05/04/2007: Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Maura Harty Remarks to Participants in Foreign Affairs Day 2007


As Prepared for Delivery

Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs
Maura Harty

Remarks to Participants in Foreign Affairs Day 2007

Dean Acheson Auditorium, Harry S. Truman Building

May 4, 2007
11:00 – 11:45 a.m.
 _______________ 

Consular Affairs: Then And Now

Good morning.  I am pleased to join you on this 42nd annual Foreign Affairs Day.  I’m glad to see so many friends and colleagues here today.  The Foreign Service really is a family, and I’m so pleased that many of you come home on this day, when we celebrate all those who have dedicated themselves to serving our nation and its citizens.  Your distinguished careers truly reflect the service part of the phrases Foreign Service and Civil Service – something that remains central to our mission today.

Your presence here is proof that our experiences here at Foggy Bottom, around the country and around the world are more than a job – for many of us they became a way of life.  I have been a Foreign Service Officer for over 25 years, and Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs for four and a half.  I absolutely love this life and this job, and I am enormously proud of the people and the work of the bureau it is my privilege to lead.  I’d like to tell you a bit about the work of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, and how we are contributing to the future of this organization.  Thank you for choosing this talk.

On this day when we relive memories of life and work in service to our country, I’d like us to think about the long, proud history of Consular Affairs.  Our nation has had consuls longer than we have had presidents.  Back in 1780, the first Consul, William Palfrey, was dispatched to France.  In an early sign of the dangers inherent in a Foreign Service career, Mr. Palfrey sadly was lost at sea when his ship sank.  Congress quickly followed up to send a successor, Thomas Barclay, and the Consular Service was born.

Since that time and still today, consuls have been dedicated to the service of this nation by protecting the lives and interests of American citizens overseas, and protecting our nation’s borders through the conscientious adjudication of passports and visas.

When I – and you – joined the Department, the world and CA were vastly different.  Some of us remember the days when we used signature sliders and Burroughs machines to imprint visa stamps in passports.  We rolled passports into typewriters and ironed in the photos.  We searched for terrorist or criminal hits on slips of microfiche.  FSI was in Rosslyn.  Foreign travelers could transit American airports without a visa.  We used Wangs.

Today’s CA is a completely transformed world.  We have a fully automated, machine readable visa process, including a lookout system that incorporates advanced algorithms.  Electronic visa application forms.  E-passports with digitized photos and microchips.  We use DVCs to cut back on travel, FOBs and BlackBerries so we aren’t tied to our offices, and facial recognition and fingerprints to identify people for various benefits.  Flyaway teams carry state of the art tools, and Americans abroad register with us on-line, so we can find them in emergencies. 

The CA of today is a “billion dollar” bureau.  We took in $2 billion in revenue last year.  Our work is almost entirely fee-funded – we get almost no appropriated money.  There are over 9,000 of us working in 65 languages at 219 posts and eighteen domestic passport agencies and two regional visa processing centers around the country, including the Kentucky Consular Center in Goldbug, Kentucky and our newest facility, the Arkansas Passport Center in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which opened for business March 27. 

I visited the Arkansas Passport Center on Monday.  It’s a fantastic facility and a unique one, focused solely on printing and shipping passports based on files adjudicated and then transmitted electronically from other regional centers.  When fully operational the Arkansas Passport Center will produce more than 10 million passports per year, making it our largest passport production center. 

Though we are the size of a “Fortune 1,000” company, we’re in fact more like a public utility, because the service we provide is defined not by the bottom line, but by the need for help.  When a hurricane, or a tsunami, or a bombing occurs and Americans are involved, we just have to get the job done.  Right then.  There are no second tries. 

Our numbers are one way to show what we do when they call.  Last year we conducted 7.6 million NIV interviews and 400,000 IV interviews; issued a record 12.1 million passports; evacuated 14,870 Americans from Lebanon; helped American families adopt 20,679 foreign children, and helped return hundreds of children to their families after being wrongfully abducted overseas.  And then there were the thousands of deaths, arrests, notarials, welfare and whereabouts cases. 

These are not just statistics.  All of them matter fundamentally to the people we serve.  Each time we do the things we do, we touch people’s lives – and enjoy the incredible privilege of being touched in return.

