From The New York Times
.... By the end of September, tourists from 27 nations, including Britain, Germany, Japan and Australia, will for the first time be photographed and fingerprinted on arrival. And beginning at the end of October, passengers from 22 countries, mostly in Europe, must carry machine-readable passports in order to visit without visas. .... Tourists from Europe and other industrialized countries are not typically required to apply for visas to visit the United States, but they will have to do so if they do not have machine-readable passports by the Oct. 26 deadline. Officials at the Travel Industry Association of America, which represents the nation's largest airlines, hotels, cruise lines and car rental companies, say some people in Spain, Italy, France and Switzerland still lack such passports. ....
The new policy that requires tourists from 27 industrialized nations to be fingerprinted and photographed affects travelers from 22 European countries and Brunei, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand who can currently travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa. Because students and other visitors from those nations who stay for more than three months are required to carry visas, they have already been subjected to these new security measures, which took effect for all visa carriers in January regardless of country of origin. The policy that requires travelers to carry machine-readable passports will now affect 22 of those 27 nations. The remaining five - Andorra, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and San Marino - adopted the American standard in 2003. |