The House voted 407-19 Tuesday to tighten the Visa Waiver Program that lets people from certain countries travel to the United States without first obtaining a visa – a reaction to fear of terrorism, particularly given the roles of French and Belgian nationals in last month’s Paris attacks. “The bill also authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to suspend a country from the Visa Waiver Program without prior notice if the country fails to comply with an agreement to share information regarding whether its citizens and nationals traveling to America pose a USA security threat”.
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Twenty million visitors a year enter the USA under the program, which allows them to stay 90 days.
Responding to recent terrorist attacks at home and overseas, the House easily approved a bill Tuesday to close security gaps in the nation’s visa waiver program that was created in the 1980s to promote travel and tourism.
The White House administration supports the legislation, and it could be attached to an end of the year budget Washington lawmakers are working to finalize. Lawmakers are also looking into potential changes to the fiancee visa program, which San Bernadino shooter Tashfeen Malik took advantage of to gain access into the country. Those who use the program are screened less stringently, although they are checked against American databases.
He said: “Our focus should be on terrorism, not just country or origin”.
“We urge Congress to exercise caution and to avoid passing legislation that would broadly scapegoat groups based on nationality, and would fan the flames of discriminatory exclusion, both here and overseas”, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a letter to lawmakers. “Five thousand of them have Western passports, and we know that several of the ISIS attackers in Paris had Western passports, meaning they could have entered the United States without a visa”. There is a different version in the Senate by Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona.
The Senate has not scheduled a vote on either measure.
US House of Representatives on 8 December 2015 passed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement Act of 2015. VWP countries would be required to issue their citizens fraud-resistant electronic passports containing biometric information, confirm such documents are legitimate when they are scanned upon travel, and notify INTERPOL within 24 hours of their citizens’ passport being reported missing.
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The USTA released a similair statement last week when the changes to the bill were being considered, writing that “the travel community is all in favor of a good-faith congressional debate about enhancements to the VWP, but if the [bill] imposes redundant, costly, inefficient protocols, it could ultimately do more harm than good”.
