New York Needs Chinese Business Travelers

Justin Fox knows what needs to be done to keep New York competitive with London as a financial center:

The immigration people at Heathrow are polite to non-UK-citizens and usually get them through the line very quickly. I know that from personal experience. Meanwhile, I've heard from lots of foreigners that coming through immigration at Kennedy (and elsewhere in the U.S.) is an excruciatingly slow and often demeaning process. This is potentially disastrous for the long-term prospects of both New York and the U.S. in general. And while I'm being sort of jokey in the rest of this post, I'm dead serious about this: Discouraging foreign businesspeople from visiting the U.S., which we now effectively do, is a potentially disastrous policy.

Quite right. In fact, it's a much, much bigger issue than putting more and friendlier immigration officers on staff at JFK. The really big issue is allowing business people to visit NYC on business in the first place.

Many international executives simply can't get a visa to visit the US, or if they can it takes months. This applies especially to businessmen from what is arguably the world's largest economy, China. If NYC wants to remain relevant, it has to start looking west rather than east, and taking full advantage of the US's Pacific Rim status. That means encouraging, not discouraging, human business links with China.

Have you ever wondered why Hank Paulson spent so much time flying back and forth to China when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs? Yes, the country was important to him, but it wasn't that important. Rather, it was the one country where he had to go there, because they were simply incapable of coming here.