Analysis: Voinovich urges visa waivers

WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, has called for the expansion of the Visa Waiver Program to improve homeland security and increase the United States' popularity in Eastern Europe.

"In this new post-9/11 world our country faces many foreign policy challenges," Voinovich told a meeting Thursday at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. "The Visa Waiver Program is an important tool that we can use to modernize and improve homeland security, public diplomacy and economic competitiveness.

"At this critical juncture in American foreign policy when our public diplomacy is perhaps at its lowest level in history, I think this program would have a real impact on that," he said. "I was in Ljubljana (in the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia) and our public diplomacy is in pretty bad shape there."

The VWP, which was introduced in 1986, allows citizens of 27 rich and developed countries to travel to the United States for 90 days without a visa. An estimated 15 million people use the program every year.

Voinovich said the VWP generates between $75 billion and $100 billion in travel and business revenue annually. Yet no countries have joined the program since 1999, and Argentina and Uruguay were removed from the program for economic reasons in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

The Bush administration would like to add seven new security measures and be given the right to change the required refusal rate for any given country. The seven new measures include online registration before traveling; more data-sharing; better reporting of lost and stolen passports and guaranteed repatriation of nationals ordered to be deported. These four would be mandatory; the other three, which concern airport security, air marshals and travel documents, wouldn't be.

The plan is for these new requirements to apply to the 13 mostly Eastern European countries that would like to join first and to subsequently be enforced on the countries that are already members.

James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation said, "The administration and Congress should expand the program to bring more like-minded nations into a secure regime that makes traveling between free nations faster and easier and helps impede the travel of terrorists and criminals.

"If a country wishing to join the VWP agrees to these provisions, participating nations would have to accept them or risk losing their VWP status. Expanding the program would encourage all nations in the program to adapt better security practices," he said.

According to Carafano, a provision of the Senate's bill on this issue would require visitors from countries that enter the program to "check out" at major U.S. international airports when they leave the country. "With this requirement in place the Department of Homeland Security could ensure that foreign visitors are complying with U.S. immigration law," he said.

Yet deciding which new countries would be desirable in the program is problematic. To become a member of the VWP, a nation must have a rate of refusal of less than 3 percent for U.S. visa applications. But Stewart Verdery, a former Department of Homeland Security official, said that refusal rates are unscientific and arbitrary.

"The refusal rate has always been an arbitrary proxy," he said. "We're guessing whether people are going to overstay. We have no idea. We're looking at their income and we're looking at how much they're sweating during the interview.

"We take an aggregate number of those guesses and that's the refusal rate and that decides where the country stands. Not very 21st century to me," Verdery said.

Department officer Nathan Sales believes that the VWP isn't extensive enough and could breach national security. "Under the VWP citizens of many friendly nations are able to travel to the U.S. without a whole lot of advanced security screening. So the only indication that we get from them that they may bear us ill intent is when the plane blows up," he said. "Our security policy needs to account for this grim reality."

According to Sales, the weakness of the program is that it assumes that everyone from a VWP nation represents a lesser threat to the United States than someone from another country. He said that those assumptions are not tenable because "the threat of global terrorism is not confined to particular corners of the globe."

"Think about what is lost when a country moves from visa status to visa-free status," he said. "Travelers from visa countries have to fill out detailed visa applications before they come. They have to sit for consular interviews and have to give us biometrics basically a fingerprint and photograph before they come to the United States. VWP travelers don't have to do any of those things before they come to our country and as a result we don't know a whole lot about them before they show up.

"The basic idea is that we ask more questions before departure. You make a reservation with an airline and you make a reservation with the DHS as well."

The Department of Homeland Security already has access to a great deal of information. Any information given to an airline upon booking, such as your meals, your frequent flyer number, the number of bags you have and your credit card numbers, is passed on to the department.

Legislation could be complete by the end of the year, according to Voinovich. Although 12 new Eastern European countries have joined the European Union, they are not yet part of the VWP -- unlike every other EU country except Greece -- and feel discriminated.