended in its inspection report of Mission India published in July 2005, that we establish a presence in Hyderabad, India’s sixth largest city with a population of nearly 6 million. As the capital of Andhra Pradesh, one of the most economically progressive states in India, and center of India’s booming information technology and biotechnology industries, Hyderabad is home to a growing number of American companies, such as Microsoft. It is also home to a strong, traditional Muslim community that comprises more than one third of its population. Finally, Andhra Pradesh accounts for more than 35 percent of Consulate General Chennai’s nonimmigrant visa workload; a new consulate in Hyderabad would relieve much of the pressure Chennai now experiences.
The proposal to open a consulate in Hyderabad is under active discussion in the Department of State, and the Bureau of Consular Affairs is working with our colleagues in the Bureau of South Asian Affairs and the Overseas Buildings Operations to reach a decision as quickly as possible. The Bureau of Consular Affairs anticipates starting up the new consular section in Hyderabad, if approved, with a section of 14 consular officers and approximately 60 locally engaged staff.
U.S. Mission China
The Department’s consular facilities in China face many of the same challenges and opportunities as in India. China is a vast country with an enormous population. The U.S. mission to China is huge and complex, consisting of the Embassy in Beijing, and consulates in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, and Chengdu. Over the past seven years, American staff has almost doubled to 467 and local staff tripled to 938.
The U.S. is engaged with China on an increasing number of strategic, political and economic fronts. China’s recent economic reforms have produced a rapidly expanding economy and trade with the United States has increased dramatically. Increasing numbers of Chinese are able to afford travel to the United States, for business, tourism, professional development and education. China is the second largest source of foreign students studying in the United States, with 62,000 mainland Chinese students choosing to enroll in U.S. academic institutions.
Nonimmigrant visa application rates in China were dampened by 9/11 and the SARS outbreak. Although the level of applications is still 13.5 percent below what it was before 9/11, demand for visas is returning. Visa issuance in China increased in FY 2004 by 26 percent, and grew an additional 11 percent in the first half of FY 2005.
The Department is responding to the dramatic increase in visa demand with a combination of more efficient management practices and increases in staffing and physical space in consular sections. In March 2004, Mission China established a user-pays call center to provide visa information and visa interview appointments for applicants from all over the country. Consular sections in Beijing and Guangzhou are returning issued visas via the Chinese national postal system; Shanghai will shortly follow suit. Together, these management initiatives allow consular staff to concentrate on border security issues and ease acute pressure on consular facilities, while providing better service to Chinese visa applicants.
On the diplomatic front, the Department persisted with lengthy negotiations that have resulted in the reciprocal extension of visa validity for business travelers and tourists between China and the United States. As of January 15, 2005, the validity of business and tourist visas has been extended to twelve months, multiple-entry, reducing the number of annual applications required of regular Chinese travelers to the United States. Visa validity for students and exchange visitors was extended this summer.
Meanwhile, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou have all worked with local American Chambers of Commerce to implement programs similar to the India BEP program, facilitating the issuance of business visas to employees, and in some cases customers and clients, of American companies. In CY 2004, Beijing processed over 6,200 American Chamber of Commerce-related visa applicants with a 95 percent issuance rate; the number rose to 10,000 in FY 2005. Shanghai has processed about 5,000 business visas in the first eight months of this year. Seventeen large, non-American multinationals such as BP, Nortel, Nokia, and Samsung have also been invited to participate in this business facilitation program.The Department’s ability to meet workload demands is limited by other personnel resources and physical plant requirements. Nine new consular adjudicating officer positions were created for China in FY 2004 and FY 2005. During that same period, an additional five new consular officers replaced the consular associates who were adjudicating visas. The Bureau of Consular Affairs has preliminary plans for six more officer positions in FY 2006, and is currently discussing the best distribution among the six consular sections in China.
Embassy Beijing and the U.S. consulates in China have made significant strides forward with regard to facilities. The Consulate in Guangzhou and Consulate General in Shanghai have moved into new consular facilities. . Guangzhou is important because this post processes immigrant visas for all of China, as well as processing more than 68,000 non-immigrant visas in FY 2005 to date. The immigrant visa workload has seen a worldwide sudden increase as the Department of Homeland Security approved a large number of immigrant visa petitions in the past year. The Department has responded to increased demand for both immigrant visas and nonimmigrant visas by boosting staffing and by moving into a spacious new commercial facility in August 2005. The new facility offers four times the office space of the old site, boasting forty interview windows that have been put to immediate use to meet backlogs in non-immigrant and immigrant visa processing. The move is a temporary solution until a new consulate compound is completed, but a great improvement over the previous site in a hotel annex, which offered only 13 interviewing windows. With regard to staffing, the Bureau of Consular Affairs has provided additional temporary support to the immigrant visa section in Guangzhou and is sending a “swat team” in the early part of the next fiscal year to enable the post to adjudicate the most urgent cases.
