However, with more than a trillion dollars per year in cross-border travel, as well as trillions more in trade at stake, the Border Trade Alliance is campaigning for a guarantee that the new Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative won’t make the U.S. border states pay the price for this national craving for safety.
At a special Tucson meeting, sponsored by the Phoenix-based trade advocacy group, alliance President Maria Luisa O’Connell joined with Arizona Office of Tourism Director Margie Emmermann and trade consultant Luis Ramirez Thomas, president of Ramirez Advisors Inter-National, to talk about the new and tighter rules for crossing the border and the challenges ahead for implementing them.
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Even borders where a driver’s license has been sufficient until now, will be requiring a passport for U.S. citizens returning from Canada and Mexico. Tourists, cross-border truck traffic and even those who live and work on the border, will now have to carry a passport as part of their daily life.
In a nation where only 23 percent of people own a passport, “it’s a huge change in lifestyle,” O’Connell said, “and it could be a huge problem.”
With the security climate in Washington, she said complaining about the economic burden “will get you laughed out of the room.” So what’s needed is to build a case for delaying implementation until the right procedures and technology are available to do it without creating a crisis.
“It’s a matter of finding answers to the questions that need to be answered, such as what are the details and how do we measure success,” she said.
“If it’s done efficiently, we can have enforcement of the law, and it doesn’t have to happen to the detriment of trade,” O’Connell said. “That’s the message we’re trying to get across.”
For Arizona, there’s special importance to that message, Emmermann said, but every state will feel the impact if trade and tourism are interrupted by the new border travel law.
Foreign travel accounts for $16 billion a year in impact on the state’s economy. “That’s $44 million a day in Arizona,” she said. However, it accounts for $1.3 trillion a year for the U.S., “Which is $3.4 billion a day or $2.4 million, every minute.”
Emmermann said, ““People take for granted the importance of travel and the value to the economy, but this is a critical time for the tourism industry. Global tourism has been on the decline in America because of the message we’re sending to the world, which is that we’re too difficult to do business with.”
Arizona gets more than 30 million visitors a year. Canadians who visit the Grand Canyon and other attractions in the state spend $286 million a year. “We don’t want to lose them,” she said.
However, the greater the difficulty of coming to the U.S., the less value Canadians will perceive in coming here. As long as less than half of Canadians hold passports, travel to U.S. destinations is easier than going anywhere else. If the U.S. requires a passport, too, “They might go to the Caribbean or Mexico or Cuba, instead.”
Mexican travel and business development is also jeopardized, Emmermann said, and the results could be even more drastic. Mexican visitors already account for $962 million in spending for the state, and just last month, Arizona and Sonora joined with the National Geographic Society to create the first international Geotourism Zone in North America. “This is a unique opportunity, for Arizona and Sonora, to further develop bi-national tourism.”
However, if Arizona residents, vacation visitors and seasonal residents are required to have a passport, she said, “They won’t go to Mexico. That will hurt the Mexican economy, which means Mexican residents won’t come here.”
Emmermann said, “We understand that the U.S. government has a legitimate right to secure borders, that’s a given. However, we have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t create a major hurdle.”
For Thomas, the solutions are obvious. “It’s all about how we do it. This presents an opportunity if we can overcome the fear and the tendency to sit back and let it happen. If we do that, we might wind up with something we don’t like, but if we’re active in finding ways to do better at both enforcement and facilitation, we could make access and protection better.”
Even more than tourism, trade is at stake and the volume of that is vast. “There are 27,000 trucks crossing the U.S.-Canadian border each day and the Ambassador Bridge alone, between Detroit and Windsor, accounts for more trade than Japan,” he said.
At this time, he said there’s still no clear idea how the travel initiative will be implemented. Everyone acknowledges that passports are “not user-friendly, but we’ve yet to come up with an alternative.”
Among the options being discussed are cooperative programs with state motor vehicle departments to offer driver’s licenses with citizenship status included on them. Thomas said there’s also a Senate proposal, SB-2611, to integrate the passport requirement with other border programs, such as NEXUS for the Canadian border, as well as SENTRI and FAST along the U.S.-Mexican border.
“Can we leverage existing technology or are we saying the passport is the only acceptable option? That’s just one of the issues we need to address,” he said.
“Somehow, the way people cross the border is going to change,” Thomas said. “So, it is incumbent on us to drive the approach. We need guide what’s chosen as this goes forward. That is the way we’ll protect trade and tourism.”
E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact Philip S. Moore at pmoore@azbiz.com or at (520) 295-4238.
© 2006 Inside Tucson Business. All Rights Reserved
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