Article was published in the daily tabloid SL Õhtuleht on February 28, 2008

Explaining U.S. Visa Waiver

Ambassador Stanley Davis Phillips

During his visit to Tallinn last week, Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Richard C. Barth made a momentous announcement: the U.S. was ready to move ahead with an agreement that would allow Estonia to join the U.S. Visa Waiver Program by the end of the year. This announcement is the latest and best news in a series of discussions that began in November 2006 when President Bush stood here in Tallinn and promised to work with Estonia to expedite its inclusion into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. As we get nearer and nearer to the day when this promise becomes reality, however, I would like to clear up several misconceptions that appear to have surfaced about the U.S. Visa Waiver program.

Visa-free travel has never meant identification-free travel – or travel without any security checks. The U.S. Visa Waiver program was also never intended to create a kind of a trans-Atlantic Schengen visa zone. As a result, it is unlikely that travel between Europe and the United States will ever be as easy as traveling within the European Union itself. Instead, the goal of the U.S. Visa Waiver program is to facilitate the short-term travel of businesspeople and tourists to the United States. Anyone interested in traveling to the United States for a long period of time – especially for work or study – will still be required to have a visa.

The U.S. Congress mandated a number of changes to the U.S. Visa Waiver program through the 2007 “Secure Travel and Counterterrorism Partnership Act.” While one series of changes is designed to enhance the program's security requirements, the second set of changes is meant to extend visa-free travel to nationals of foreign countries like Estonia that are partners in the war on terror. As a result of this law, the U.S. Visa Waiver program has entered a period of transition which will last until the end of 2009. This new U.S. law requires that every country currently in the Visa Waiver program must meet the same enhanced security requirements that new candidate countries like Estonia are being asked to meet. There has been – and will be – only one U.S. Visa Waiver program.

One of the new security requirements mandated by the “Secure Travel and Counterterrorism Partnership Act” is known as Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA). The ETA form is an electronic tool that will gather the same information (i.e., the answers to approximately twelve questions) that everyone, including travelers from current Visa Waiver member countries, now provide on a paper landing card on arrival in the United States.  The ETA just gives U.S. officials an advance look at this information and will only need to be filled out once every two years. And by flagging those issues which can be more easily resolved here at the U.S. Embassy in Estonia, the new ETA process will also save some people from the unnecessary inconvenience and expense of getting turned back at the U.S. border for whatever reason. When asked about the cost of using this new system, Assistant Secretary Barth explained that “our intent is to start without charging anything for the ETA.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's office in Brussels has already briefed the European Commission on the new requirements which must be met by all countries that intend to participate in the updated U.S. Visa Waiver program. But as long as each EU country continues to issue its own national passports, admission to the U.S. Visa Waiver program will remain a bilateral issue for us.