Program to track U.S. visitors hits snag
By Mimi Hall
USA Today
WASHINGTON — Congress and the travel industry are slamming the first phase of a plan to track visitors to the United States and raising doubts about whether the program can begin as scheduled Jan. 1.
Border agents are supposed to photograph and fingerprint all foreign visitors traveling with visas through U.S. airports and seaports. The information would be compared with lists of known and suspected terrorists and other lawbreakers.
Officials would keep track of whether the visitors left the United States when they said they would.
The ambitious plan was ordered by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when officials learned that two hijackers had violated the terms of their visas.
Officials estimate that there are more than 3 million people in the United States on expired visas.
Initially, the plan would cover 14 percent of the foreign travelers to the United States — the 7 million a year from countries where they are required to apply for visas from American consulates.
It would exempt those from 27 countries deemed low-risk until those countries embed the information in passports, including four from the Asia-Pacific region: Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. That requirement has been delayed for a year.
Other nations with significant numbers of visitors to Hawai'i, such as the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam, are not exempt.
The plan has run into widespread complaints:
• Congress is cutting its financing by a third. Republicans and Democrats complain that the Homeland Security Department has not properly accounted for its initial $380 million allocation. As a result, lawmakers last week agreed to cut to $330 million the Bush administration's 2004 request for $480 million.
• Key players haven't been included in the planning or informed. Thirty airport executives have signed a letter expressing this concern and sent it to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge yesterday.
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport CEO Jeff Fegan says he didn't hear about the program until last week and will be hard-pressed to implement it by January.
• Tourism could suffer. Rick Webster of the Travel Industry Association says officials haven't publicized the program for international travelers, who will have to place two fingers on a machine and have their pictures taken. That could lead to confusion at airport gates, long delays and a decline in tourism.
The program is called US VISIT, for U.S. Visitor and Status Indication Technology. It could cost $10 billion or more and take a decade to put in place.
Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department's chief of border and transportation security, says that getting the program set up has been a struggle.
"We're working aggressively to meet the deadlines that Congress has given to us," Hutchinson said.
Some experts question whether the effort is a smart expenditure.
"If the primary purpose of this is as an anti-terrorist measure, I don't know that we're going to get our money's worth," says James Ziglar, former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Ziglar says would-be terrorists will simply send operatives with clean backgrounds who can get in and out of the country before their visas expire. If they don't get out on time, he says, the government still may lack enough investigators to track them down.
