[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 75 (Wednesday, June 8, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1175]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         AMERICA'S GLOBAL IMAGE HAS CONSEQUENCES FOR US AT HOME

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                        HON. WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 8, 2005

  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, at a national summit last month hosted by 
the Travel Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, hundreds 
of travel and tourism executives gathered in Washington to discuss the 
impact of America's deteriorating global image on the U.S. economy. As 
a Representative of coastal Massachusetts, where declining 
international travel and tourism is a local economic development 
issue--and as a member of the International Relations Committee, which 
grapples with our foreign policy, as well as the Judiciary Committee, 
which oversees our visa protocols--I was asked to address the summit. I 
sought to convey that the perception of America around the world has 
lasting consequences for us at home, and was pleased to see these 
themes highlighted in a June 1st column by Tom Friedman of the New York 
Times. His admonitions, like those of scores of business leaders at the 
summit, are serious and disturbing--and I commend the Friedman column 
to my congressional colleagues.

                [From the New York Times, June 1, 2005]

                             America's DNA

                        (By Thomas L. Friedman)

       A few years ago my youngest daughter participated in the 
     National History Day program for eighth graders. The question 
     that year was ``turning points'' in history, and 
     schoolchildren across the land were invited to submit a 
     research project that illuminated any turning point in 
     history. My daughter's project was ``How Sputnik Led to the 
     Internet'' It traced how we reacted to the Russian launch of 
     Sputnik by better networking our scientific research centers 
     and how those early, crude networks spread and eventually 
     were woven into the Internet. The subtext was how our 
     reaction to one turning point unintentionally triggered 
     another decades later.
       I worry that 20 years from now some eighth grader will be 
     doing her National History Day project on how America's 
     reaction to 9/11 unintentionally led to an erosion of core 
     elements of American identity. What sparks such dark thoughts 
     on a trip from London to New Delhi?
       In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the U.S. 
     Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. ``They have these 
     cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete 
     blocks, and the whole message is: `Go away!' '' said Kate 
     Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. 
     ``That is how people think of America now, and it's a really 
     sad thing because that is not your country.''
       In part it was a conversation with friends in London, one a 
     professor at Oxford, another an investment banker, both of 
     whom spoke about the hassles, fingerprinting, paperwork and 
     costs that they, pro-American professionals, now must go 
     through to get a visa to the U.S.
       In part it was a recent chat with the folks at Intel about 
     the obstacles they met trying to get visas for Muslim youths 
     from Pakistan and South Africa who were finalists for this 
     year's Intel science contest. And in part it was a 
     conversation with M.I.T. scientists about the new 
     restrictions on Pentagon research contracts--in terms of the 
     nationalities of the researchers who could be involved and 
     the secrecy required--that were constricting their ability to 
     do cutting-edge work in some areas and forcing intellectual 
     capital offshore. The advisory committee of the World Wide 
     Web recently shifted its semiannual meeting from Boston to 
     Montreal so as not to put members through the hassle of 
     getting visas to the U.S.
       The other day I went to see the play ``Billy Elliot'' in 
     London. During intermission, a man approached me and asked, 
     ``Are you Mr. Friedman?'' When I said yes, he introduced 
     himself--Emad Tinawi, a Syrian-American working for Booz 
     Allen. He told me that while he disagreed with some things I 
     wrote, there was one column he still keeps. ``It was the one 
     called, ``Where Birds Don't Fly,''' he said.
       I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember 
     the column. Then he reminded me: It was about the new post-9/
     II U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, which looks exactly like a 
     maximum-security prison, so much so that a captured Turkish 
     terrorist said that while his pals considered bombing it, 
     they concluded that the place was so secure that even birds 
     couldn't fly there. Mr. Tinawi and I then swapped impressions 
     about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were 
     having on foreigners' perceptions of America.
       In New Delhi, the Indian writer Gurcharan Das remarked to 
     me that with each visit to the U.S. lately, he has been 
     forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to 
     America. They ``make you feel so unwanted now,'' said Mr. 
     Das. America was a country ``that was always reinventing 
     itself,'' he added, because it was a country that always 
     welcomed ``all kinds of oddballs'' and had ``this wonderful 
     spirit of openness.'' American openness has always been an 
     inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. ``If you go 
     dark, the world goes dark.''
       Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look 
     at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11--
     from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've 
     sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around 
     prisoners of war--and ask this question: While no single 
     change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 
     years from now we will discover that some of America's 
     cultural and legal essence--our DNA as a nation--has become 
     badly deformed or mutated?
       This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, 
     as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, 
     ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, 
     stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.

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