Homeland Security Chief: Mend Controversial Visa Program, but Don’t End It

For years citizens from 38 countries ranging from Andorra to New Zealand have been able to enter the United States without a visa. With terror risks growing, however, calls to get rid of the program are growing louder.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson defended the program Thursday against critics who say it raises the risk of terrorists from European or other nations in the program finding their way into the United States. Johnson said the program needed to be preserved, but acknowledged that it might need to be tweaked to ensure travelers from American allies could enter the United States relatively quickly without making it easier for terrorists to come in as well.

Johnson said changes would likely involve additions to the “security assurances” required of “almost every” country that participates in the program.

Those changes would build upon new demands for information from travelers that the United States added to the program in November, Johnson told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. The new requirements included additional passport data, contact information, and other potential names or aliases.

“The visa waiver program is an important, valuable program,” Johnson said. “There are some out there who want to scrap it. I think that’s a mistake.… It is a program that must continue, but there are ways in which the security of the program can be improved, to enhance security while maintaining the integrity of the program.”

Critics such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have targeted the visa waiver program on the grounds that it invites attacks from citizens of Western nations, including many of the European countries in the visa waiver program, who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State and then return home.

In July, Matthew Olsen, at the time the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that at 1,000 Europeans and 100 Americans were fighting in Syria. Those numbers have increased as the bloody civil war there drags on. In September, the French Interior Ministry estimated that at least 930 citizens were fighting in Iraq or Syria. On Tuesday, meanwhile, Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, put the current number of foreign fighters supporting the Islamic State at more than 19,000.

In his own remarks Thursday, Johnson said he was more concerned about European foreign fighters returning to their homes to carry out attacks than those from the United States try to do so.

“I think that we and the FBI do a reasonably good job of tracking [U.S.] people who are going to Syria, going anywhere near Syria, attempting to go to Syria to take up the fight there,” he said. “The bigger challenge [is] the European countries.”

Alex Wong/Getty Images News