In light of the recent terrorist activities in Glasgow and London, I thought this might be a good time to discuss a piece of legislation I’ve introduced to help prevent terrorist attacks in our country. The United States currently operates a Visa Waiver Program, which enables citizens from certain “friendly” countries to travel to the U.S. without obtaining a visa.  There’s a major flaw in this legislation – terrorists don’t just operate in unfriendly nations. As we witnessed this past weekend, they operate within the borders of our closest allies as well. Until we can screen every person entering the United States under the Visa Waiver Program, we cannot continue to support a program that allows terrorists to cross our borders unchecked.

The 2001 Patriot Act requires the Visa Waiver program to include a machine-readable and tamper resistant biometric identification system – but this system is not yet in place!  Even though these mandated security requirements are not fully operational, we still allow the program to continue – widely opening the door for terrorists to enter our country every day.

To fix this, I introduced H.R. 1342, The Secure Entry Act, to suspend the Visa Waiver Program. Until we have a fully operational system to check the criminal and terrorist backgrounds of every visitor who arrives in the U.S. and biometrically confirm their identity, the Visa Waiver Program shouldn’t continue.

Currently, 27 countries are covered under the Visa Waiver Program, but many more seek inclusion. In June, I proposed an amendment to the State/Foreign Operations Appropriations bill to prevent that money from being used to negotiation an expansion of the Visa Waiver Program.  The only thing worse than allowing this program to continue without rigorous security measures in place is to expand the program while still neglecting these security measures. I am very glad that my amendment passed. 

We cannot allow terrorists to cross our borders unchecked simply because their passports are from London or Canada.  The recent terrorist activities in Europe underline the critical importance of passing H.R. 1342.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 4:54 pm and is filed under 11th Congressional District, Gingrey Legislation, Homeland Security, Immigration and Border Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.