Bill Would Allow Some No-Passport Caribbean Travel Until Mid-2009
The current passport regulations went into effect in January, but a requirement that air travelers present a passport to reenter the U.S. from the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada and Bermuda was suspended last week in the wake of massive delays in processing passport applications.
Just a little commentary on this whole passport snafu: The Western Hemisphere Travel Inititative underlying the passport requirements for travel to the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada and Bermuda was sold to the public as a vital national-security issue, part of the War on Terror and necessitated by the need to keep terrorists out of the U.S. If the stakes were really so high, why in the world was the U.S. government so ill-prepared for what was a very predictable wave of passport applications this spring?
We'll have to wait to tally how much money this fiasco has cost the Caribbean in tourism dollars and how many Americans had their travel plans altered because they didn't have or receive a passport in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, the solution from Congress and the State Department is to suspend the rules for up to another 17 months. Basically the government is putting the needs of travelers ahead of security, which is nice on one level but kind of disturbing on another. If that's the solution then why was it so all-fired important to get these regulations in place by January 2007? Is this really going to make Americans more secure, and if so how can we afford to give "The Terrorists" another 17 months to enter the U.S. without a passport? Are the Caribbean passport regulations just another security charade?
“Putting the needs of travellers ahead of security” shouldn’t be seen as disturbing. It should be seen as comforting. It simply means that there the security need isn’t as necessary and pressing as it is being presented by the current administration.
That’s just too bad if the Carribean lost tourism money and the same goes for Americans who have to wait for passports. They had since 9/11 to get passports.
Actually, that’s not accurate. Rules for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which require passports to reenter the U.S. from the Caribbean and elsewhere, were not finalized until November 2006. So, really, anyone planning to travel who didn’t already have a passport had very little lead time to get one. The real question is why the federal government was so ill-prepared to deal with the very predicable flood of passport applications that occurred after the rules went into effect.