07 July 2004 Blog Home : July 2004 : Permalink
A find by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine mentions that the US is requiring foreign journalists to renew their visas abroad. The article he references and he himself seem to be of the opinion that this is an attack on press freedom and especially uppity foreign journalists.
Well actually I think that is just as side-effect, what we see here is the Dept of Homeland Security doing its absolute best to kill the faltering economic recovery. If you look at the relevant State Dept webpage you see that its more widesweeping than just picking on journalists as it affects many other classes of foreign worker within the US:
After many years of service, the Revalidation Division must discontinue its domestic revalidation service for E, H, I, L, O, and P visas. Section 303 of the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act requires the Department of State to collect a biometric identifier (fingerprint) from all non-diplomatic visa applicants. It is not feasible for the Department of State to collect the biometric identifiers.
We encourage all applicants to apply for new visas in their home countries. If you are not traveling to your home country, you may apply at a U.S. visa processing post in Canada and Mexico provided you have made a visa interview appointment. You may also apply at a U.S. visa processing post in a third country provided you have made an interview appointment. You should understand that if there is a delay in visa issuance, you may need to spend more time overseas than you originally planned.
Journalists as Class I visa holders and as you can see are just one of the half-dozen visa types that must now leave the USA in order to renew their visas. Although journalists are probably important (though not as important as the often think they are) in this case they are just the canary in the mine when it comes to suffocation under swathes of red-tape. H and L visas for example are the ones used by technology companies to get the engineering talent they need. I have no idea how many Silicon Valley workers are on L-1 or H1-B visas but I'm going to predict its a significant number. If these people have to spend an uncertain period of time that could be as long as 6 weeks or whatever in their home country at the beck and call of the friendly US INS and DHS every time they change jobs then that is going to add a significant burden to the sort of innovative comapnies that America needs to keep its technology leadership and keep the current economic recovey going.
When you put this sort of roadblock in the way then you really really increase the probability that high tech R&D is going to be outsourced. A rational business manager is going to look at the costs and uncertainties of hiring people to work in Silicon Valley and start suggesting that the people he would have hired from India or China stay in theit home country with the same salary and work there. So is outsourcing your R&D to potentially hostile nations, not to mention hurting the economy and proprty tax base of some of the wealthier parts of the country, just the price America has to pay for increased security?
You might argue that this would in fact be a reasonable trade off for security except for one minor detail: these people are not a security risk. Why? because in general they are working 50 hour weeks and if you are working 50 hour weeks you don't have time to spy or plot terrorst attacks. The legal workers who produce things of value for the economy, pay their taxes and help drive up property prices in Silicon Valley have to take the hit while the illegal workers who don't pay any taxes receive support to get driving licenses and so on. As Michelle Malkin has pointed out numerous times the way to get in to the US is as an illegal alien or abuse the tourist visa/visa waiver program. What we are seeing here is the usual bureacratic response to something bad - make the law-abiding jump through additional hoops which utterly fail to affect the law-breaking. You and I take our shoes off and lose our laptops in airports across America while conmen flash false credentials and get escorted to the front of the line. The same applies to this visa renewal thing.
Biometric visas - lets hurt tourism and high tech industry by mandating a system that doesn't work but does give full employment to bureaucrats.