"The High Cost of Coming to America"

Read the full editorial by Al Teich and Wendy White in Science of 5 May 2006. (Vol. 312. no. 5774, p. 657; subscription required.)

Goverdhan Mehta, a distinguished chemist from India who serves as president of the International Council for Science (ICSU), recently found the process of getting a visa for travel to the United States so humiliating and unjustified that he simply cancelled the trip. Wendy White and Al Teich (in their Science editorial) have used this as an example of the problems that are still occurring with travel by scientists and people from the other learned professions as they seek to travel to the United States. They recognize that the process, which got much worse after 9/11, has been improved in the last year or two. More needs to be done.

Obviously, most of the scientists and engineers who seek to come to the United States for conferences, exchanges, or educational opportunities constitute no threat to the United States, and indeed their continued travel here helps to keep us up to date with science in the rest of the world (which is now producing twice as many scientific papers per year as is the United States).

Even were this not true, I would object to the lack of courtesy shown by our government to our most distinguished visitors! So too, I am concerned by the lack of capacity of our government to deal with even so simple a logistical task as giving visiting scientists visas.