November 29, 2006, Michael Cutler Commentary on:  Bush seeks to ease visa requirements

I received an e-mail from Stephen Dinan, a staff reporter for the Washington Times who is traveling with the President in Eastern Europe. He informed me that the President had made a speech in which he promised to try to have more countries participate in the Visa Waiver Program in which, at present, the citizens of some 27 countries are able to travel to the United States to seek entry into the United States without first applying for and receiving a visa. Let me start out by stating unequivocally that I am opposed to the Visa Waiver Program as it exists today. Therefore you will not be surprised that this promise by the President left me outraged! This is not the first time his proposals have engendered feelings of outrage within me and I suspect that this won't be the last time. If he really wanted to shock me, I guess he would have to indicate a willingness to secure our nation's borders and create an immigration system that possesses real integrity.

Stephen asked me for my input as to the President's proposal was concerned. You can read my quotes in the article below. In addition to my remarks as reported by Stephen below, I will also provide you with a repeat of the material I have previously written about the supposedly encouraging news that our government was finally going to get the countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program to issue so-called "E- Passports" to their citizens. I have attached my analysis to this e-mail. It is important to understand why travelers who seek to cross international borders need to provide passports. Passports are designed to be secure identity documents. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a passport is defined in Section 1011(a)(30) as follows: "The term ''passport'' means any travel document issued by competent authority showing the bearer's origin, identity, and nationality if any, which is valid for the admission of the bearer into a foreign country."

The value of a so-called "E-Passport" which are passports that are machine readable and have computer chips and other safeguards, is that it is more difficult to counterfeit or alter. Period. There is nothing magical or mystical about an E-Passport, only that in this day and age of desk-top publishing and identity theft, that E-Passports would be more difficult to falsify. An E-Passport does not change the benefits and concerns addressed by the visa requirement.

A passport, ideally, enables officials at ports of entry to be able to properly identify individuals seeking entry into the country that they work for. This is an area of responsibility I relate to quite well, having started my career at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City in 1971 as an immigration inspector, and having worked there in that capacity until I became a special agent of the INS in 1975.

No one I know would open their door to a person whose identity they could not determine, our nation, especially in this perilous era, should do no less.

Consider this quote from the article I have attached below and ask yourself, "What is wrong with this statement?"

"Among the current requirements is that the visa-refusal rate from a country be below 3 percent and that they have a low rate of travelers who violate the 90-day limit.
Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Bush will ask Congress for the power to waive the 3 percent rule for some countries as long as those nations meet new enhanced security requirements."

It is easy enough to determine the visa refusal rate for a particular country, our counselor officials should be able to produce those statistics fairly easily. If a country is having a rate of visa refusal that is higher than 3% secure passports will do nothing to make the citizens of that country any less likely to seek entry into our country who should not be permitted to enter the United States. This would only enable more illegal aliens, potentially, to enter our country. Also worth noting is the fact that a visa is not a guarantee of entry into our country, it only constitutes an initial screening mechanism that makes the job of the beleaguered inspectors at ports of entry a bit easier. The truly amazing assertion is the fact that the travelers from Visa Waiver Countries have a low rate of violation where the 90 day limit is concerned. Our country is unable to track the comings and goings of aliens entering our country. US-VISIT is still not tracking the departure of aliens from the United States, so our nation does not really know how long aliens remain in the United States! The President is apparently willing to ignore high refusal rates for visa applications and is claiming that because aliens from Visa Waiver Countries generally leave the United States within their authorized period of entry, that it is reasonable to have the citizens of those countries participate in a program that creates inherent national security vulnerabilities. He makes these assertions even though he knows our government lacks the ability to know when these aliens leave our country! We cannot even be certain if they ever do leave at all!

At the rate that Mr. Bush is going, he may as well declare anyone born on the planet Earth to be a United States citizen! Then he could claim that there are no illegal aliens in the United States! He could then claim that he fixed the illegal immigration crisis for once and for all!

