re: "State Dept. in ‘Open War’ With White House"

Pamela Geller at The Geller Report ("a foremost defender of the freedom of speech against attempts to force the West to accept Sharia blasphemy laws, and against Sharia self-censorship by Western media outlets") is highly critical of the new SecState.  For that matter, she clearly has no great love for the State Department or Foreign Service themselves.

"Foreign Service is a different kind of animal. Most get subsumed by the culture at State and the snakes in Foreign Service. Condi was consumed by them, and Kerry was completely and utterly out of his depth."

Her recommendation:

"Amateur hour is over. Send in the cavalry. It’s time for a pro. It’s time for John Bolton."

re: "Thoughts on Moving Consular Affairs to Homeland Security"

Dan Cadman at the Center for Immigration Studies ("an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization") evaluated the proposed transfer from the standpoint of 30 years of INS/ICE experience.

Money quote(s):

"Insigniam had conducted a review and issued a report for Secretary of State Tillerson suggesting that Department of State functions having to do with issuance of visas and passports should be transferred from the Department of State (DOS) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The recommendation was made after surveying thousands of employees online.

Such functions are now performed at embassies and consulates throughout the world by Foreign Service officers (FSOs) within DOS's Bureau of Consular Affairs."

It's got to be said; CIS punches above its intellectual weight when it comes to debates about immigration reform and illegal immigration.  They are forthrightly in favor of legal immigration but demand that existing laws be enforced and, where necessary, strengthened.  At least, that's my considered opinion having observed them from afar for some years now.

"I'm not sure that there are huge benefits to such a transfer, other than perhaps helping Secretary Tillerson meet his goal of massive budget reduction at the State Department."

Definitions matter.  Transferring the visa and passport functions out of State Department also means transferring about $3 billion per annum in fee receipts for those services.  They pay for the accomplishment and delivery of those services as well as underwriting a lot of other expenses involved in maintaining a worldwide diplomatic presence and operations.  Cutting off that revenue stream without getting Congress to appropriate some level of replacement funding would definitely reduce the DOS budget while bloating that of DHS.  

Is reducing the size of State's budget the sole foreign policy goal of this Administration?  What are the consequences, intended or otherwise?

Mr. Cadman concludes:

"(W)ould consular decisions be any better? Certainly not. Would DHS take its new mission seriously enough to re-think how it is going about its business where aliens are concerned? Don't know. Have they shown any proclivity in the last 15 years to involve themselves (despite the authority granted them via the section of law I quoted) in the always busy and often messy environment of visa issuance and consular affairs, even though it directly impacts upon their work domestically? Absolutely not."

re: "SFRC Grills D/S Sullivan About @StateDept FY18 Reauthorization Bill and Reorganizational Plans"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("an obsessive compulsive observer, diplomatic watcher, and opinionator") reviewed the SFRC testimony of the new "D" (DepSec Sullivan).

Money quote(s):

"He was also asked about the idea floated by the WH of moving CA and PRM functions to DHS. He told the panel that it is not the intent of the Department to move these functions.  He told the senators that it is something that if it were raised, they would  consider it but that it would be from a position that the two are vital to the mission of the State Department."

(Cue muted applause.)

re: "Post-Trexit: A Blueprint for Restoring Foreign Policy & the State Department After Trump is Gone"

Retired FSO James Bruno at Diplo Denizen ("Author and ex-diplomat comments on foreign affairs & writing") is planning ahead.

Money quote(s):

"The Trump/Tillerson debasement of the State Department comes on the heels of eight years of Obama/Clinton marginalizing the department through patronage bloat, dilution of mission and concentration of foreign policy making in the White House. And, of course, all administrations sell around a full third of (the most important) ambassadorships to campaign contributors. Under Trump/Tillerson, the nation's foreign ministry is a ghost ship aimlessly meandering through perilous seas (see: Trump's Zombie Ship of State), with senior positions glaringly unfilled and little contact between SecState Tillerson and the career bureaucracy."

