President. President Johnson has taken an important step toward improving the rate of foreign tourism to the United Statestourism desperately needed to help ease our serious balanceofpayments situation. The President has asked Congress to modernize the onerous visa requirements that. in his words. "appear to a foreign visitor to be greeting him grudgingly rather than graciously." The President reminded us that under the present system a prescreening process is required of each potential visitor at the American consul abroad. Under this process. the visitor discovers that he may be ineligible for a visa under some 25 specified grounds of eligibility. As the President noted: Those requirements have been rendered obsolete by a major Increase in tourism from abroad. by a revolutionary reduction in travel time. and by the fact that 35 other nations require no visas from American tourists. What the President proposes is to replace bureaucratic redtape with a solid dose of good commonsense. Under the new act the administration is proposing. foreign visitors here for 90 days or less would be exempted from visa requirements on all but the most serious grounds of ineligibility. We would still bar from entry those foreign nationals who have been convicted of a serious crime. and we would continue to examine all visitors at the port of. entry through the immigration and naturalization service. In addition. visitors will be required to have a valid passport. a nonrefundable roundtrip ticket. and will not be allowed to alter their status as visitor while in this country. In essence. this new act protects the national security while also improving our foreign relations and promoting a better understanding of America throughout the world.
Keywords matched
naturalization immigration visas visa