Speech #1100019478

I welcome and support the enhanced security measures included in the bill. They are long overdue. Secondand here is the problemthe bill allows the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State to fundamentally change the way countries are admitted into the visa waiver program. and thus. who can come into the U.S. without getting a visa. Under current law. a country is eligible for this program so long as the vast majorityat least 97 percentof its nationals can get a visa when they apply for one. The percentage of people who are rejected when they apply for a visa is called the "visa refusal rate" and that percentage must be under 3 percent for a country to participate in the program. The rationale is that if the overwhelming majority of visitors satisfy requirements for a U.S. visa when they apply. we should not waste our resources and the time of U.S. consular officers to evaluate every single visa application. The 3 percent rate means that 97 percent of these applicants will return to their home country for one reason or another. They have family and earn a satisfactory living. But even with a 3 percent rejection rate. the Visa Waiver Program is a security problem. Convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui from France and "shoebomber" Richard Reid from Great Britain both boarded flights to the United States with passports issued by Visa Waiver Program countries. On August 10 of this past year. British police charged 17 suspects with a terrorist plot to detonate liquid explosives carried on board several airliners traveling from the United Kingdom to the United States. The key suspects were reported to be Britishborn Muslims. eligible to travel to the U.S. with just a passport in hand. For that reason. I believe that the current Visa Waiver Program is the soft underbelly of our national security. But this bill undermines even the scant protection afforded by our current laws in that it allows the administration to admit new countries into the program with complete disregard for how many people were previously rejected when they applied for a U.S. visa. My amendment would provide a meaningful limit to that discretion. This bill does not affect just a handful of countries. It would affect any and every country whose nationals travel to the United States. As a matter of fact. the "roadmap" countriesor countries that the administration is currently talking to about inclusion in the Visa Waiver Programtotal 19. So the Departments of State and Homeland Security are actively talking with 19 countries for acceptance into this Program. A significant number of these 19 countries have visa rejection rates that are well above 3 percent. They are marked with an asterisk. and total 13 of the 19. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD a chart showing by country the rejection rates.