Many of us in this room have faced some of our nation’s defining moments.  We retain personal memories of experiences gained in response to tragedy:  the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, Hurricane Mitch, Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the 2005 London transit bombings, the South Asian tsunami, Hurricane Wilma, Hurricane Katrina, the evacuation of Lebanon.  The horror of the East Africa attacks on our missions.

As much as we learned – and grieved – in the aftermath of each of those events, I sadly note that on September 11, 2001, we began a new chapter in our history, as well as of our Service.  Nothing has changed us as much as 9/11.  It is certainly the context for everything we do regarding visas, but it has influenced the rest of our work as well.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were some who believed we could not or would not do what was needed to protect the security of this nation.  We had to act swiftly and decisively to demonstrate our ability and determination to protect America’s borders, as well as our prerogative to continue to do the work we love and do well.  In the process, we have shown ourselves to be among the most transformational bureaus in the Department in meeting the challenges we face.

Due in part to the events of 9/11, nobody can say again that CA or its issues “fly under the radar.”  We are the public face of our nation all over the world.  Ninety percent or more of all visitors to an embassy or consulate are there for a consular service.  Consular issues are front and center of national and international attention.  You see it virtually every day on the front pages of major daily newspapers, in the number of times we are called to the Hill to testify, and in the prominent role consular issues, from visas to adoptions, play in our bilateral relationships with nations all over the world.

You know our core responsibilities – American citizens services, passports, and visas.  Our responsibilities haven’t changed, but everything about them has changed – how we do them, and also how we think about how we could do them. 

On January 18, 2006, Secretary Rice spoke at Georgetown University about her concept of transformational diplomacy.  She said in part,

“Like the great changes of the past, the new efforts we undertake today will not be completed tomorrow.  Transforming the State Department is the work of a generation.  But it is urgent work that cannot be deferred.”

We in CA are certain we are answering her call.

Meeting CA’s Future Challenges

I’d to tell you about some of the compelling challenges CA faces, and what we’re doing about them.  Let’s start with visas.

After 9/11 we saw a precipitous drop – 40 percent – in demand for visas worldwide.  I’m happy to say that visa demand is surging in China, India, Korea, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere.  In Mexico, we expect visa demand to double by 2011 – that means we need to adjudicate 2.6 million visas in Mexico alone by 2011.

The rising demand puts pressure on appointment wait times.  At 90 percent of our posts, wait times are well below thirty days.  At others, however, the wait time is persistently above that, creating substantial management and public relations issues for us – not to mention inconvenience for the public we serve. 

We have country-specific solutions in some cases.  We sent a TDY team to India last October which, combined with a mission-wide focus on reducing wait times, brought the wait time down from 100 days to 10.  We have a “Plan Mexico” to explore creative staffing and facilities solutions to their workload challenges.

More broadly, we’ve developed a two-year plan for visa services that relies on technology, best business practices and creative staffing to change radically how we provide visa services.  Under this plan, which we have already launched, we hope to:  

  • Meet our global service standard of 30 days within which it will be possible to obtain a visa appointment at any post worldwide;
  • Develop a start-to-finish paperless, electronic visa process by the end of this year;
  • Collect 10 fingerprints from visa applicants.  We’ve successfully piloted 10-print collection at six posts, and have begun worldwide deployment.  Ten prints will give us better data points and fewer false positives, and DHS has promised me that we can recycle prints on a limited basis, so that we will not have to re-interview applicants in recent renewal cases;
  • Explore technological changes such as remote data collection, or “NIV on a Laptop,” and more flexible interview options.  We have conducted pilots and are still working out the legal and technological issues;
  • Transfer to our National Visa Center in New Hampshire responsibility for making all immigrant visa appointments and document review, to allow posts to focus their energies on the interview and saving the U.S. government thousands in postal fees.

CA Global Repositioning Exercise
You may know that the Department is engaged in a global repositioning exercise.  That process did not involve CA positions, but we’ve begun our own exercise to ensure that we have our consular assets appropriately deployed to meet 21st century realities. 