It would seem that the President still does not get it. His failure to provide true leadership to our nation cost his party control of both houses of Congress and he is still cruising along, conducting what has come to pass for "business as usual" where this dysfunctional administration is concerned! When he won re-election to his second term, he won by a very small margin, yet he went around boasting about his "political capital." He has no political capital. His administration is bankrupt! Our nation needs to have secure borders and a secure immigration system. Expanding the ill-conceived Visa Waiver Program and ignoring the rules that are supposed to govern that program would further endanger our national security and therefore it is absolutely imperative that the President's proposal be utterly rejected by the Congress.

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

-michael cutler

Reference:  Bush seeks to ease visa requirement By Stephen Dinan, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Published November 29, 2006

TALLINN, Estonia -- President Bush said yesterday he will push Congress for a "loosening" of requirements for foreigners to visit the United States without a visa, pitting him against those who have called for the program instead to be tightened or even scrapped altogether after September 11.
The Visa Waiver Program allows visitors with valid passports from 27 approved countries to enter the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. That makes tourism and business travel easier by eliminating the need for a visa, though such travelers can avoid a security screening.

After meeting with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves in Tallinn, Mr. Bush said he will press Congress to revamp the program to allow more countries to join.

"I'm going to work with our Congress and our international partners to modify our Visa Waiver Program," Mr. Bush said. "It's a way to make sure that nations like Estonia qualify more quickly for the program and, at the same time, strengthen the program's security components."

But the proposed expansion would run athwart concerns that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot keep up with the 27 countries already approved, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress' investigative branch, found in a July report.

"DHS cannot effectively monitor the law enforcement and security risks posed by visa waiver countries on a consistent, ongoing basis because it has not provided [the Office of International Enforcement] with adequate staffing and resources," GAO investigators concluded, adding they also found "weaknesses" in how DHS talks with overseas posts working on visa issues.

European Union officials have complained that while U.S. nationals can visit any of the 25 EU member states without a visa, only 15 of these countries receive reciprocal privileges from the United States. Mr. Bush discussed the problem with EU officials at a July summit in Vienna, Austria.

Exclusion from the waiver program is a point of contention in former communist bloc countries such as Estonia, Poland and Hungary that have become staunch U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.

Mr. Bush said the economic and political progress those nations have made earns them the privilege of participating in the program.

"Both the [Estonian] president and the prime minister made this a important part of our discussions," he said. "They made it clear to me that if we're an ally in NATO, people ought to be able to come to our country in a much easier fashion."

Mr. Bush said he wanted to "assure members of Congress that in loosening the visa-waiver issue, or changing the visa-waiver issue, that we'll still be able to protect our country from people who would exploit the Visa Waiver Program to come to our country to do harm."

Among the current requirements is that the visa-refusal rate from a country be below 3 percent and that they have a low rate of travelers who violate the 90-day limit.

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Bush will ask Congress for the power to waive the 3 percent rule for some countries as long as those nations meet new enhanced security requirements.

The waiver program recently began requiring passports to include a machine-readable computer chip containing passport data as a security measure.

The GAO warned that tightening or ending the Visa Waiver Program could lead to other countries retaliating and requiring visas for U.S. visitors. But the investigators said the program has drawbacks because travelers from visa-waiver countries don't have to be screened as closely as other travelers -- a concern Michael W. Cutler, a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, said shows why everyone entering the United States should have to obtain a visa.

Without it, the only mandatory screening is done by a Customs and Border Protection inspector who is trying to move visitors along the entry line, Mr. Cutler said. He said the visa application process provides investigators leads to go after terror suspects. Lying on the application is punishable by a stiff prison sentence -- a charge authorities can often make stick even in cases where they can't prove terrorist or criminal involvement.

The former agent said the examples of would-be shoe bomber Richard C. Reid and this summer's foiled plot to blow up airplanes headed from London to the United States, show the vulnerabilities.

" These terrorists were able to gain access to airliners and potentially our nation without first applying for visas. This is because Great Britain, the country of citizenship for all of these terrorists, participates in the Visa Waiver Program," Mr. Cutler said.

Half of all trips by non-immigrant foreigners into the United States are people traveling on passports from visa-waiver countries.

In a statement yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff did not say how his department will handle the increased demands but described the new security enhancements.

"We envision a secure travel-authorization system that will allow us to receive data about travelers from countries before they get on the plane," he said. "Countries that are willing to assist the United States in doing effective checks on travelers could be put on track to enter the program soon."

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