After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it became common to hear that we needed to increase security and that nothing else mattered. This had a nice rhetorical ring, but it is leading to self-destructive policies.
Now that the adrenaline has worn off, it is becoming apparent we did not literally mean some of our early security rhetoric. Concrete steps are available to reduce death and destruction that terrorists might cause, but not all such measures necessarily make large differences.
The question is, how much are we willing to pay to achieve limited increments in safety? And, if we are going to institute measures for security reasons that hurt certain sectors of our economy more than others, are we going to do anything to compensate those most hurt?
The problems faced by U.S. universities and medical facilities like the Mayo Clinic are concrete examples of these choices. After 9/11, we made it substantially more difficult for foreigners to travel to the United States, particularly those coming from the Middle East.
Visas are harder to get and delays are longer. The application process has become intimidating to many. We have not increased appropriations for more consular staff to make up for the increased time required to process each application.
As a result, universities that historically relied on foreign graduate students to fill classrooms, staff research projects and serve as teaching assistants are finding it hard to bring in the bright young people they need. Qualified individuals apply and are accepted to grad programs and post-doctoral positions, but then cannot enter the country because their visa applications disappear in bureaucratic never-never land.
Medical institutions in Rochester, Minn., Cleveland, Ohio, New York and Houston, all of which historically had many foreign patients come for expensive treatments, are seeing those numbers shrink. The decline is partly in response to difficulty in getting visas and partly because many potential patients from Muslim countries now see the United States as a hostile environment. The clinics are losing a lucrative client base and the hospitality sectors in these cities are seeing their business shrink.
Multinational corporations face similar problems. Some have given up on holding business meetings, even internal sales conferences, in the United States because it is just too time consuming to get visas for attendees. London, Paris, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong benefit by taking up some of the slack, but New York, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles are taking hits.
General tourism suffers from the same visa restrictions. Disruptions caused by increased security measures in such major destinations as New York and Washington, D.C., are another negative factor. When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of threats against financial targets in those cities earlier this month, officials in both expressed frustration about the difficulties of trying to maintain acceptable traffic flows and municipal services when terror alerts produce indeterminate block-offs of major streets.
Such inconveniences pale in comparison to the sacrifices made by some civilian populations in World War II. If increased investigation of visa applicants and increased physical security around potential high-value terrorist targets saves lives and property, these measures may be fully justified.
They are not without cost, however, and the costs are imposed very unevenly across the U.S. economy. Some sectors suffer a great deal, others not at all. It merits asking some questions.
First, are all aspects of the security game worth the candles? Terrorists know they can harm a country by killing its citizens and destroying valuable property. They also know they can harm a country by scaring it so repeatedly and thoroughly that it ties itself up in knots, wastes resources and bleeds its own economy.
There is some point at which the additional safety gained by defensive measures is not worth the additional cost in disruption of daily life and of lost output.
We also need to ask if we are saving tax dollars at the expense of imposing much greater non-tax costs directly on businesses and households. If clinics, hotels, restaurants and airlines lose hundreds of millions of dollars only because we take much longer to process visa applications, we would be better off if we spent more tax dollars on the agencies doing the processing. If physical security measures tie up traffic and police in key cities, then we may make ourselves better off as a whole by funneling more federal dollars to those cities most affected.
This argument, that greater government expenditure on processing visa applications and minimizing security alert disruptions might make society as a whole better off, won’t be welcomed by an administration that opposes spending $6 billion to enlarge an already overtaxed Army. This is an issue where the more enlightened members of the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will have to provide some leadership.
© 2004 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.