The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

the press that we charged the $100 because Chile did. Unfortunately, this is not true — the locals did not charge until we began to do so. Shutting the World Out The damage our restrictive visa policies do to our once-important tourism industry should be obvious. According to an article in the New York Times recent- ly, from October 2000 to September 2001, 6.3 million people applied to travel from developing nations (this includes any nations that do not have a reciprocal waiver agreement with us, thus, for example, all of Latin America) to the United States for business, plea- sure or medical treatment. That number dropped to 3.7 million for the next fiscal year (FY 2003). Applications for student visas fell by almost 100,000 over the same two-year period. Universities that depend upon much of their revenue for fees from for- eign students must be hurting! At the same time that the volume of applications is falling, refusal rates are rising. But probably even greater is the damage these poli- cies do to our international image. Some of my old friends back home, in Pennsylvania and the Washington area, don’t care about that image, but liv- ing outside the United States more than half of my 76 years has changed my attitude toward the rest of the world. I naively, and to some of my friends unpatriot- ically, think the rest of the world is important to us, not only in pragmatic terms but for its own sake, too. And I fear that the current government policy, of bashing countries who are “not with us,” so thus “against us,” of bad-mouthing the Islam of 1.3 billion people, and of crusading against evil, but only very selectively, is isolating us from the reality of the rest of the world. I think we need more foreign tourists and international students to see for themselves that we are still not as bad as we seem to others — and to go back home and tell that to friends and relatives. I also think we need to be broader in our war against evil everywhere, not just in Afghanistan (if we really care about it any more) and Iraq. Whether we want to admit it or not, there is plenty of evil in Sudan and Burma and China, and even in our allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Even though, as the world’s most powerful shock-and-awe-provider, we don’t have enough troops to occupy and save all the downtrodden people of those places, we ought to at least show some guts in denouncing the evil there and not just in the remaining axes of evil, Iran and North Korea. Well, I have gotten away from my theme of the “good old days” of my 30 years in the Foreign Service, but it should be obvious that I am happy now that I can speak my mind and don’t have to be a “good soldier,” like some of our current admired leaders. I was briefly a good soldier — and also a good sailor — but I could- n’t take it permanently. Another big part of the “good old days” was simply living in those countries my friends back home have learned to hate. I remember the embassy nurse stand- ing up in a pre-PTA meeting in Brasilia and saying “I didn’t bring my kids all the way down here to have them go to school with Brazilians!” I simply got up and left because I had lost the power to communicate with her (or was it the other way around?). And I thought of seeing my 14-year-old, blond-haired daugh- ter (now trilingual), at a recent American School open house, walking across the playing field with her two best friends, dark-skinned little girls from India and Trinidad and Tobago, and how proud I was, hoping she would be a symbol of our future. The great Welsh travel-writer Jan Morris once wrote that “the past is a foreign country.” At least most of the good old days of my past seem to have been spent there — and I thank the Foreign Service for sending me out to experience that.  F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 Being a consular officer often meant using your imagination to devise new techniques to cope with the impossible workload.