White House Tightens Visa-Waiver Program in a Bid to Block Militants

PARIS: The White House announced changes Monday to the government's visa-waiver program to try to stop those who have visited conflict zones from easily boarding American-bound commercial flights, a move intended to prevent an attack in the United States similar to the ones that struck Paris.

But the new measures - which include potentially higher fines for airlines that fail to verify their passengers' identities and increased information-sharing between countries - are limited, and White House officials acknowledged that they would need Congress to pass legislation to further tighten controls.

Congressional Republican leaders announced Monday that they would pursue more potent legislation to toughen the waiver program.

"We see a greater threat of foreign fighters coming into Europe," said Benjamin Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.

The visa-waiver program - a special travel arrangement to ease the flow of European tourists and other visitors from friendly countries - poses a far greater threat to national security than the Obama administration's highly criticized plan to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to enter the country, according to law enforcement experts and officials. The extremists who mounted the attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 were not Syrians, but citizens of Europe who might have been able to fly to the United States without getting a visa or going through any of the significant security screening that refugees face.

The visa-waiver program also dwarfs the refugee plan, allowing 20 million foreigners a year to travel to the United States without being interviewed at U.S. consulates and embassies. It covers 38 countries, mainly European but also allies such as Japan, Australia, Chile and New Zealand.

Unlike the screening of refugees, which requires several in-person interviews and an extensive background check that can take more than a year, the visa waivers rely on computerized programs to quickly clear travelers on flights bound for the United States. According to a 2012 government audit, about 2 percent of travelers - or about 364,000 people in 2010 - had gotten into the country without the required verification.

After the Paris attacks, lawmakers and Republican presidential candidates have focused on the program to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States, saying it could easily be exploited by Islamic State terrorists. At least one of the militants who died in the attacks may have posed as a refugee to get into Europe from Syria.

In November, the U.S. House passed legislation that would significantly tighten the screening of refugees from Syria. It would require the director of the FBI, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence to confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat. Obama has said he would veto the bill, calling its requirements "untenable."

While cracks in the visa-waiver program are worrisome to national security officials, business leaders see the program as a boon to tourism and the economy. Foreign tourists who come to the United States under the program are estimated to spend as much as $100 billion a year, and advocates argue that tightening the program would deter tourism, a concern the White House shares. American tourists get similar waivers to travel to Europe and other friendly countries.

"It is something that facilitates important international travel," Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Monday. "It does facilitate the kind of travel that has a positive impact on our economy."

But both parties see reason to tighten restrictions. The Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, Rhodes said, demonstrated that the Islamic State was increasingly focused on targets outside Syria, so the United States must be more careful about screening travelers.

The administration will now require countries to ask travelers to the United States whether they have traveled to conflict zones.

"What they envision with this proposal are countries like Iraq and Syria," Earnest said. A trip to either country would bar passengers from automatic entry to the United States, officials said.

The enhanced measures also include American assistance to other countries to ease the sharing of information about passengers. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will deploy teams of agents abroad who specialize in tracking foreign fighters.

The secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, will ask Congress for the authority to increase fines against airlines to $50,000, from $5,000, for failing to verify a traveler's passport, the administration said. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been asked to study the waiver program and report to the president in two months.

The House majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said Monday that Republicans would push their own changes, which would include requiring that all visa-waiver countries issue electronic passports with built-in computer chips, that they report all lost and stolen passports to Interpol, and that passenger lists be screened against the Interpol database of missing passports.

The measures announced by the White House strike the right balance between economics and national security, said James Carafano, a scholar at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation who has studied the waiver program. He said the measures represent a modest tightening of restrictions without threatening tourism.

"You want to do this in ways that don't confuse or upset travelers," Carafano said. And the chances of a terrorist using the program to make it into the country remain minuscule, he said. "If I'm a terrorist, I'll walk across the Canadian border; my odds are better."

Vulnerabilities in the waiver program have been a longstanding concern at the FBI, the director, James Comey, told reporters after the Paris attacks.

Comey said the FBI was particularly concerned about Europeans who go to Syria to fight with the Islamic State, then return to Europe and are just "a visa-waiver trip away" from getting into the United States.

"That remains, obviously, a focus of our work," he said.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said homeland security officials continually looked for ways to improve safeguards in the waiver program and "to maintain control over it."

Officials said the Department of Homeland Security was working with other countries to add more personal information about passengers to their screening programs. And the government has formed "foreign fighter surge teams" to work with countries to prevent militants from traveling to the United States, although officials did not explain what such teams do.

Earnest expressed frustration that Congress had failed to pass legislation that would bolster the safety of the visa-waiver program, including by passing a law that would bar anyone on the government's no-fly list from buying weapons in the United States and by increasing funding for the screening program already in place.