Debasement is a pretty strong word, but six months into the new Administration is not too short a time to be critical.  Certainly, six months after the end of the previous Administration isn't too short a time as well, and Mr. Bruno is not over-stating those legacy problems from the last eight years.

"With no concrete justification, Insigniam adopts whole cloth a fevered night dream of the Bannon Sturmabteilung set: move all consular, refugee, population and migration functions out of State and into that model of bureaucratic coherence and efficiency, the Department of Homeland Security. Why? Your guess is as good as mine."

Insigniam is the contractor which conducted a volunteer survey, complete with word clouds, of State Department employees.  CAA participated.

Parts of DHS' many agencies function quite well.  But it's a sprawling department with many independent and interlocking missions.

"(T)he Heritage Foundation last year produced, "How to Make the State Department More Effective at Implementing U.S. Foreign Policy." While rebutting assertions by State that it is under-resourced, Heritage also makes a solid case for re-establishing lines of authority, reducing the operational role of the NSC, curtailing the use of special envoys, halting the selling of ambassadorships and cutting back bloat. "

State is under-resourced in parts and perhaps over-resourced in others.  No Department is free to simply move money around on its own authority and contrary to how Congress has appropriated and allocated it.

re: "Doomed to Failure"

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye identified a key flaw in our Grand Strategy for GWOT:

"We don’t win because we don’t want to win. The psychological, political, and cultural implications of what we’d need to do to win are just too devastating."

WP - "Consular officers do far more than just adjudicate visas"

Retired consular officer Brian McNamara wrote to The Washington Post.

Highlights:

"I take exception to the White House proposal to move the Bureau of Consular Affairs from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security"

&

"Consular officers adjudicate visas, issue reports of birth and death of Americans overseas, adjudicate U.S. passport applications and assist Americans who get into trouble in foreign countries (get arrested, get sick, etc.). This requires every staffer, from the lowest worker to the highest, to have a good knowledge of the host country and thorough knowledge of the geography (are people from a particular neighborhood more or less likely to stay in the United States?). Consular officers, as do all Foreign Service officers, liaise with local officials, but for consular officers, those local officials include police officers, jailers, doctors and those in the foreign ministry.

In other words, consular officers have a much wider span of duties than merely adjudicating visas."

Ain't it the truth.

The fact of the matter is that adjudicating visas (which involves more than merely 'stamping passports,' as the expression goes), while a very significant part of the consular workload, is nonetheless only a part.

For most Americans, that doesn't mean much.  But for those of you who have found yourselves or a family member far away from home and the victim of a crime, injured in an accident, missing, arrested, or who simply lost their passport, the fact that there was someone at the embassy whose professional responsibility it was to help you is, as the commercial says, priceless.  You don't quickly forget it.  And you're very welcome.  On our side of it, it can be the most fulfilling part of the profession.  For many of us, it's the reason we do what we do.

WP - "Five myths about the Foreign Service"

Retired FSO Leon Weintraub addresses some of the most-popular fallacies of the U.S. Foreign Service for the readers of The Washington Post.  He nails it.

Some tidbits:

"(D)iplomats who represent the United States government and help U.S. citizens abroad, have long been the target of jibes from lawmakers, pundits and the public. Often portrayed in films as elitist dilettantes"

It's a stereotype.  Most people will never meet one of their country's diplomats so they'll never know the difference between the portrayal and the reality.  After all, diplomats tend to be working overseas about two-thirds of the time and the rest of the time they're likely to be working in the D.C. area.  Only a relative few will, at any given time, be consular officers working at one of the passport centers or, if they are Diplomatic Security agents, at a field or resident office somewhere around the country.

"There was a time when members of the Foreign Service almost exclusively came from well-heeled families of American patrician society and were educated in one of the Ivy League bastions of privilege, part of an “old boys’ ” network (sarcastically referred to as “pale, male, and Yale”).
These days, though, Foreign Service officers look like America. They come from every state, from rural and small-town as well as urban areas, and from state and small private colleges as well as the Ivy League."

