Stand-Off at the Border

Boy, that was a disappointment. I've been getting some hits lately from people searching Maura Harty, and I thought I might be able to get some updates on the passport mess I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Alas, there's not much news. Harty, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to answer for the massive delays for issuing passports, but she didn't have that much to say. WhirledView has a pretty substantial summary of the testimony, but as far as I can see, the money quote from the hearings was, "One of the things we failed to predict was how quickly Americans would decide to apply for a passport. . . . It was a mistake." Uh, yeah, I suppose it was. This just seems to sum up government in the Bush era. They tell us that we need passports to travel internationally by air, and then they're shocked when a lot of people want passports.

For her part, Harty does seem to be making some sort of effort to meet the shocking demand. She's hiring new people, she's expanding hours, and she's encouraging any consular employees anywhere near a passport office to roll up their sleeves and jump in to help. That's got to be great for State Department morale.

So far, the rules for North American international travel only applied to air travel, but in January 2008, they were set to expand to people entering this country at any border crossing by any means of transportation. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security delayed the passport rule for at least six months.

At this point, the story seems to be focusing mainly on inconvenienced Americans. But a couple of days ago, The Globe and Mail reported that stricter restrictions for travel to the United States had resulted in a 17-percent drop in overseas travel to this country since 2000. That translates to a hit to the economy of 200,000 tourism-related jobs lost and $16 billion in tourist dollars never spent. Even travel from Canada is down by 2.4 percent (while travel from Canada to the rest of the world is up 10 percent). But that was reported in a Canadian paper. We'll see how long it takes anybody in this country to notice.