August 17, 2004

After months of complaints that US Customs officials were unfairly harassing travelers to the US, giving what Department of Homeland Security Commissioner Robert Bonner said was a “black eye” to the US’ reputation, President Bush last week signed into law legislation that allows Visa Waiver Program countries an additional year before issuing new passports and visas that provide tamperproof passports requiring so-called “biometric identifiers.”

Also last week, Bonner announced that travelers from the VWP countries will no longer be searched, handcuffed and detained if they overstayed their visas by a few days during a previous trip to the country.

“The consequences were grossly disproportionate to the minor, technical violations,” Bonner told journalists. “Typically these individuals were handcuffed during the time they were transported to and from detention. In other words, they were treated as criminals.”

“We said, ‘Look, this doesn’t make any sense. If the person doesn’t pose any threat to us whatsoever, we want to find a way to let that person in. If they’re not a risk to the United States, we want to find a way to do it,” said Bonner.

The decision affects travelers from 27 countries, including Britain, Germany and Japan who are allowed to visit the US for 90 days without visas.

The new policy will allow these travelers to be granted a one-time break and will be allowed to enter the country for 90 days despite having overstayed a pervious visit. For subsequent visits, they will have to apply for visas.

But Adam Ereli, State Department deputy spokesman, said last week that these travelers who are not required to obtain visas still must submit to fingerprinting and digital photographing, as all others visitors have been required to do since 2003.

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress voted in 2002 for the creation of biometric passports that will enable officials to match a person’s unique physical characteristics with a digital photograph in his or her passport or travel documents.

A biometric identifier is an electronic scan of a physical feature, such as an eye, hand, fingerprint, or face. Biometrics are just now being incorporated into US-issued visas and will, sometime in the future, be used in passports issued by the US and VWP countries.

Use of a biometric identifier allows an immigration inspector to positively identify that the person appearing before them is the same person to whom a passport or visa was issued.

The Travel Industry of America, TIA, which represents the nation’s largest airlines, hotels, cruise lines and car rental companies, lobbied hard for the additional year, telling lawmakers that none of the 27 countries would be capable of issuing the new biometric passports by the 2004 deadline. With these countries unable to produce and distribute biometric passports, as many as 5 million VWP travelers would have been impacted.

Last April, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge recommended a two-year extension beyond the Oct. 26, 2004, deadline for issuing the new biometric passports.

They said countries needed time to solve technical problems such as chip durability and to resolve privacy questions.

Without the extension, they said millions of visas would have to be issued in countries whose citizens now can visit the United States without visas, overwhelming US consular offices.

Source - http://www.aljazeerah.info