The Department also made physical improvements to the existing consular sections in Beijing and Shenyang, including additional interview windows. Nevertheless, Shanghai’s two-year old new facilities are already near capacity and the consular section in Beijing will continue to suffer from tight working spaces until the embassy moves into a completely new building in 2008. The Embassy and Consulates in China are currently working at full capacity to serve the visa needs of travelers from China and appointment wait times in China range from two weeks to a month.
The Future
At all levels, the Department’s representatives in India and China are involved in an aggressive public outreach campaign to communicate to the governments of India and China, and to the public about the improvements to visa processing in each country. The bottom line is that the Department of State is committed to ensuring that the visa application process, or perceptions about it, does not serve as an impediment to legitimate travel to the United States.
In fact, consular officers at 211 visa adjudicating posts worldwide are dedicated to this goal. In order to adjudicate over 7 million visa applications annually, the Department of State has augmented the resources dedicated to processing visas, creating more than 515 consular positions since September 2001. The Department has enhanced the training of consular officers overseas in interviewing techniques and counterterrorism, while continuing to also emphasize the need for efficiency and the facilitation of travel by legitimate travelers. The Department has invested heavily in automating the system for transmitting and receiving interagency security clearances.
The results are incontrovertible. Now, 97 percent of all visa applicants around the world who are found qualified to receive visas get them in one or two days. For the two-and-a-half percent of visa applicants who, for national security reasons, are subject to additional screening, the Department has streamlined the process so that even this small percentage of the overall number of applicants can expect an answer promptly.
The Department of State is encouraged by reports from consular sections around the world of a rise in nonimmigrant visa applications, as well as those documenting steady increases in U.S. visitation utilizing the Visa Waiver Program over the last year. The Department hopes that these developments signal a resurgence in nonimmigrant visa applications worldwide.
In preparation for additional growth in workload, we are exploring the possibility of replacing current, paper versions of the visa application forms with a completely electronic, interactive model. The Bureau of Consular Affairs already offers an electronic visa application form to facilitate data entry. Implementing an interactive online application would allow the Bureau additional scope and flexibility in conducting security namechecks, fraud investigations and biometrics checks in advance of a visa interview, further streamlining the application process.
I believe the Bureau of Consular Affairs has acted with ingenuity and resolve to apply our experience and resources to re-engineer visa processing to the extent we are able under existing legislation. The result of these efforts is that we have improved the efficiency and integrity of the nonimmigrant visa process and have reduced significantly delays and uncertainty about visa processing. The Bureau of Consular Affairs is committed to continuing to employ all means at our disposal, especially our leading-edge technology, to further improve the efficiency of visa processing without sacrificing national security.
There are very real constraints, both legal and practical, on consular operations. In the post 9-11 era, Consular Affairs operates under a new set of legal and policy mandates legitimately designed to enhance national security in the visa process. It is clear that improved management practices and incremental resource enhancements will not be sufficient to keep up with future demand for nonimmigrant visas.
Accordingly, in addition to the near- and mid-term changes that the Department of State can accomplish internally, or in coordination with our interagency partners, we are looking further into the future. The Bureau of Consular Affairs is conducting a methodical approach to strategic planning we call the “Futures Study.” Through this study, the Bureau is attempting to determine the extent and composition of anticipated explosive growth in visa demand during the decade from 2007 to 2017 so that we can develop and evaluate options for meeting the demand. The Bureau has contracted a private firm to conduct a first-ever sophisticated analysis of nonimmigrant visa demand initiators or “drivers,” and to apply the results of that analysis to projected demographic, commercial, economic and political trends worldwide over the target time period. The contractor’s report is due at the end of this month.
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, I thank you for inviting me to participate in this hearing and explain the Department’s commitment to maintaining both “Secure Borders” and “Open Doors.” The Department’s plans to achieve this balance are informed by our absolute commitment to supporting our important relationships with India and China, as well as legitimate travel from all over the world.
I look forward to answering your questions.
