The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

process. Student visas gave young people a chance to improve themselves and learn the methods that made our country the best and most advanced in the world — and then take those lessons back to help their own nations. Temporary work visas for Filipino and other Third World nurses improved the care of patients in badly understaffed hospitals back home. And immi- grant visas reunited family members of American citi- zens and also brought individuals possessing excep- tional skills to our shores. Often, doing that work meant plenty of pressure, extra hours and hurried lunches so we could handle the crush of applicants despite inadequate staffing. It often meant being more patient than we normally would have been with applicants who had waited a long time, sometimes with young children and elderly parents. But most of my memories of those times are still warm. Playing God Being a consular officer in the “good old days” often meant using your imagination to devise new tech- niques to cope with the impossible workload. We took pride in this ability to innovate, to “make do,” even if praise from the bosses and formal awards were few and far between. We were accustomed to being treat- ed as inferiors by many hot-dog political and econom- ic officers, to say nothing of ambassadors and DCMs, who seldom had much concept of what we were doing. Once, at a nice dinner given by a colleague, our DCM came to slum with the vice consuls and asked us how it was to play God “down there.” My reply that, if he really wanted to find out, he was welcome to come downstairs and play God while I went up to clip news- papers, did not please him, nor help my annual employee evaluation review. We worked hard to surpass former issuance levels and set some admirable records along the way. And in the process, we were often issuing multiple-entry, indefinite-validity visas so that the eligible applicant didn’t have to return and we didn’t have to duplicate our efforts. Now that is impossible, for reasons said to be connected with security and efficiency. It was often difficult then, too, because we could not issue any bet- ter visas than the host country did. In one important country, I continually tussled with the local head of consular affairs, but could not get our ambassador to weigh in at a higher level, even though he had been a high-level consular official himself, and it would have benefited our own tourists more than the few locals who went to the U.S. The growing “efficiency” restrictions on visa activi- ty today bother me more than the security ones. Most of us were happy that our NIVs, in addition to being mostly multiple-indefinite, were also free, thus encouraging tourism to the U.S. Now it is 180 degrees the reverse, with a charge of $100 for each application. In other words, people who want to come to our coun- try, for whatever reason, have to pay $100, whether they get the visa or not. It must not be much fun for consular officers, not only to tell the applicant that he can’t go, but also to steal $100 from his pocket. And even for those who do get the visas, they have $100 less to spend to help the U.S. economy. In several of my reincarnations in the Foreign Service, I was involved in disputes between the pro- grammatic sections and the administrative managers. The latter usually won, and I was almost always on the losing, program side. I am glad that I was already retired when the business of charging a big fee, sup- posedly to enhance cost-efficiency, went into effect, although I was a witness to the practice, when the fee was a lot lower, in five TDY assignments. Why cannot the decision on so-called cost-efficien- cy permit taking into consideration other issues of importance to our country besides money? Our national reputation for fairness and the state of our economy are also important, but are difficult to put a price on. Our visa fees, for example, simply make the cost of foreign travel for Americans more expensive, because other countries merely retaliated and charge our citizens $100 or whatever, too. And, although tourism to the U.S is diminishing, our nationals’ trav- els abroad — although affected by the intentionally weak dollar — are still an important cost to us. Recently, a consular officer in our embassy here told F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 Frederick Purdy, an FSO from 1956 to 1986, served in Ciudad Juarez, Kingston, Ponta Delgada, Brasilia (twice), Santiago, Manila, Seville and Washington, D.C. After retirement, he went on TDY assignments to Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, Bogota and Addis Ababa. Now living in Chile, he is the author of The Gringo’s Guide to Chilean Wine (fifth edition, 2003).