Fortress America's gatekeepers need to remember: first impressions count

The US tightening of entry requirements is understandable, but it must not be at the cost of its welcoming reputation
    • The Guardian,
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Projected on to the consul's wall in the American embassy in London was a series of snapshots. They came from a hi-tech database somewhere in the United States and they showed my face - bleary-eyed, flight-weary - as captured by the homeland security camera at the passport control desk every time I have entered the US since 2004. Beside my name, the database said: "Clearance Status: Not Adverse."

According to the most recent information supplied to me by the American embassy, some 100 million people are now contained in that database, held at an undisclosed location. Last year, they gave me a figure of about 60 million. At that rate of growth, they'll have a good portion of humankind face-logged within a decade.

Not only our faces but our fingerprints are there. If you go to the US on an academic exchange visa, as I do every year, you have to report to the embassy every time, have your fingerprints checked and be re-interviewed. Watch out not to cut your finger the night before - because if the cut impairs the fingerprint match, you must go home and wait till the finger heals. After first filling in various forms, one of them asking you to list your parents' and siblings' telephone numbers (I imagine the phone call: "Do you have or have you ever had a son called Timothy?"), getting a new, special-format passport photo from Snappy Snaps and paying not just one but two hefty fees, you receive a stern letter warning you that you may have to wait outside the embassy in "inclement" weather and telling you not to bring a mobile phone. (Store it at a railway station safe deposit, they helpfully suggest.) I was advised that one should allow three to four hours for the whole procedure.

At the fortress which the American embassy in London has become since the September 11 attacks, you pass through a Portakabin where you are security-checked by local, British employees. When I went through this time, these Brits were just being gratuitously rude to a visiting American, whose precious fountain pen they had mishandled. Inside, you find yourself in a vast room, the size of two tennis courts, with row upon row of people sitting on serried ranks of chairs, zombie-like, waiting for their ticket number to come up on an electronic screen above their heads. If your uncut finger passes muster at window number 13, you then return to your seat to wait to be summoned for an interview at window number 23, before queuing again to pay another fee for courier delivery of your passport. The whole scene reminded me of a line I once read in a poem describing the European experience in the 1930s: something about "those whose address was the corridors of Europe/waiting to be interrogated on their lack of guilt". Except that now it is the corridors of an American consulate.

Let me be clear: wearisome though they are, I completely understand why the US has introduced these procedures. If I turn back to my copy of the 9/11 Commission report, I can find details of how the men who attacked America had applied for and received such visas. There were good reasons for tightening up.

One may, however, wonder how effective this vast, technologically sophisticated safety net is, given that some 3 million people travel to the US from the UK every year without a visa, on the visa-waiver scheme. Moreover, the great majority of entries into the US come not by air or sea but by land, from Mexico and Canada. That consul with my involuntary Facebook page on his computer gave me an estimate of a staggering 400 million visits a year by land crossing - many of them people commuting in daily to work. (So the total number of visitors, as opposed to visits, is lower.) Now the controls on the Mexican and Canadian land frontier are being tightened up too, yet many commuters from Mexico and Canada are apparently still waved through in their cars, merely flashing some form of ID to an official in a booth. So there is a perfectionism of control for the few and a leaking sieve for the many. But I can see that you had to start somewhere.

Over the years, I have noticed efforts to make the procedure a little more user-friendly, with forms that can be completed online and payment over the phone by credit card. You used to have to go in person to Barclays Bank - and it could only be Barclays - to pay your visa fee and receive a physical receipt. After seven years, the US government has finally realised we live in the 21st century.

Often, the problems come from the arrogant and suspicious attitude of locally employed staff, who are, so to speak, more American than the Americans. In London, that means British employees lording it over fellow Brits. Or, as in the case of that incident I witnessed at the security check, even Brits lording it over Americans - in the name of the US. This phenomenon is far from unique to the US. I've heard of applicants having similar (and worse) experiences with local staff working in British consulates in eastern Europe. The theory is one thing, the practice often another.

I dwell on these seemingly workaday details because they shape the first impressions which are made on hundreds of thousands of people who wish to work, study or live in the United States. And first impressions matter. What Osama bin Laden most desires is that those impressions should be bad ones. I want the US to deny him that pleasure.

Since the 9/11 attacks, some people have been deterred, partly by these forbidding procedures, partly by the general impression of a fortress America. In 2003/2004, the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities fell for the first time since 1971. Some of them went to Britain or Australia instead. American university presidents sounded alarm bells. Condoleezza Rice declared publicly that this must be reversed. For, as Harvard's Joseph Nye never tires of insisting, such foreign students enhance a country's "soft power". More recently, the trend seems to be moving slowly upward again. In 2005/2006, there were over 560,000 foreign students enrolled at American universities.

The question then becomes what experience they have while living there. It is my impression that the United States has, in recent years, been a slightly less welcoming place than it used to be - although it remains one of the most big-hearted, friendly countries on earth. This is partly because of the post-9/11 sense of national embattlement, fostered by a relentless 24/7 Fox News rhetoric of "war on terror". It also connects somehow with the fear of low-wage foreign competition promoted by populist scaremongers such as CNN's Lou Dobbs. But the atmosphere changes from year to year. I shall report back over the next few months, when I shall be writing from America - provided, that is, my clearance status remains Not Adverse. As I approach the passport control desk, I shall prepare a wan smile for America's secret Facebook.

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