Let’s Hear it for Bureaucrazy

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Let’s Hear it for Bureaucrazy
Winter’s halfway gone. The light is getting brighter and the days are getting longer but not as fast as the lines of frustrated French citizens waiting these days in front of the American consulates in France, Paris in particular, to get expensive new visas for travel to the United States   Therein lies a tale of mostly French bureaucratic rigidity that boggles the mind, that is torpedoing tourism between the two countries, that is hitting travel agents hard and generally drumming up ill-feeling on a grand scale. .   The reason is that the United States, for months now, although it still will accept optically readable passports given out before then, has been insisting that none dated after October 26, 2005 are valid for entry into U.S. territory unless they are machine-readable or have a special American visa issued since then.  All this obviously is justified as an anti-terrorist precaution.   Add to that the fact that the final destination for the traveller doesn’t even have to be in the United States. The rules apply even if you’re just transiting en route anywhere and simply stopping briefly or changing planes in a U.S. airport.   The problem is that visas didn’t used to be required at all for French citizens. The new machine-readable and visa rules were never widely publicized in France and, what’s more, French passports issued since October aren’t machine readable anyway.  That’s where rigid French bureaucracy comes in.   The new U.S. rules were voted through in the year 2001 after the September 11 attacks in New York. Aimed mostly but not exclusively at countries in western Europe whose citizens had been visa-exempt, they allowed a grace period up until last October before taking effect. Every one of the 27 countries concerned managed to crank up the new kinds of passports featuring digital photographs or microchips for machine recognition—except France.   There was a private French printing company ready and able to do the job in plenty of time.  But the French changeover—like so much else in the country—ran into trade union resistance, this time from the workers in the State-run printing house that always had had the monopoly for such work.   Despite negotiations underway between the government and the unions, both sides say the problem probably won’t be solved until into the month of May at best.  In the meantime, chaos.   Meanwhile, untold numbers of would-be French visitors who have new—but not U.S.-accepted– passports have been finding themselves suddenly forced to cancel or radically revise their travel plans.    To get the American visa requires a personal by-appointment-only visit to the consulate. Just that costs 14.50 Euros, or almost $18, and for the visa itself there’s another charge of 85 Euros, more than $100, in addition. If the parents in a family need a visa, then their kids do too and the total cost mounts up quickly.   And the waits are long, not just on the sidewalk. The delay for a visa appointment can be as long as two months if the slightest glitch develops. It’s virtually hopeless for someone who had a trip all planned but doesn’t have the right passport and didn’t know of the new visa rules.   Thousands of French people have been caught unawares.    The Section Chief of a French hospital in Paris was told she couldn’t transit the U.S. en route to a conference in Mexico just a few days away.  A professor in southern France, just days before her scheduled departure for a pre-paid vacation in New York, was forced to make a hurried flight to Paris for a visa which she obtained just in time. A U.S. college student with dual nationality who, without worrying, used her French and not her American passport for a quick vacation trip to Paris then was turned back at the Paris airport when she tried to return to the States because she didn’t have a visa. Her parents had to fly a friend to France to bring her American passport in order to get her back to school on time.  .   Not surprisingly, all this has virtually tripled the visa load on overwhelmed consular officers and if someone who lives in Paris may succeed in running the gauntlet within days or weeks, those in the provinces have to add on the travel time and cost involved in getting to and from the capital. More chaos.   On February 2, the U.S. embassy in Paris announced it was shifting staff to beef up its consular section in the hope of handling 50 percent more visa interviews each day. In addition, it said U.S. embassies or consulates in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bern, Brussels, London, Madrid, Rome and Florence had been authorized to issue U.S. visas to French citizens applying in those cities.   Still, the embassy said, despite its best efforts, many would-be travellers would face long waits for visa appointments until the arrival of French biometric passports.     Understandably, the tourist industries in both countries are up in arms. Estimates of French tourist spending in the United States up until now usually run at more than 600 million dollars a year.  But French tourist agencies are lamenting drops of 30 percent and more in their requests for U.S. trips and the industry is talking already of business losses this year in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars. The estimate of potential lost French tourist revenue for tourist-related establishments in the United States is similarly stratospheric.   Although some briefly—very briefly–refunded the money when ticket purchasers first hit the visa block late last October, most French tourist agencies and airlines now are refusing to issue U.S. destination tickets until shown a valid passport or visa in advance.  And if a Parisian without a visa wants to go to Tahiti in the Pacific, for instance, attempting the normal routing via Los Angeles is too risky.   His tour operator is more likely now to route him via South America.   No wonder many would be French visitors…
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