Remarks at Foreign Service Institute

Advanced Consular Course
5 March 2007

A few months ago, one of our Trustees called with an urgent question.  He is a member of the Presidential Commission reviewing the effectiveness of the nation’s visa programs and advising on changes that should be made on how they are handled by the Departments of State and Homeland Security.  He asked: “What should I tell them to do to fix the State Department?”

“Nothing.”  That was my reply.  “State is not the problem that needs fixing.”  I will say what the problems are that need fixing in a moment.  But, first, I want to thank you for asking me here.

This Institute and the Department are connected in many ways today that advance our nation’s public diplomacy.  We have the honor to administer your Fulbright Program on behalf of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural affairs, and have done so with cooperative agreements since its inception.  We also administer your Humphrey Fellowships, Gilman Scholarships, and serve as your coordinator the Regional Education Advising Offices around the world.  We are a cooperating agency for your International Visitor Leadership Program.  And, with your help, we undertake each year a census of the flows of international students and scholars to and from the United States called “Open Doors.”  You have the cliff notes of our latest findings in the PowerPoint slides that have been distributed.

But our very first partnership with the Department was over visas.  Or, more accurately, because of the absence of them.

In 1920 and 1921, the Institute’s first president found himself making weekly trips to Ellis Island.  He did so in response to telephone calls from stranded European scholars and students who were being told by the immigration inspectors that they would have to wait 2-3 years on the island because of the quota.  Since there was no such thing as a non-immigrant visa in those days, the scholars simply became “another” Italian, Frenchman, or German and had no legal way to take up their visiting professorship at Columbia, give their lecture at NYU, or start an academic degree program anywhere close to when they had planned.

President Duggan persuaded the then Commissioner on Immigration (who later served with him on the first Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board) to have all international students and scholars paroled into the Institute’s custody.  A $500 bond was paid to us to be returned on exit.  And we were required to file an annual report that called for just about the same amount of detail as schools now supply in complying with the SEVIS system.  By the end of the 1920s, there were close to 10,000 parolees under our care; the arrangement lasted until after World War II .

Starting in 1922, the Institute also taught the consular course on academic fraud at FSI’s predecessor and designed the form that consuls could use for persons applying to enter the U.S. for the purpose of academic studies and research. 

It is good to be back.  Since 9/11, my colleagues and I have spoken to every class of new consular officers about value of international education to our society and what we are hearing “on the other side of the window” from students and scholars as they apply for visas to come here.  I want to thank Scott Cecil and his colleagues for making this possible and for also including us when you have workshops abroad where our REAC officers can share what they are hearing in their regions.  The idea to do these lectures came out of a conversation I had with Maura Harty and her enthusiastic support.  She is, as far as I know, the only head of a consular service in the entire world who is consistently on record (in The Chronicle of Higher Education, initially, and in many other publications since) as saying that losing even one student is one too many.

What needs to be fixed?  Three things.

Their media.  The image of our visa process that is portrayed in the foreign press tends to focus on all the bad news all the time.  One visa denied or one nasty incident at a U.S. airport (about which more in a moment) creates a perception that all visa applications will be denied and that all incoming visitors will be profiled, singled out, and hassled.  Now I know that we cannot control what the press publishes (even in our own country) and that some media exist in large part to make the U.S. look like a hostile power.

But the embassy can work to correct every error and every misstatement all the time.  This is what I call the “letter to the editor” approach.  Some years ago, a man named Bill Depperman lost a family member to an accident with a speeding driver.  He made it his goal in life to get the speed limit reduced to 55.  He found a way to follow every published newspaper story about an automobile accident involving a fatality and a car going faster than 55.  He also knew that the statistical odds of and accident not turning into a fatality were substantial if the speed was under lower than the posted limits which, at the time, were 65 mph.  He wrote to every newspaper editor pointing this out and urging a national 55 and stay alive approach.  He is credited with some of the success in getting us to that speed limit today – and with saving many lives.  Be a Bill Depperman at your post.

Another very effective tool I discovered is that used by consular officers who give out two business cards.  One contains the usual.  The other, like the one from the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong that I received a year ago, tells the story we want people to read: that we stress service, that the process is reasonable and also predictable.  In our language and theirs.

Second, we need to fix what the personnel from the Department of Homeland Security do at our airports.  I think much of this can be solved by better training and we have been trying to get this on Secretary Chertoff’s agenda since October.  We have offered to do for the border inspectors training class what I am doing here today.

So what is the problem?  In the past 2 years, 99% of all the “visa problems” my colleagues and I have heard about are not that at all.  They are “arrival-and-greeted-with-suspicion” attitudes.  I had a taste of this 3 weeks ago at JFK on my way back from Saudi Arabia.  The officer started my 30 minute inspection with him by saying simply that “no Americans should be going to that country.”  He asked why I did.  And what the Institute did.  He was shocked to learn the U.S. Government was supporting a Fulbright Program and letting foreign students into our country.  That was the easy part.

He then started thumbing through my passport, page-by-page.  He did that twice.  Then a third time and stopped in two places.  “I see you have been to Iran.”  I said no; I had been to Iraq twice and that what the visas in my passport show.  He did not, at first accept that.  Then he asked me why I would go to Iraq.  It did not help at all when I said I went at the invitation of the U.S. ambassador and on behalf of Fulbright.

Eventually, he let me go.  I wondered what it would have been like if my name have been Mohammed.

Few days after returning to the office, I received a copy of an email from a Saudi business official who asked for my views on an experience that one of their scholarship students had just had at LAX.  Let me share it with you verbatim.

Now the good news is that the student would still like to return here to finish his degree.  He seems to understand that this happens.  And by now, since the company that sponsored him is Aramco, I think our ambassador may have found a way to help.

The bad news, of course, is I am sure I am not the only person who will get a copy of the email.  Many will be discouraged and frightened of coming here.  Homeland Security needs to know two things: Saudis especially know they are looked at extra carefully and expect to be asked more questions.  They accept this and understand the link to 9/11.  They are also people and need to be treated with respect.  That would go a long way.  And would not get in the way of assuring that we have secure borders.

Third, my industry has to take the message abroad that we welcome international students just as we welcome the fact that our numbers are back up to where they were pre 9/11.  For too long, we have had the approach that if we built it they would have to come.  The two years of decline reflected in the Open Doors statistics – coupled to the competition that surged from the UK, Australia, and other countries who, for a time, said they had much easier visa processes than ours – were a wake up call.  We need more of the kind of delegations that Secretary Spellings, Under Secretary Hughes, and Assistant Secretary Powell have taken abroad to make the point that our academic doors are really open and that we have a substantial capacity and willingness to welcome international students.

The signs on this front are encouraging.  Having just completed our season of University Fairs in Asia, I can report that we had record crowds to meet representatives of record numbers of U.S. institutions in virtually every country in the region.  The latest issue of Indian Fulbrighter, which just reached me from New Delhi, tells an equally encouraging story:

“Lively student interest in U.S. higher education is matched by U.S. university enthusiasm for establishing deeper ties with India.… Representatives of many U.S. institutions – American University, City University of New York-Brooklyn, Colorado State University, Cornell University, Harvard Yenching Institute, Kent State University, the New School’s India China Institute, University of Florida, University of Nebraska, and Washington University in St. Louis among them – visited India during the December-January holiday period.”

You are doing your part.  And the visa issuance numbers for FY06 show it.  Now it is time for the rest of us to do ours.  Thank you for your service and for what you will do to keep our academic doors open and our country secure.