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Consumer Reports


Travels to U.S. will mean high-tech passports for some visitors

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) Come fall, traveling to the United States will get more complicated.

Foreign visitors from 27 countries must get a computer-friendly passport by October, or they'll need a visa to enter the United States.

The new requirement for "machine readable'' passports is the latest in a series of measures designed to keep better track of foreigners entering and exiting U.S. borders. But for the travel industry, it's one more thing that may discourage tourists from choosing the United States for their vacations.

Latin American and Caribbean nationals, and other citizens who are required to have visas, already are facing tightened visa requirements such as personal interviews. The nonrefundable visa application fee recently soared 53 percent - to $100, a considerable sum in many Third World countries.

"The combination is a tough thing to swallow,'' said Stuart Blumberg, president and chief executive of the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association. "International visitors are 55 percent of our business - this could be very negative.''

As of Oct. 1, tourists from Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand will need a passport that enables immigration inspectors to confirm their identity on a computer database.

If they have neither a visa nor a machine-readable passport, they run the risk of being refused entry. Ultimately, that decision will be left to the border checkpoint official's discretion, said Stuart Patt, spokesman for the State Department's Consular Affairs Bureau.

"It's up to the immigration inspector whether to send them home,'' Patt said. "They might just say, `It's OK this time, but next time get a new passport.' ''

Airlines likely will also have to ensure that passengers have the correct travel documents at check-in, he said.

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Machine-readable passports, which the United States has issued to its citizens for 20 years, contain two lines of scannable characters at the bottom of the biographical information page.

"We've been trying for years for every country to have machine-readable passports,'' Patt said. "They're more secure and much harder to tamper with.''

The requirement will get even tougher in October 2004. Travelers to the United States then will need passports with biometric identifiers, such as facial bone-structure characteristics, incorporated in a contactless chip in the document.

Tougher passport requirements are not the only changes in U.S. travel rules.

Starting Jan. 1, all foreigners entering the country will be fingerprinted and photographed, sparking fears of long lines at heavily trafficked ports of entry such as Miami International Airport.

They also must undergo a personal interview, which for many entails traveling to a city where a U.S. consulate is located.

For nationals of some countries in the Visa Waiver Program, especially those in the European Union, complying with the machine-readable mandate will be a hurdle given the looming deadline. Many nations are just starting to issue computer-readable travel documents.

"It's coming out, but it takes a long time,'' said a spokeswoman for the French Embassy in Washington, D.C., who did not want to be identified. "The French are doing it with new passports, but there are many old ones.''

Other nations, such as Britain, Australia and Japan, have been issuing machine-readable documents for years.

"It's not a problem for people traveling on Australian passports,'' said embassy spokesman Matt Francis.

The battered U.S. travel industry, which has suffered a 20 percent drop in international visitors since 2001, is worried because Western Europeans are the United States' biggest source of overseas tourists and business travelers.

"The great fear of the travel industry is that it will be more trouble to come to the U.S. than to other places,'' said Tom Flanagan, spokesman for Visit Florida, the state tourism agency.

Flanagan said Gov. Jeb Bush has been lobbying Capitol Hill for less restrictive tourist-entry rules.

"The hassle factor hasn't become unbearable yet, but it's a compounding effect,'' said David Whitaker, senior vice president of marketing and tourism for the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Travel Industry Association of America spokesman Allen Kay said the struggling industry understands the need for security - to a point.

"We're the big attraction in the world - people want to come here,'' he said. "But there are a lot of places people want to go. It's not hard to see how this is going to discourage people.''

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© 2003, The Miami Herald Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services