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Published
May 23, 2014
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Tourism: Obama wants United States to overtake France as number one

By
AFP
Published
May 23, 2014

AFP - President Barack Obama is prioritizing the reduction of wait times at airport passport control in order to encourage more foreign tourists to visit the United States, announced the White House.

On Thursday, Barack Obama visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (New York), a top tourist attraction, to discuss the tourism industry two years after setting out to make the United States the world’s top destination in an effort to boost employment.

Manhattan seen from Brooklyn (photo by Christophe Loth)


The president has charged the secretary of commerce Penny Pritzker and the secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson with “improving entry procedures for traveler entering the United States from abroad and implementing strategies to reduce wait times for the 15 largest airports.”

It is not uncommon for travelers from abroad to wait over an hour at the counters of the US Customs and Border Police (CBP) in U.S. airports, where control procedures tightened considerably following the attacks on September 11.

To expedite entry, the administration wants to introduce more automated controls. It also announced that 2,000 new CBP officers would be taken on, having recently received the green light from Congress.

On January 19, 2012, Barack Obama set the goal of making the United States the world's top tourist destination, a position currently held by France, especially by granting more visas to Chinese and Brazilian visitors.

More than two years later, the White House said that the United States had made significant progress, reducing the average visa wait time for these two countries to five days.

It also boasted that the number of visas granted by the United States had increased overall by 42% since 2010 to 9.2 million in 2013 .

The American president would like to see the United States attract 100 million visitors in 2021. In 2013, the country welcomed 70 million compared with 55 million in 2009, according to figures released by the executive branch.

The Obama administration confirms that nearly eight million U.S. jobs are tourism-related.

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