Economics Tricks

According to the press service of the USA State Department in Washington, the consular fee paid at presentation of documents for receiving non-immigration visa to the USA rises in price starting with 1 January, 2008, from today's 100 dollars to 131 dollars.

Among the reasons of increase in rates the State Department names inflation, the need for costs on new technologies and visa protection, as well as invoices issued by the FBI to the State Department for processing finger-prints of both hands taken at receipt of the visa documents.

"Now we take ten finger-prints from each person who presents his documents, and the rate charged by the FBI for the processing of these finger-prints does not allow us to do this any more", the press service explains.

"The fee in the amount of 100 dollars for a machine-read visa is less than the real price of processing non-immigration visas", the report emphasizes.

The State Department reminds that the last time the visa fee was raised five years ago, in the year of 2002.

USA introduces more and more security measures on the entrance border posts like airports or sea ports. The problem is not the security measures itself, but their selection. For example - the effectiveness of the fingerprint scanning is a matter of argues, but the negative attitude of the tourists to this process should not be underestimated. Only because of this measure - enormous amount of tourists have decided not to visit United States at all. And in the last time there are news to hear that the tourism development state departments of the USA are seriously bothered with the problem of the decrease of the tourist flow. The problem seems to be evident in hotels reservations and flights booking that have significantly decreased in amount after all these security measures were introduced.

The news programs that are targeted to lead more tourists into the USA are already being developed and some of those are started. Let's see what kind of balance between security and hospitality outcomes.