Nowadays, the old-money Northeast establishment WASPs don't much go in for public service at the working level.  There are a few still around, bless them, quietly living way below their means; you won't even know they're there!  But that demographic tends to show up later and higher up the ladder as political appointees if they're interested in diplomacy at all.

"Gingrich suggested in Foreign Policy in 2003 that President George W. Bush’s State Department was purposefully undermining his objectives abroad. But this mistrust mistakes specialized knowledge, which may not reflect what administrations believe, with rogue agendas.

Like military officers, Foreign Service officers have commissions from the president and take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. We serve the president elected by the people of the United States, as well as the officials appointed and confirmed to help formulate and execute our country’s foreign policy and international relations.

We also, however, are responsible for advising the secretary of state or the president when we believe differently than they do, especially when it comes to advancing the nation’s best interests."

FSOs take that oath seriously.  They enter the Service smarter than the average picnic basket, with nice diplomas from lots of different schools (Go State!), buckle-down to learn obscure (and not-so-obscure) languages before going forth to mostly un-glamorous locales to perform often unpleasant duties (morgue visit anyone?).  When they disagree with a particular administration's world-view, strategic vision, or foreign policy goals, it's not out of disloyalty to the country but quite the opposite.  The marvelous thing is how few, from administration to administration, actually throw up their hands, say they just can't do it, and resign.  Most put their shoulders to the wheel and do their level best to make the policy-maker's policies work.

Read the whole thing.

re: "LEAVE THE BUREAU OF CONSULAR AFFAIRS IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT"

Mark Stout at War On The Rocks ("people who know what they are talking about") provided a well-reasoned argument for his conclusion.

Money quote(s):

"The question of who gets a visa to visit the United States has been a security issue at least since the country was seized by the fear of infiltration by German spies during World War I. In this era of terrorism and Trump, it has come to be one of the foremost security issues of our day. For a century now, the State Department has been at the center of the process, in coordination with various U.S. intelligence services. Recently, however, the Trump administration floated the idea of moving the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to the Department of Homeland Security as part of the overall effort to restructure the federal government. Given the present political climate and the fact that Carl C. Risch, the person soon to be nominated to head the Bureau of Consular Affairs, once proposed moving the visa function to the Department of Homeland Security, the change seems to be a serious possibility. However, this move is a bad idea. It would endanger services vital to the protection of Americans abroad while doing nothing to protect Americans at home against terrorists or other malefactors."

Dr. Stout backs up that strong introduction with strong arguments.

"To begin with, there is no reason to expect that the Department of Homeland Security could do any better job overseeing the granting of visas than could the State Department. Consular officials take their role seriously and are not known for their flexibility with regard to the rules. Moreover, under an inter-departmental Memorandum of Understanding dating to 2002, the Department of Homeland Security already establishes visa policy, reviews implementation of said policy, and has final say over State Department regulations implementing that policy. So it is not clear why the Department of Homeland Security would do any better adjudicating visas than Foggy Bottom. It is true that there are occasional cases of State Department consular officers being bribed and issuing visas to people who should not have had them. However, the Department of Homeland Security has had corruption problems, too, as has pretty much every other government agency.

In addition, the State Department draws on and contributes to the same watchlist and intelligence databases that the Homeland Security Department does. In fact, the State Department has been working with those databases since before the Department of Homeland Security even existed."

The division of labor at present plays to the two department's respective strengths:  DHS deals with things from within the U.S. and DOS handles the overseas parts.  That's not to imply that those DHS officials who are posted to some of our embassies and consulates don't do superlative and important work, because they absolutely do and we (the U.S.) are lucky to have DHS folks willing to take those assignments.  But that points to the difficulties DHS would be assuming along with the responsibilities of a suddenly worldwide workforce, as Dr. Stout addresses.

