The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

22 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 0 ment Accountability Office investi- gations and recommendations. Peo- ple blamed us for students not coming, for the drop in the number of visitors and for business travelers not being able to get their visas. In 2002 and 2003, we had markedly expanded the require- ment to obtain security advisory opinions, and the State Department and our other agency partners were not resourced well enough to keep up. Some categories of security checks were taking seven to nine months to complete. Students were missing not just a semester but the entire academic year. So we were really under fire. There was a feeling among some members of Congress and in the press that the De- partment of Homeland Security should have assumed the visa function. When Maura began as assistant secretary, about a month after I started as visa DAS, we launched an exten- sive outreach plan— starting with other offices in the State Department — to explain the changes, clarify that you could still get a visa and to confirm that we still welcomed people to the United States, especially students. All of us in the front office started engaging in outreach. We traveled around the country visiting campuses to talk about student visas; whenever we traveled overseas we met with student and business groups. I held a town-hall meet- ing at the deputy assistant secretary level with desk offi- cers to talk about what we were doing to eliminate delays in visa issuance. Gradually, things started to turn around. People realized that we were really making an effort to make this work. There were so many changes — not just in our proce- dures, but in our interaction with the new Homeland Se- curity Council, which was made up primarily of DHS and law enforcement agency representatives. In those days we were spending more time with the HSC than the National Security Council. In this gathering of law enforcement offices, the State Department was sometimes the odd man out. Because there was still a lot of interest in further tightening border security, we constantly had to walk that fine line of show- ing that we understood security while trying to gently tell people that we can’t shut down the borders. We had to continue being the open, welcom- ing country that we’ve always been. Sometimes we were the only ones at the table saying this, so it was a very difficult time. RM: While you were attending the meetings, it was the folks in the field who were having to actually implement changes in their visa is- suing processes. How did that go? A/S Jacobs: Overseas, as al- ways, the consular officers stepped up. We were sending cable after cable with one change after the other. I’m sure they were thinking, “What are they doing back there? Where is this coming from?” For example, a law passed in May 2002 required collecting biometrics for visas. We knew that we would soon be collecting finger- prints from every applicant, so we instructed posts to start interviewing nearly every applicant. We figured by the time the biometrics collection was set up, they would have already worked managing the physical flow of applicants through their sections. Officers came back with very legitimate, logical ques- tions about how they were supposed to accomplish this. For years we were understaffed. State hadn’t been hiring in sufficient numbers in the 1990s. A lot of smart people out there were saying, “Wow, do you know what this means? Have you really thought this through?” But again, it showed the sort of can-do attitude of consular officers. We completely transformed the visa process. Staffs were working hard and the consular managers were having to get buy-in for all these changes. They had Foreign Service Nationals with 15, 20, 25 years of experi- ence doing things a certain way who suddenly had to learn new procedures. We also had a few outstanding veteran officers who weren’t thrilled with a lot of these changes and were not shy about speaking out. So we did a lot of training in change management. But everyone came around, realizing that they had to set the example. Although the government is known for its inertia and moving slowly, we did all of this in just a few months. It was amazing. We deployed and started using all of our biometric equipment within a year. It was just unheard of how quickly we moved on this. And after a while, of course, people began to wonder how we had ever done F O C U S “[After 9/11], we constantly had to walk that fine line of showing that we understood security while trying to gently tell people that we can’t shut down the borders.” — CA Assistant Secretary Janice L. Jacobs