The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

of index cards for immigrant visa cases and American citizen registra- tions. There were no computers. Security was the mallet kept within easy reach for emergency destruc- tion of the visa printing plates. In the consular sections of a gen- eration ago phones rang constantly, and the Foreign Service Nationals (now known as locally employed staff) spent much of their time an- swering inquiries and processing mail-in visa and passport cases. Citizens of France, Britain and other prosperous Eu- ropean countries still required visas to visit the United States; there was no formal visa waiver program until 1986. In that era, however, many consular sections interviewed only visa applicants considered high risk for illegal immi- gration. Lookout systems were primitive. A few large posts used teletypes to do visa applicant name checks. Most consular sections relied on microfiche sheets or rarely updated lists kept in ring binders. A Focus on Security Many factors contributed to the transition in consular work, but four essential forces drove forward the consular revolution: visionary leadership on the part of Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Mary Ryan and her suc- cessor, Maura Harty; an IT technological boom that of- fered powerful new tools; the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ success in being able to use a portion of visa fees to pay for the new technology; and the challenge posed by interna- tional terrorism, which led to greater interagency infor- mation-sharing. Although the era of heightened security after 9/11 cer- tainly spurred major changes in consular work, such as centralized passport issuance and biometric data collec- tion, many technological advances and process reforms actually began in the 1980s and early 1990s. For example, the Wang computer sys- tem installed worldwide in the early 1980s provided the first relatively timely and reliable visa application record and lookout list. Attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tehran and Is- lamabad in 1979, and against our embassies in Kuwait City and Beirut in 1983, accelerated the process (begun in the late 1970s) of in- stalling hardlines and other security features now in place at all consular sections worldwide. And the escalation of il- legal immigration into the United States led the State De- partment to begin developing a more assertive strategy to reduce the vulnerability of the visa process to fraud. The machine-readable visa, first introduced in 1989 and modified to improve its security features in 1993 and again in 2002, ended the era of stamped, easily forged visas. The MRV also, for the first time, linked non-immigrant visa ap- plications directly with an automated lookout system. The early automated lookout systems were painfully slow and inefficient, but they got better through the use of algo- rithms. At the same time, the telecommunications revolution offered CA an extraordinary opportunity to modernize both its technical procedures and its administrative process. Under Assistant Secretary Ryan, the bureau began identifying “best practices” at its more than 200 con- sular operations abroad and encouraging efficiencies like offsite fee payment, call centers and Web-based appoint- ment systems. Commonly used forms and basic guidance material like cables and the Foreign Affairs Manual be- came available online at every desktop. The introduction of a non-immigrant visa application fee, and CA’s success in securing partial retention of those fees in 1994 in the wake of theWorld Trade Center bomb- ing, finally provided a stable revenue source to finance the development and implementation of a series of powerful automated tools to protect U.S citizens and borders. By 1996 every consular section, however small, was using the same technology. Equipment was replaced and staff re- trained at two- to three-year intervals, ensuring that con- sular services stayed close to state-of-the-art in a rapidly advancing technological environment. J U N E 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 F O C U S Ann B. Sides is a 27-year veteran of the Foreign Service. Her consular assignments include Niamey, Dakar, Oran, Belgrade (twice), Zagreb, Dublin, Sarajevo and Athens, where she served as consul general from 2004 to 2008. She is currently a grievance analyst in the Bureau of Human Resources and looks forward to retirement in 2011. “The Foreign Service has provided a rich vein of material for the fiction I hope to write when I hand in my building pass,” she says. The machine-readable visa, first introduced in 1989 and modified in 1993 and again in 2002, ended the era of stamped, easily forged visas.