"(M)oving Consular Affairs to the Department of Homeland Security would guarantee major problems in recruiting, training, and retaining the necessary people. For starters, the department would have to find a new labor force. Much of Consular Affairs’ work is done by foreign service officers in the consular “cone,” the State Department term for a career field.  However, almost all foreign service officers, whatever their particular field, do a consular tour (usually their first) at an embassy or consulate overseas. A Bureau of Consular Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security will not be able to continue to benefit from that ready State Department labor pool. "

Consular officers are generalist Foreign Service Officers (FSO) with a specific career-track or "cone."  But they are not limited to doing only consular work during their careers, just as FSO generalists in other career tracks/cones (Political, Economic, Management, & Public Diplomacy) sometimes take consular assignments or perform consular duties long after their initial vice consul assignments as junior officers.

CAA, by way of example, has worked outside of his career track during domestic assignments and, while working consular assignments abroad, has covered other portfolios (e.g., Public Diplomacy) in an acting capacity, when a colleague's position was vacant or they were away from post.

Moving the consular functions and personnel to another department eliminates that flexibility and, more importantly for recruiting, evaporates much of the attraction and, for lack of a better word, glamour of the profession.

"I’d expect the Department of Homeland Security to have a hard time staffing the visa lines, let alone protecting Americans. In fact, the State Department itself is having trouble keeping up with rapidly increasing demand for visa adjudicators. Moving Consular Affairs will just dig that hole deeper and make the U.S. government look feckless and disorganized.

Over the longer term, the Department of Homeland Security would face daunting training challenges. Consular officers presently serve two- to three-year tours abroad and require some training before most new postings overseas, which sometimes takes months or even years. This includes language training and area training and familiarization, all functions presently performed by the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. The Department of Homeland Security would have to duplicate these functions, likely at great cost, or try to negotiate another Memorandum of Understanding with the State Department to buy its students back into the Foreign Service Institute."

There are lots of nuts-and-bolts issues like this that decrease the feasibility of making a move like this, without much in the way of a counter-weighting increase in either efficiency or security.

"(I)t is important to know that the Bureau of Consular Affairs does not just issue visas to non-American visitors and passports to Americans. It is also responsible for “the welfare and protection of U.S. citizens abroad.” This involves a wide variety of functions that require experienced and internationally engaged personnel and institutions. For instance, if an American is thrown in prison abroad, consular officers visit that person regularly to check on his or her welfare, ensure access to legal counsel, attend trials, and provide other services, some of which involve detailed knowledge of the legal and political systems in the country in question. In fiscal year 2015, consular officers made 9425 prison visits. If an American goes missing abroad, consular officers respond to queries from worried family members and work with authorities, media, the Peace Corps, and diplomats from third countries to find the person. Consular officers work with family members to handle those unfortunate cases where Americans die overseas. There were 10,589 such cases in FY15. Children who have been abducted abroad and Americans who get robbed overseas also benefit from the work of this bureau."

Consular officers do all these things.  CAA has done all these things in countries around the world.  Would DHS assume these responsibilities as well or would State retain responsibility for them, only without any longer having the trained staff to perform them?  Would some number of consular officers remain at State as a vestigial Consular Service?  Bear in mind that nearly all of these responsibilities are provided without U.S. citizens having to pay any sort of consular fee, unlike visa, notarial, passport, and other consular services.  The welfare & whereabouts and prison visits, the death and missing persons cases; all of those come out of overhead.  Without the some $3 billion (roughly) in consular fee receipts coming to Consular Affairs, what overhead is that going to come out of and who is going to do it?  

Dr. Stout concluded:

"(I)f the Department of Homeland Security takes over the Bureau of Consular Affairs, it will inherit a wide array of tasks that are related to protecting Americans abroad but not protecting the homeland per se. Many of these duties involve expert knowledge of the country and tasks in question. Defending “the welfare and protection of U.S. citizens abroad” is a mission that at best sits uneasily with the idea of “homeland security” in an agency that has far less particular expertise with overseas affairs."

re: "Sen. Menendez Asks the Consular Affairs Nominee the Questions Y’All Wanna Ask"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("an obsessive compulsive observer, diplomatic watcher, and opinionator") has some observations from the SFRC hearing for Assistant Secretary (Designate) Carl Risch.