After careful review of current and projected workload, we have concluded that we’re overstaffed in some places, notably EUR, but understaffed in SCA, NEA, WHA and EAP.  To correct the imbalance, over the next two to three years we plan to transfer about 30 positions and create 22 new ones.  Most will be entry-level positions, although some mid-level positions will be included as well.  Although there will be gains and losses at posts in all bureaus, WHA, EAP, SCA and NEA will see net gains.  Most of the transfers will come from EUR posts.          

Passports

We’re also focused on the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and the workload challenges it poses for our passport operations.  Phase one of WHTI – that all passengers arriving by air must present a passport – took effect January 23.  I visited Miami International Airport that day to see how it went.  It was so smooth it was a non-event – “the dog that didn’t bark.”  DHS estimated there would be 7,000 arrivals who potentially would not have a passport.  In fact, there were only two.  We have been advertising and preparing for this since 2005, and it is clear we succeeded in alerting travelers to this new requirement. 

WHTI, combined with spring and summer travel plans and the fact that a passport is increasingly seen as the premier identity document, is pushing demand for passports to unprecedented levels.  When I began as Assistant Secretary, we were issuing around 5 million passports a year.  Last year we issued a record 12.1 million passports, and this year expect to issue more than 17 million.  We issued 1.6 million passports in March, over 60 percent more than in march 2006.  

We have implemented a number of strategies to meet the demand.  We have:

  • Expanded the operating hours at all of our passport agencies, and the National Passport Center is operating 24/7;
  • Established a temporary call center at our Kentucky Consular Center to augment the capacity at our National Passport Information Center;
  • Set up a passport adjudication task force manned by qualified volunteers from throughout CA; and
  • Obtained an exemption from OPM to the hiring cap for civil service annuitants, so that we can bring back experienced and well-trained retired adjudicators while we continue to recruit and train new passport specialists.  If any of you are interested, let me know!  Whether you are Foreign Service or Civil Service, we genuinely need your help.

Lebanon Oral History Project
I mentioned that last summer the U.S. Government evacuated 14,870 American citizens out of Lebanon.  That exercise yielded a treasure trove of stories and lessons learned.  With funding from the Una Chapman Cox Foundation, we are now engaged in an oral history project to interview people involved in the Lebanon crisis and capture their stories.  Lebanon is a training story, a recruitment story, and a leadership story that we want to use to inform and inspire the next generation.

Leadership in CA

We are dedicated to fostering leadership in CA because we know it’s essential to how we meet the challenges we face, how we prosper and move ahead.  As the Secretary told a group of new diplomats on February 8,

“If the essence of transformation here at State can be summed up in one word, it’s this: leadership.”

Developing the next generation is critical to the future of any organization, and CA is in an ideal position to do just that.  After all, we are a major Civil Service employer.  The entire Foreign Service Officer corps passes through our hands.  Every Foreign Service Officer must serve at least one year in a consular position, and many do three or four years of consular work.  Many FSNs get their start in consular sections.  Family members, including kids on school breaks, work in consular sections.  In the U.S., many in the Civil Service call CA home.  Many join through career entry programs and university co-ops – in fact, CA hires more employees through the Career Entry Program than all other USG agencies combined.  We therefore have a tremendous responsibility to nurture employees and support their professional development.  If we fail to model leadership as the next generation comes up through the ranks, then they will not be prepared to lead when they take over our jobs – and we will have done a disservice to the organization, and to the people it is our duty to serve.

CA has established a comprehensive program to cultivate leadership throughout the bureau.  The heart of this effort are our ten Consular Leadership Tenets, a set of shared principles about what consular leadership looks like and how we should model it for ourselves, our peers, and those who follow.  They are the product of a months-long conversation involving hundreds of consular officers and FSNs from 87 posts.
 
We established the Tenets because we wanted something to enable people to integrate leadership in their life and work – a simple mission statement is not enough.  I’m happy to say the Tenets are taking off.  We’ve integrated them in the training we provide to consular staff at FSI and at regional conferences.  I got several telephone calls during the last rating cycle, because references to the Tenets are showing up in consular EERs.  And I talk about them and hand out copies every chance I get, from ELO conferences to ambassadorial seminars to briefings for other agencies.

I do this not to imply that CA has a monopoly on how to model leadership.  But my hope is that if we talk about leadership, and show by our leadership why we love this organization, we will inspire in those who come after us, that which motivated us to go into public service, and secure the future of the Foreign Service family.