Despite our desperate need for jobs, 16 million unemployed, the U.S. is ignoring a surefire way to create 1.3 million good, no-cost jobs and add $390 billion to U.S. exports in the next decade.
The world travel market grew by 60 million annual visitors in the last decade -- a virtual worldwide gold rush -- but the U.S. welcomed essentially the same number of travelers as it did in 2000. Our market share of international tourism has declined from 17% to 12% in less than a decade.
Millions of qualified would-be tourists, who want to travel to our great country, are being frustrated and turned away by cumbersome, bureaucratic State Department procedures, which discourage and reject bona fide tourists -- (foreign millionaires) -- denying them visas to visit and spend their money in the U.S.
Recapturing our lost share of this tourist market would result in 98 million more visitors, $390 billion in additional exports and $859 billion in total economic output by 2020, according to a recent U.S. Travel Association authoritative study: "Ready for Takeoff"
No U.S. destination has been hit harder by the drop in foreign visitors than Las Vegas, and, predictably, a bill recently introduced by Congressman Joe Heck (R-NV), (H.R. 3039), hopes to remedy some of these issues by mandating 12-day visa processing standard and the implementation of a video-conferencing pilot for interviews. Currently the wait for visas to be acted upon is more than 145 days in some countries.
It is no surprise that a recent survey of 1,500 travelers from Brazil, China and India demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of travelers found the U.S. a difficult place to visit. Inbound foreign travel is the single largest opportunity to increase exports and jump-start job creation immediately, according to Lawrence Summers, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Indeed, this graph shows the current complexities travelers from those countries experience when applying for a U.S. visa.
The relative decline in inbound tourists represents a "Lost Decade" for the U.S. Travel industry.
As a nation, we keep putting up "Keep Out" signs to the rest of the world. There is a widespread perception that America has become less welcoming to foreign visitors
Indeed there is a visa waiver program for 36 countries, but there is no visa waiver program for high spending visitors from China ($6,243 average spend), India ($6,131), and Brazil ($4,940). Many are discouraged from even applying. There are 153,000 millionaires in India, 535,000 millionaires in China, and 126,000 millionaires in Brazil. Many of them cannot get visas to visit the United States or don't want to go through the bureaucratic hassles.
A traveler from India spends twice as much ($6,131) as a visitor from the United Kingdom ($3,001), Germany ($3,347) or France ($3,047), according to U.S. Department of Commerce figures.
We must break down the self-imposed trade and visa barriers that have caused the United States to lag behind the rest of the world, amid a worldwide global travel boom over the last decade. For example, an international traveler from Brazil --- 126,000 millionaires --- is almost twice as likely to travel to Western Europe (52%) as to go to the U.S. (29%). Paris is awash with cash from the wealthy foreign visitors that we keep out. The average Chinese tourist at the Galleries Lafayette spends over $7,000 at the luxury store.
Travel is America's largest industry export sector by far, bringing in $134.4 billion annually, nearly 25% of services exports alone. Inbound travel is the equivalent of an export outpacing Business and Professional services ($128.3 billion), Machinery ($125.9 billion), Basic Chemicals ($124.3 billion), based on 2010 data from the Department of Commerce.
Each $5,000 spent by an inbound tourist is the equivalent of selling a $5,000 worth of Caterpillar tractor parts or a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or $5,000 in bushels of wheat.
Increasing travel to the United States would be the quickest and most effective form of economic stimulus, and a cost-free path to quickly increasing our exports. Increased foreign inbound travel would revitalize hundreds of tourist communities, inject billions into the U.S. economy and create millions of new jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail trade, and entertainment. Many of these new jobs would go directly to semi-skilled and unskilled workers: maids, waitresses, bartenders, guides, who are currently being laid off by the recent recession.
Each overseas visitor spends an average of $4,500 at hotels, restaurants, retail and other U.S. businesses. International Travel supports 1.8 million American jobs.
The heart of the new plan is to increase staffing, reduce visa interview wait times and expand the Visa Waiver Program.
