La Dolce Visa

To see America, get in line

The British are coming! Also the French, Italians, West Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Danes, Japanese and other footloose foreigners who find the U.S. an increasingly attractive summer vacation spot. But as the annual invasion gathers strength, a perennial complaint is again being heard from Western visitors: an American can usually gain entry to their countries merely by flashing a passport, while they cannot come to the U.S. without also obtaining a visa.

That requirement is especially galling for the British, the largest and fastest growing group of tourists to the U.S. Some 1 million Britons are expected to apply for visas this year, up from 900,000 in 1980. Some 98% have been approved; most of those turned down are jobless young people who might be prospective immigrants, not tourists. Travel money and a return ticket are favored proofs of tourist status.

The surge of applicants has made the embassy in London the busiest U.S. visa office in the world. Lines of 100 or more British and other, primarily Third World, nationals spill down the steps and onto the sidewalk outside the embassy building on Grosvenor Square. Inside, 60 employees process as many as 6,000 applications a day. At any moment, some 60,000 to 80,000 British passports are in the embassy's hands. Boxes and baskets overflow with applications. Harried staff give hurried glances before rubber-stamping approval. Applicants, once thronged inside, now wait mainly outside. Says Visa Unit Chief Diane Dillard: "We have a factory here. It's dehumanizing, demoralizing."

The embassy has tried any number of schemes to ease what one weary applicant called "organized chaos": newspaper ads advising British tourists to apply early and by mail for standard three-week service; white boxes where rush customers can drop their passports and applications and be mailed a visa the same day; black boxes for the truly desperate, who can drop off their passports and applications and pick up a visa three hours later. But these efforts have not cleared away the crush, just pushed it onto the street. U.S. Consul General Alan Gise attributes the upsurge to the "Laker legacy" of cheap, no-frills flights, to exchange rates that until recently were favorable, to relatively low U.S. prices for food and hotels, and to the British worker's growing infatuation with Miami Beach. A further complication is London's growing population of Third World citizens, many of whom think they have a better chance of obtaining a U.S. visa in Britain than in their home countries.

For two years Congress has been weighing proposals to waive the visa requirement for Britain and a few other countries that reciprocate. However, Gise warns that if the U.S. did not require visas in advance, foreigners might face waits of up to four hours to get past the meticulous and often irritating U.S. Immigration officers at U.S. ports of entry. Most Britons reluctantly accept the visa requirement, though some cite it as yet another example of American insolence.

Said Londoner Leslie Scott as he queued up outside the embassy: "It's an archaic idea and a lot of rubbish." qed

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