Administration seeks deadline extension for US VISIT compliance

The Homeland Security and State departments officially asked Congress Friday to extend the deadline for more than two dozen countries to comply with a new U.S. immigration program.

The departments asked Congress to pass legislation that would give countries that are part of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program an additional two years to issue machine-readable travel passports with biometric information about their citizens who visit the United States. Under current law, all 27 visa waiver countries must meet the deadline by Oct. 26 as part of the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US VISIT) program.

Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state of consular affairs, told Congress in January that only two of the countries would probably meet that deadline. Without legislative relief, citizens from countries that do not meet the deadline must go through the formal U.S. visa application process, which likely means processing an additional 5 million visa applications for consular offices and adding hundreds of officers to staff, Harty said.

In asking for the deadline extension, DHS announced that it would start processing visitors traveling under the visa waiver program in US VISIT beginning Sept. 30, at air and sea ports of entry. DHS also asked Congress for a two-year extension to put biometric passport readers at all U.S. ports of entry.

US VISIT was created after Sept. 11 to meet congressional mandates for developing an electronic immigrant entry-exit tracking system using biometric and biographic information. The program was launched at 115 airports and 14 seaports on Jan. 5, and requires visitors with nonimmigrant visas to give border inspectors two fingerprints and a digital photo, along with their biographical and travel information. The information is entered into a database and compared to terrorist and criminal watch lists.

A DHS spokeswoman said two years was agreed upon as the time needed for visa waiver countries to come into compliance, and the request for a deadline extension was made to the House Judiciary Committee.

"Working with the State Department and the foreign governments involved in the visa waiver program, we are confident that we can meet our goals within the two year timeframe," the spokeswoman said.

The visa waiver issue is one of the first serious problems to emerge with new immigration policies passed by Congress in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and has been met with mixed reactions.

The Travel Industry Association criticized DHS on Friday for requiring travelers from nations that are major U.S. trading partners to go through US VISIT. Association President and CEO William Norman said while the association supports the program, he wanted the administration to explain the decision to include visitors from visa waiver countries, noting travel from western Europe, Japan and other regions has fallen by 27 percent since Sept. 11. The Travel Industry Association and its member companies have been lobbying Congress to extend the October deadline for biometric passports.

James Carafano, senior research fellow for defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, praised Homeland Security Friday for requesting a deadline extension, saying that two more years appears to be the right amount of time needed.

"I think it's definitely the right thing to do," he said. "It's more important to get the program right than do it fast."

According to Carafano, decertifying visa waiver nations will create a mountain of work and problems for federal agencies, taking money and resources away from other programs. Although the requirement for an entry-exit tracking system has been around for years, DHS has just began to deploy US VISIT and engage other countries on requirements, all of which will take time.

"This is a prudent, responsible thing to do," Carafano said. "The expectation that this thing could happen overnight … was unrealistic."

International standards for biometric passports remain unclear.

In a draft position paper on electronic passports, Carafano and other researchers say that many nations are scrambling to implement e-passport programs and are turning to the International Civil Aviation Organization for guidance on standards. But the ICAO, they argue, has been vague in establishing clear standards for implementation.

"To ensure that America's security needs are met, the Bush administration should push ICAO to promulgate clear and cohesive guidelines," the draft paper states. "It's more important to get the visa issue right than to rush to failure."

For example, the ICAO has not yet issued clear guidelines on whether personal biometric data should be stored as raw data or in encrypted form, a discrepancy that raises privacy concerns. The paper also argues that all visa operations should be consolidated under DHS, including the authority to award visa-waiver status to a country.

"Consolidating the responsibilities for visa affairs under the DHS will enable the department to focus on tightening, improving and more broadly utilizing the visa function to meet the exigencies of homeland security," the paper stated.

An estimated 13 million visitors from visa waiver countries enter the United States annually, and are allowed to stay for up to 90 days using only a passport.

The following 27 countries are currently in the Visa Waiver Program: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.