Mdm. Spero rightly keys on repeated use of the word "currently" with regards to several statements A/S Risch made in response to questions regarding his, er, current views by contrast with his 2002 testimony before Congress.  In that connection, CAA offers an alternative interpretation, that he appends the qualifier "currently" to clearly demarcate his views today with what he believed was the case back in 2002.  In other words that he hasn't changed his mind about the truth and circumstances at that time, but that circumstances and conditions then are no longer the case today.

Lastly, one thing CAA noticed is that, if confirmed, A/S Risch will be the first non-female head of the Consular Affairs bureau in more than three decades!

(The last male in that position was career FSO Diego Cortes Asencio, from 1980-1983.  A/S Asencio bookended his tenure at CA by being U.S. ambassador to Colombia before and to Brazil afterwards.)

re: "State Department Workforce Hopes Tillerson Will Not Sacrifice Mission for Reforms"

Ellen Laipson at World Politics Review ("uncompromising analysis of critical global trends") gives credit, albeit faintly, to the new SecState.  There's also some discussion of the mostly-unsupported recommendation by an outside contractor that passport and visa functions be taken away from the State Department.

Money quote(s):

"It’s also worrisome that the private-sector management consultants who conducted the study offer their recommendations. Many of their ideas are based on employee input, one assumes, but a few seem off the mark in understanding the historical and evolving purpose of American diplomacy. For example, the notion that all passport and visa work should revert to the Department of Homeland Security is a howler. It swings the pendulum way too far in the direction of making security the paramount concern, over the political and cultural benefits of opening our country to diverse cultures and points of view. What’s more, visas are sometimes a diplomatic tool in managing relations with key countries, so stripping the State Department of its lead role would accrue new dangers and costs to U.S. interests."



H/t AFSA.

re: "July 18 SFRC Hearing: Carl Risch to be Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit keeps the Foreign Service community apprised of important events and developments.

Mr. Risch is coming over from Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) where he was acting Chief of Staff.  He was most-recently the "Field Office Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services" at U.S. Embassy Seoul.

On the face of it, despite not coming up-through-the-ranks as a consular officer, he appears an exceptionally-qualified candidate for the position.  He was even, once-upon-a-time, an FSO:

"Mr. Risch who served one tour as a junior officer in Europe in 1999...  took a leave of absence from his law practice to accept an appointment to the United States Foreign Service. Following a year of training in Washington, D.C., Mr. Risch and his wife, Wendy, were assigned to the U.S. Consulate General in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. While in Holland, Mr. Risch managed the Nonimmigrant Visa Unit for 15 months, worked for 3 months at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, and managed the American Citizen Services Unit in Amsterdam for 7 months.  In May 2002, Mr. Risch resigned from federal service and rejoined his law firm in Carlisle"

According to his 2002 testimony before the Sub-Committee on the Civil Service, Census and Agency Organization of the Committee on Government Reform:

"I interviewed a Tanzanian who wanted to visit the United States. He had only

been in Holland for a few days as a visitor. He could not articulate
a single reason for wanting to visit the United States or even give
a specific geographic destination for his trip. He had no evidence
of employment or other ties to Tanzania or any other country.

I refused his application for failure to prove his qualifications for
a visit to visit the United States. Less than an hour later, a high-
ranking official called me into his office. Apparently, a local VIP
had called to report that he was disappointed to hear that his
neighbor’s safari jeep driver from Tanzania had been denied a visa.

After the State official apologized to the neighbor for any incon-
venience this man caused, I was then directed to issue the visa.
The fact that the applicant did not qualify for a visa under any rea-
sonable interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act did
not seem to bother the official. The only thing that mattered was
the diplomatic mission. Only an agency committed to law enforce-
ment and not diplomacy should be trusted with enforcing the laws as intended by Congress."

CAA feels for a first-tour junior officer put in the position Mr. Risch faced.  Where was his first-line supervisor, the visa or consular chief at this post, who should have been providing him top-cover?  This sort of thing is emphatically not how it's supposed to work and at most posts, in CAA's experience, it simply doesn't happen.  Post-9/11, safeguards and procedures such as the worldwide visa referral policy (and a few folks going to jail for abusing that policy) have made the position of even a low-ranking vice consul a lot stronger when it comes to being able to say, respectfully, "No."

