Speech #1000048432

Mr. Speaker. today I am introducing legislation establishing a Visa Review Board within the Department of State to ensure that those aliens and Americans with the greatest stakes in the alien admission process are not injured by arbitrary decisions. Each year U.S. consular officers around the globe deny over half a million visa applications. in many cases rendering decisions of monumental importance to both the alien applicants and to those American individuals and firms with connections to them. Consular officers are charged with applying statutory standards in considering visa applications. However. current statues expressly insulate consular decisions from any meaningful review. thus giving consuls power that is virtually unparalleled in American law. Even the Secretary of State is without authority to reverse an entrylevel consular officers decision to deny a visa. Existing procedures were enacted over President Trumans veto as part of the McCarrenWalter Act of 1952. Virtually every witness who testified regarding the subject during congressional hearings on the McCarrenWalter legislation opposed the "consular absolutism" created by that law. It was felt that such procedures did violence to bedrock American political theory that places a premium on official accountability. and that. in practice. they would be grossly inadequate to ensure that statutory standards governing visa applications were applied. Yet in the cold war climate of the early 1950s. the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected review procedures in order to raise "fences for the alien to surmount." Experience under current law and the record under review procedures that were implemented during World War II demonstrate the necessity and viability of a Visa Review Board. One study commissioned by the State Department during the late 1970s found that many consuls did not follow internal guidelines for visa adjudication. that eligibility standards were often applied inconsistently from office to office. even within the same country. and that visa refusals often were not documented due to the ineffectiveness of internal departmental review procedures. On the other hand. a twoperson Board of Appeals on Visa Cases that operated during World War II successfully processed over 22.600 visa appeals during its 3V2year existence and overturned lower level decisions that had rejected visa applications in more than 26 percent of the cases. My Visa Review Board bill would not establish a right to judicial review. It would not establish an aliens right to enter the United States prior to the issuance of a visa. It would not change the standards governing an aliens eligibility for admission. It would. however. enable those aliens with the greatest stake in the visa processimmigrants. investors. foreign workers. returning students. financesto pursue an administrative appeal to ensure that they are not improperly denied visas under existing statutory standards. Equally important. the bill would protect the legitimate personal and economic interests of American individuals and firms who support an aliens application for admission. My legislation would end a procedure of "consular absolutism" that is unsound both in theory and in practice.