A warning against tight borders (or, The hidden costs of the "War on Terror")

When I was coming back into the country from Jamaica back in April, I was struck by the number of menacing signs posted in the international arrivals terminal (at Charlotte/Douglas Airport), announcing our nation's policy of fingerprinting all foreign visitors upon their arrival on American soil. I didn't remember this having been policy in the past, and I guess I missed the announcement that we would be starting to do so.

Turns out, it's been our policy for the better part of the last decade, another initiative of the ever-growing Department of Homeland Security. From a news item announcing the policy change in early 2004:

Stringent new security regulations affecting most tourists have been introduced at US air and sea ports.

Everyone entering the United States with a visa will now have fingerprints and photographs taken and scrutinised...

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the US aimed to be "open to visitors but closed to terrorists".

All 115 US airports that handle international flights and 14 major seaports are covered by the programme, under which customs officials can instantly check an immigrant or visitor's criminal background.

Of course, this is all part of a broader crackdown against immigration and foreign visitors, as visas for both travel--and perhaps more importantly, employment--purposes have become increasingly difficult to come by. Tom Ridge's assertion that the DHS wanted to be "open to visitors" is in fact laughable in the face of the ever-increasing restrictions, a point that a recent Time article picked up on.

Everyone should love Brazilian tourists. They spend more per capita than any other nationality. Worldwide, Brazilian tourists shell out an average of $43.3 million a day, dropping a gigantesco $1.4 billion last April alone, up 83% from the same period last year, according to the Brazil's Central Bank. In 2010, 1.2 million Brazilians visited the United States, injecting $5.9 billion into the U.S. economy...

Not that the U.S. has made it particularly easy for os turistas brasileiros to visit. Instead of rolling out the red carpet for the travelers from the increasingly wealthy South American nations, the U.S. makes Brazilians — and every other Latin American nationality — undergo a lengthy and expensive visa-application process that takes months of planning and can cost thousands of dollars in travel, lodging, food and other expenses — all before leaving the country...

In all of Brazil, a country larger than the continental United States, the U.S. has only four consular offices: in the capital Brasilia, Recife, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. That means a family living in Porto Alegre would have to spend hundreds of dollars on domestic airline tickets to fly everyone 700 miles to São Paulo, then drop hundreds more on hotel rooms, food and taxis, just to get a visa application interview, which costs an additional $140 each.

While the State Department claims the average international wait time for a visa interview is 30 days, in Brazil it can be as high as 141 days, according to Steve Joyce of the U.S. Travel Association. That's not due to bureaucratic laziness. The overworked consular staff in São Paulo is currently processing an average of 2,300 visas every day, more than any other U.S. consulate in the world. And they hope to nearly double their production level by next year to keep from falling farther behind. Brazil represents the fastest-growing non-immigrant visa demand in the world, up 234% over the past five years, eclipsing even China's 124% increase in U.S. visa issuances, according to the State Department.

Tourist industry officials say Brazil should be on the list of countries whose citizens do not need a visa to enter the U.S. There are currently 36 countries on Washington's visa waiver list, but none of them are in Latin America. Some argue it's hampering the U.S.' economic growth and global competitiveness. For example, Chilean tourism to the United States is down more than 30% from 10 years ago, while globally the number of Chileans traveling overseas to other countries is up 50%.

The article goes on to cite a U.S. Travel Association statistic that suggests that by hampering international tourism over the last decade, our nation has put itself at a competitive economic disadvantage.

The American tourism market has recovered slowly since 9-11, but it missed out on a decade of growth, according to Roger Dow, president of the U.S. Travel Association. "We call it the lost decade. If we had just stayed on pace with the rest of the world, we would have generated $606 billion more dollars and have 467,000 more jobs right now."

In an economy with millions of unemployed citizens that is struggling to generate 100,000 new jobs per month, that 467,000 jobs figure--while debatable--is no small nugget. Consider it one of the hidden costs of our dogmatic and amorphous "War on Terror".

I've of course written here before about the ill-advised tendency to crack down on immigration (and, by extension, foreign visitation) during a recession--in this recession, the long shadow of 9/11 merely exacerbated that tendency. There is a general feeling that protectionism can ensure that immigrants aren't "stealing" the jobs that rightfully belong to struggling American citizens, and theoretically that concept makes sense.

But realistically, immigrants are more likely to become entrepreneurs--spurring economic growth--and more likely to perform "complementary" work, work that enhances the value of other workers, like installing drywall or driving a taxi.

Unfortunately, the same policies that have eliminated many of those workers from contributing to the American economy are now also prohibiting foreign visitors from coming into our country and spending money as tourists, spurring the economies of the cities they visit. Maybe the benefits of keeping tight borders outweigh the costs, maybe they don't. I just don't think that most people realize how far-reaching the costs of our "War on Terror" really are.

[BBC]
[Time] (h/t Daily Reckoning)