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Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 13:29:46 -0700
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Source: The New York Times, September 9, 2003
New Passport Rules Are Put Off by U.S.
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - The Bush administration has decided to postpone
enforcement of new antiterrorism regulations that had threatened to block
millions of Western Europeans and citizens of other developed nations from
traveling to the United States unless they obtained new, computer-coded
passports, senior administration officials said today.
They said the new passport rules, which were supposed to take effect on Oct. 1
and which were mandated by Congress as an antiterrorism measure, will not be
enforced until October 2004. The rules will require that citizens of 27
countries who do not usually require visas to visit the United States - most of
them in Western Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and
Brunei - carry passports with text that can be read by computerized scanners at
airports and other American border stations.
The rules, arising from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, were intended to
stop terrorists from trying to use false passports to enter the United States
and make it easier for officials to gather information on people arriving here.
Administration officials said the State Department decided to delay
implementation of the rules by more than a year because of the chaos that could
have resulted next month when travelers unaware of the new rules tried to enter
the United State with old-style passports.
In some Western European countries, including France and Spain, more than a
third of all passports in circulation do not have so-called machine-readable
features. The majority of passports from Switzerland are not machine-readable.
Officials said the decision was communicated on Friday to American embassies
representing the United States in 26 of the 27 countries, with the embassies
instructed to inform the foreign governments that their citizens could be
exempted from the new passport rules until October 2004 so long as the
governments provide assurances that the machine-readable passports will readily
available by then. The countries are being required to provide a written
request to the State Department of their desire to have their citizens exempted
from the new rules until next year.
The rules are not being waived for Belgium, where the requirement for
machine-readable passports is already being enforced because of concern about
passport security there.
American officials said the move to postpone enforcement of the rules followed
a vigorous debate between the State Department, where senior officials felt
that enforcement of the rules had to be delayed to avoid turmoil for foreign
travelers, and the Department of Homeland Security, where officials believed
that the new passport rules were a valuable antiterrorist tool and needed to be
enforced as quickly as possible. The officials said the Department of Homeland
Security agreed to the one-year waiver, but only after insisting that the
foreign governments provide written assurances of their commitment to ending
passport fraud and to introducing machine-readable passports.
"I wouldn't characterize it as State Department versus Homeland Security, but
it's been a subject of some discussion," a State Department official said.
An official at the Department of Homeland Security said, "We're pleased to have
reached an agreement on a policy that serves all needs, especially our needs in
combatting terrorism." A copy of the cable sent by the State Department to the
American embassies last week was provided to The New York Times.
While the cable suggests that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has not made a
final decision to waive the Oct. 1 deadline for the new passports - it says
only that Mr. Powell "is prepared to exercise his authority to grant a limited
waiver" - administration officials said the decision had been made. The
decision to delay enforcement of the new passport rules will be welcomed by the
travel industry, which says it has been devastated by antiterrorism policies
adopted by the Bush administration that have discouraged many foreign travelers
from visiting the United States.
People from countries that participate in the State Department's visa waiver
program are allowed to travel to the United States for tourism or business for
90 days or less without obtaining a visa. In entering the visa waiver program,
the countries are required to certify that they are committed to issuing only
machine-readable passports.
In several countries, including Australia, Britain and Japan, most passports in
circulation are already machine-readable.
American passports are also machine-readable, with passenger information
encoded in two lines of text at the bottom of plastic-coated inner cover.
The 27 countries in the visa-waiver program face another daunting deadline in
October 2004, when they will be required by the United States to issue
passports with computer chips containing facial recognition data.
Travelers from those countries with passports issued before the October 2004
deadline will still be allowed to travel to the United States without visas as
long as their governments have begun a so-called biometric identification
program.
Privacy advocates in the United States and overseas have expressed dismay at
the demands being made by the administration over the immigration policies of
some of its closest allies.
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Received on Tue Sep 09 2003 - 15:57:02 PDT