CAA has adjudicated visas, both non-immigrant and immigrant, at our overseas embassies in four countries, on three continents, under both political-appointee and career-FSO ambassadors.  I don't know what sort of scared-straight briefings that newly-appointed ambassadors receive during their training before coming to post, but it's effective.  Career-FSO ambassadors know how the system is supposed to work and the political-appointee ambassadors have obviously been advised what a "third rail" sticking their oar into the adjudications process can turn out to be.

My metaphors.  They are self-mixing.

Oh, and I've just got to say it:  Seriously?  A Tanzanian safari-driver?  For realz?

CAA takes a backseat to none in his appreciation for the skills and courage of African safari drivers, but when it comes to one who is just off the plane in a Western capital on their first trip to the First World and then applies for a U.S. visa, absent some major information not presented thus far, CAA would be making the same adjudication decision Mr. Risch did.  The U.S. maintains an embassy and even a visa section in Tanzania and that's where the safari driver should have gone before ever leaving for Amsterdam.

The good news (although perhaps whistling in the dark) is that 2002 was a long time ago and Mr. Risch has obviously had a long and successful USCIS career including working very closely with the Department as part of an embassy country team.  CAA has never served in Seoul, but knows some top consular officers who have, so CAA is hopeful Mr. Risch is familiar and more comfortable with how embassy visa operations ought to be run and are run these days.

re: "Trump White House Reportedly Considering Folding CA and PRM to Homeland Security"

There's a thing where if you miss a committee meeting, the people do _did_ show up assign tasks or other responsibilities to you in your absence.

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("an obsessive compulsive observer, diplomatic watcher, and opinionator") noticed something like that here.

The Domestic Policy Council which has suggested that the visa and passport functions be transferred from the State Department (along with about $3 billion in fees) to Homeland Security doesn't include in its membership any representative from a certain oldest federal cabinet-level department.  

(The name escapes me, as it apparently did the DPC.)

re: "Should the Visa Function Be Transferred from State to Homeland Security?"

Gary Chodarow at the Chodarow Law Offices ("U.S. & China Visa Law Blog") examined some of the history behind this proposal.

He concluded:

"But it seems to me that the visa function requires balancing the need to facilitate travel and honor diplomatic principles with the law enforcement function of maintaining secure borders. These are functions that a foreign service officer–based on their training and agency culture–may well be better equipped to make than a DHS official."


H/t AFSA.

re: "Transfer Visa Functions to DHS? Who's Listening to Whom?"

Our dear colleague TSB weighed-in the other day on the suggestion of transferring all visa functions to DHS.

"there is a long history of legislation and policy on the question of whether passport and visa functions would be better served if retained with State or transferred to DHS, and so far the decision has been to keep them with State. "

TSB cited and mined some excellent source material (Congressional Research Service report from 2004, which was updated in 2011), including:

"staffing approximately 250 diplomatic and consular posts around the world would stretch DHS beyond its capacity. 

Those who supported retained immigrant adjudications and services in DOJ and visa issuances in DOS point to the specializations that each department brings to the functions. They asserted that the "dual check" system in which both INS and Consular Affairs make their own determinations on whether an alien ultimately enters the United States provides greater security. "

(Note:  Before DHS was established following the 9/11 attacks, the non-DOS part of the visa process resided in the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was part of the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Attorney General.)

And concluded:

"This is far from a done deal, no matter what the Listening Survey reports or what State's reorganization contractor reads in its word clouds. To transfer those functions to DHS the Administration would have to overcome significant bureaucratic and financial barriers, plus, it would just be a bad idea for all the same reasons that Congress already found in the years after 9/11. But that doesn't mean it won't happen all the same."

For reasons most DOS folks will be loath to hear, the Department doesn't have a store of good will banked with the new Administration.  It just doesn't.  CAA just hopes they won't cut off the country's nose to spite the State Department's face.

Ping

Is this thing still on?