How the Visa Waiver Program makes it easy peasy for terrorists to get into the U.S.

We rely solely on the countries of origin to do the vetting, and often they have no idea who these people even are

, --December 10, 2015

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If you hadn't already fallen asleep, changed the channel or thrown something through your TV screen by the time President Obama got around to talking about the Visa Waiver Program during his Sunday night lecture on terrorism, you might have wondered just what that was and why it mattered. In essence, this is a program that allows people visiting the U.S. from 38 different countries to get in strictly using their passports, and not requiring them to obtain a visa from a U.S. consulate. It was originally put in place to eliminate some of the hassle for people coming here to do business, but it's quickly become an easy loophole for terrorists to slip through - especially because what little vetting the U.S. is supposed to be doing in the program, the U.S. is not doing:
But the program has two serious security gaps. The first is that the U.S. has become wholly dependent upon the competence and thoroughness of the countries that participate. Visitors' eligibility for entry under the Visa Waiver Program is determined by the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. But a 2012 audit by the Government Accountability Office found that roughly 364,000 people reached the U.S. in 2010 "without verified ESTA approval." This security gap, long ignored, has now become enormously important. Over the past two years, thousands of European citizens have gone to Syria to fight with ISIS, and these killers are returning to Europe. Because they travel through covert channels, evading passport controls, in many cases European security agencies don't know who went where. These men and women can travel freely under the European Union's Schengen Agreement, which has done away with border controls among 26 European countries. Getting into the Middle East from Europe--and back again to Europe--without being monitored by a European security agency has never been easier. And if these agencies don't know, we don't know. ISIS today is likely working hard to identify a group of Europeans who can reach America with only a perfunctory security check to launch an attack. That cannot be allowed to happen. The second problem with the Visa Waiver Program is the ease with which Middle Eastern refugees arriving in Europe seem able to assume new identities. Press reports suggest that ISIS can produce forged documents, such as Syrian passports and driver's licenses. We also know that refugees are discarding legitimate documents that would help identify who they really are and where they come from. After Paris, processing these refugees takes on new significance. Asking a terrorist if he has been to a certain country, such as Syria, is a mirage security measure. One of the greatest security vulnerabilities is a "clean skin"--a real passport obtained using forged paperwork. Once a legitimate passport is procured, it is extremely difficult to discover who the holder really is. With the wave of refugees overwhelming European countries, which are struggling to process them and give them Western identification, the possibility of clean skins being granted is at an all-time high.

An Obama veto of these bills would be 1,000 times more outrageous than anything Donald Trump has ever said in his life

This helps explain why it was so easy for the San Bernardino killers to leave the U.S. and return. It also provides a clear roadmap to ISIS and any other Middle Eastern terrorist organization for how to slip its people into the country. The U.S. has gotten lazy about vetting these people and has farmed out the job to Europeans, who are overwhelmed and have no way to tell if a passport was obtained with fraudulent information. Everyone is hyperventilating over Donald Trump proposing that we put a halt on Muslims coming into the U.S. Whatever the problems with that idea, it is far less important than an actual policy, in place right now, that is failing miserably to prevent terrorists from walking right into the country without so much as a visa because the Europeans couldn't tell who they were, and we couldn't be bothered to put any effort into it ourselves. On Tuesday, the House passed a bill requiring anyone who traveled to Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan in the past five years to get a visa before entering the U.S. There is also a Senate bill that calls on all countries participating in the Visa Waiver Program to collect fingerprints, and for air carriers to provide the names of travelers to Homeland Security. Both of these bills need to pass the full Congress immediately. Then we can see if Obama has any seriousness at all in him concerning U.S. national security. You'd think, at a time like this, it would be virtually impossible for any U.S. president to veto such measures. But this is no ordinary president. His indifference toward the thread of international terrorism is truly extraordinary, and he can usually count on his media protectors to ignore such inaction. But an Obama veto of these bills would be 1,000 times more outrageous than anything Donald Trump has ever said in his life.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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