U.S. Ends Argentines’ Ability to Avoid Visas

U.S. authorities on Wednesday banned Argentines from coming to the United States without a visa because of worries about a growing exodus of visitors seeking to flee their economically ravaged nation and find a permanent--and illegal--home in America.

The emergency order by the Justice Department marks the first time the United States has thrown any country out of its visa waiver program, which allows nearly 17 million business travelers and tourists a year from 28 other nations to bypass the normal U.S. visa process.

The United States is also examining the visa waiver status of five other countries--Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Uruguay--because of concerns about potential abuses. Those reviews were planned before Sept. 11, but the terrorist attacks sped the process as authorities pushed for wide-scale reforms to plug cracks in the immigration system.

Argentine visitors, numbering more than 400,000 a year under the visa waiver program, now will have to go through the time and paperwork of getting a visa before they leave Argentina. U.S. officials said the change, which was met with grudging acceptance from Argentina, will allow them to do more vetting of prospective visitors.

The decision is not intended as “a punishment” for Argentina, said Christopher Lamora, a spokesman for the State Department’s bureau of consular affairs. “The decision is in order to make sure that the U.S. government can effectively enforce U.S. immigration laws.”

The Immigration and Naturalization Service said the change is a step toward preventing illegal overstays. The visa application process would give U.S. officials an opportunity to sort through Argentine requests for travel to America and turn down those who might have plans to stay in the U.S. permanently but lack the legal status to do so.

Since Argentina’s economic collapse began late last year, many residents have tried to leave the country for better opportunities elsewhere, with skyrocketing numbers seeking to enter the United States, Spain, Italy, Israel and other nations.

New York and Miami have been particularly popular destinations. A senior Argentine consulate official in Los Angeles, however, said there has not been any noticeable increase in Southern California.

The fiscal crisis enveloping Argentina gave an added urgency to that nation’s review and triggered the decision to remove it from the program, officials said. Argentina’s participation in the program was deemed to be “no longer compatible with the enforcement of immigration laws of the United States,” the Justice Department said.

“The economic instability was certainly a big part of this decision,” said a Justice Department official who asked not to be identified. “There was a concern that we’d have a lot of people coming to the United States without intent to leave, and we’ve already seen some increase that gave us reason for concern.”

U.S. officials have no firm numbers of Argentines who may be overstaying the 90-day visits that are allowed them under the visa waiver program.

In the last few months, however, many would-be visitors from Argentina admitted to customs officials at U.S. ports of entry that they wanted to find permanent work here to escape the economic woes at home, U.S. officials said.

Those people have been denied entry and sent back home. But visitors who were less forthright with customs officials about their intentions may have eluded detection, officials acknowledged.

U.S. residents have been allowed to travel to Argentina without a visa since 1991, and Argentines visiting the United States have done the same since 1996. An estimated 411,000 Argentines took advantage of the waiver program to visit the United States without a visa in 2000, the last year for which data are available, immigration officials said.

But the visa waiver program “is based on the presumption that people from a particular country or area would not have any particular reason to want to stay,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters. “When their circumstances change so dramatically back home, particularly in economic ways, one has to reexamine some of those presumptions.”

Argentina, once home to one of the world’s most envied economies, has been wracked by worsening economic and political instability since late last year. Unemployment has soared above 20%, the federal government defaulted last month on part of its $141-billion debt, and the peso has been devalued by more than half its value against the U.S. dollar.

Embassies in Argentina have been besieged with people desperate to secure entry visas and work permits, and according to a recent survey, a third of the nation’s 37 million people would like to leave the country if they could.

Particularly worrisome to national leaders is the fact that many young people and professionals--people in a position to help rebuild the economy--are among the potential exiles.

Argentine officials, who were warned several weeks ago that they could be cut from the waiver program, appeared to take the news in stride Wednesday and lodged no formal objections. They said they were hopeful of regaining the status.

“This is an internal decision of the United States, and we understand that,” said an official at the Argentine Embassy in Washington.

The Argentine official characterized the U.S. decision as a “preventive measure” and said it is too early to tell whether significant numbers of Argentine visitors are actually overstaying their welcome in the United States.

Because Argentina’s economy only began veering toward full-scale crisis in December, many visitors who came here since the onset of the turmoil are still in the country legally under the 90-day window, he noted.

Argentines “are going to continue to come to the United States. They are just going to have to get a visa to do it,” the official said.

Indeed, with the new policy taking effect immediately, long lines of Argentines who were angry and dismayed by the pending change formed outside the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires as they sought permission to travel to the United States.

The change will be “a big deal” for Argentine travelers who will face increased scrutiny in the future, predicted Mario Diament, an Argentine professor at Florida International University in Miami, which has a large population of Argentine-born residents.

“If people mean to overstay their allotted time, they will, visa or no visa,” Diament said. “The new order applies to the people who will travel next,” Diament said.

The Justice Department’s decision could also intensify debate about the future of the visa waiver program as a whole.

Out of about 30 million short-term entries a year by foreigners into the United States, more than half are from the visa-waiver countries, which include France, Germany and Britain, along with a handful of smaller countries.

Increasingly, critics have argued that the program has contributed to overstays by visitors, but supporters say it also has helped streamline a vast wave of global travel and commerce.

“The first question is, should we even have a visa waiver program,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group favoring more restrictive policies.

“It probably makes sense as long as it’s run as a tight ship. The problem is we don’t manage the thing as tightly as we should,” he said. “The INS doesn’t have any idea who’s going home and who hasn’t. So there’s no yardstick to measure which countries should be participating in the visa waiver program.”

To qualify for the waiver program, countries are supposed to meet several criteria, including political and economic stability, passport security and a low refusal rate by U.S. officials of their visa requests.

But critics claim the program is vulnerable to abuse by criminals who may use stolen or tampered-with passports to enter the United States or who have illegally entered the visa waiver country before traveling to America.

“Hopefully, [the Argentina decision] is the start of a trend,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors deep cuts in immigration. “With 9 million illegal immigrants in this country, clearly there’s something wrong, and the visa waiver program is a big part of it.”

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami and Associated Press contributed to this report.