This cost-free stimulus can kick in immediately by reforming an antiquated visa process that often drives wannabe international travelers from the U.S. to other countries, who are all too eager to welcome the foreign tourists and their bulging wallets.
And dramatically increasing the number of consular officers would not cost taxpayers any monies. In fact each consular officer generates fees in excess of $1.68 million (at $140 per foreign application), which is a profit center of $1.4 million per officer for the State Department.
While security should be a priority for the US State Department, some of the self imposed visa barriers are absurd. "We can become neither economic protectionists nor political isolationists" according to former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. "With new security measures...we can manage the risk of a lawful entry for unlawful purposes better than ever...It is an acceptable risk."
In Brazil, for example, the wait time for a typical 3 minute visa interview is 142 days. Tourists have to pay a $140 application fee, up front, just to get the interview. Of course, not everyone is qualified to enter the country under U.S. laws, but millions of qualified people are being turned away by the bureaucratic hassles and archaic procedures.
In the last decade the U.S. lost the opportunity to host 78 million visitors and generate $606 billion in direct and downstream spending - enough to support more than 467,000 additional U.S. jobs annually over these years.
This is just reverting to the status quo of ten years ago. If we were to further liberalize visa requirements, these figures might double.
David Rowell, a travel blogger, recently wrote about a reader who lives in China, who is frustrated at being refused a US visa.
"She is in her mid forties. She is divorced and has an adult daughter, currently studying at university in Oxford, UK.
She has her own successful business, (i.e. more than five). She earns about 500,000 Yuan a year (over US$80,000). She owns her own apartment (possibly a second apartment too) and her own imported car and has substantial deposits in her bank account (in excess of $50,000). She has no criminal background.
Other ties to China include her support to her elderly father, and the simple fact that she would have no chance of earning anything like the amount she does if she were to overstay and remain in the US, due to poor English skills and non-transferable employment skills. She has no relatives living in the US. She is paying for her daughter's college tuition in Oxford.
She has traveled to various other countries regularly..., including the UK, and has always complied with the terms of her visas. She was recently granted a tourist visa to travel to Canada (without needing a visa) and decided to add a side trip briefly down to the US.....
So she paid the fees, filled out the forms, and flew thousands of miles to be interviewed in your Beijing visa issuing section.
Surely she fits into as gilt edged a category of intending visitors as exist - successful affluent tourists who have previously demonstrated compliance with visa requirements in other western countries, with money, income, and good reason to return to China?
Her visa application was refused. Her application paperwork was scarcely glanced at, her 'interview' (which she flew thousands of miles for, requiring overnight stays in Beijing and substantial cost for airfare, taxis, and accommodation) comprised no more than the briefest of cursory exchanges which could have been done by phone if at all, and her refusal was almost immediate and without any clear explanation or recourse for appeal, but these "Keep Out" policies are self defeating to our safety and well being."
Rather than being thanked for her interest in visiting the US and her willingness to spend thousands of dollars on touring, on flights, on hotels, on meals, and on sundry other expenses in the U,S., this would- be legitimate visitor was treated in a rude and pre-emptory fashion. It happens every day to tens-of-thousands of qualified visitors.
In these brutal economic times, the U.S. can't afford these self-defeating policies. We must accept the economic reality of globalization: our manufacturing jobs are never coming back.
But we can reinvent ourselves as a tourist and cultural Mecca, just as many cities like New York, San Francisco and Miami have done. America is still the most sought after tourist destination in the world: if we don't continue to screw it up. We need to focus on our service industries, with tourism being the largest, and only then can we jump-start the creation of millions of good jobs, to take up the slack from the jobs that are forever lost. This is one area where our government can play a large role in making this happen.
The vast majority of foreign tourists return to their homes impressed by our values and way of life. They become ambassadors for this country, something we sorely need in these times of worldwide distrust of the U.S.
Perhaps more importantly, at a time when America's reputation is at an all time low, these exclusionary policies deprive us of the chance to show the world who we are, what our values are, and what our culture represents.
Write to: jfleetwood@aol.com