Visa waivers won't come soon, isles told
By Ken Sakamoto, Star-Bulletin
Ernest Watari, chairman and chief executive of PKF-Hawaii, addresses inaugural luncheon of the Hawaii Chinese Tourism Association. Watari said that Asia's financial crisis will continue to plague tourism.

A State Dept. official says the Asian financial crisis put the issue on the backburner

By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

Hawaii's tourism industry, which has been lobbying hard for visa waivers for more Asian visitors, shouldn't hold its breath waiting for U.S. action on the issue, a State Department official says.

Terry Daru, a State Department adviser to the Hawaii government on visa matters, yesterday said that the percentage of tourist visa applications being denied is on the rise throughout Asia, primarily because of the region's economic crisis.

He said the refusal rate has soared in Korea, the country that has been the focus of the strongest push from Hawaii for visa waivers.

Since the United States bases its visa waiver decisions for each country on the rejection rate, Korea isn't going to get approval soon, Daru said.

"That's just not going to happen right now," he said at the first luncheon meeting of the recently formed Hawaii Chinese Tourism Association. "It should be put on the back burner."

Advocates say visa waivers, which Japanese tourists have enjoyed for years, make travel to Hawaii easier and more desirable by cutting the paperwork for potential visitors.

Daru made his remarks moments after Rep. Neil Abercrombie, a champion of visa waivers for Koreans, said the fight is a hard one because most in Congress see it as an illegal-alien issue rather than a way to create jobs and revenues from outside the United States.

Daru said it is policy at the U.S. embassies and consulates issuing visas for U.S. trips to assume that the applicant is intending to stay illegally after the permit expires, unless he or she can prove otherwise. As they deal with severe currency deflation and other financial troubles, many more Asians are having trouble proving otherwise, he added.

As for China, the center of interest for most at the meeting, the visa refusal rates run from 23 percent in Beijing to more than twice that in other cities, Daru said.

Fanny Yao from Beijing, introduced as a representative of the biggest Chineses private-sector travel business authorized to organize U.S. tours, said customers of her company, Cathay International Travel Agency, are wealthy.

They are mostly business executives and they average $200,000 a year in income, she said. They're not the kind of people who want to spend the rest of their lives hiding out and doing menial jobs just so they can stay in the United States, she said.

Ernest Watari, chairman and chief executive of tourism consulting firm PKF-Hawaii, repeated remarks he has been making recently about the serious impact Hawaii will feel from the currency meltdowns in Asia.

"We've never before had every single Asian country having economic problems," Watari said. "We'll definitely see a decrease in eastbound travel to Hawaii. In fact, we're already seeing it."

Japanese visitors will likely opt for Southeast Asia destinations such as South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, where the yen buys them more than it will here, he said. But, Watari added, the underlying strength of the Asian countries will allow them to recover in a couple of years.