U.S.-bound travelers to notify DHS of travel plans ahead of departure

The summer traveling season is upon us, but Europeans are worried that U.S. post-9/11 preoccupation with security may disrupt it. They point to measures now making their way through Congress, or being proposed by DHS, which require, among other things, that travelers from some countries register their travel plans online forty-eight hours before departure.

A DHS pre-travel registration proposal, for example, would apply to the twenty-seven visa waiver countries (that is, countries the citizens of which do not need a visa to enter the United States for ninety days) and to the twelve countries seeking to gain this visa waiver status.

The New York Times’s Brian Knowlton writes that the current European members of the visa waiver program are not exactly thrilled by the forty-eight-hour requirement: Business people often change travel plans at the last minute, for example, and the two-day prior notice requirement would impose great difficulties on them.

Russ Knocke, DHS spokesman, said that online registration could be done fewer than forty-eight hours before departure. “The concept is that whenever the ticket is purchased,” he said, “there’s a quick ‘ping’ to give us advance notice on who’s going to travel to the U.S.”

The DHS proposal does not stop with prior travel notice: The proposal would also require new and existing visa waiver countries to improve data-sharing, more rigorously report lost and stolen passports, and guarantee they will repatriate citizens who are ordered out of the United States.

Michael: The following text should be in a blue box

Visa waiver program

To be a member of the visa waiver program, countries must be judged as reliable travel and business partners of the United States. The current twenty-seven members were required, among other things, to have a record of very low rejection by American consular officials of the visa applications from a country’s citizens — less than 3 percent of the total. Until 9/11, the low total reflected the low probability of a country’s citizens’ overstaying visas. Since 9/11, terrorism concerns have played a growing role.

The problem with extending the visa waiver program to the new members of the EU is that these countries have rejection rates far higher than the 3 percent threshold. Estonia had a rejection rate last year of 7.1 percent; the Czech Republic, 9.4 percent; Hungary, 12.7 percent; and Poland, 26 percent, according to State Department figures.

The countries now in the waiver program are Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.