Close the Shoe-Bomber Loophole

To fully appreciate the gift Congress just sent al Qaeda, recall the Christmas season of 2001.
On December 22 of that year, American Airlines Flight 63 was somewhere over the Atlantic, carrying 197 passengers from Paris to Miami, when a stewardess noticed a man lighting matches. As strange as it seemed, it looked like he was trying to set his shoelaces on fire. When she tried to stop him, he bit her.
Fast-moving passengers—9/11 fresh in their minds--flew to the aid of this stewardess. They subdued the match-lighter and lashed him to his seat.[1]
Ten months later, Richard C. Reid — AKA the “shoe bomber” – stood in a federal court and defiantly admitted attempting to blow Flight 63 out of the sky. “I’m a member of al Qaeda,” he said. “I pledge to Osama bin Laden and I’m an enemy of your country, and I don’t care.”[2]
Who gave this murderous fanatic a U.S. visa? Truth be told, no one. Under a loophole in the immigration law called the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), all Reid needed as a British citizen to put himself in a position to murder a plane-full of Americans was to purchase a ticket on a U.S.-bound flight.
According to The London Daily Telegraph, a laptop captured in Afghanistan contained evidence indicating al Qaeda clearly understood the benefits of Reid’s citizenship. “His British passport was described as perfect cover,” the paper said.[3]
Reid was not the only al Qaeda terrorist who exploited VWP. “In addition,” said a 9/11 Commission staff report on terrorist travel, “Zacarias Moussaoui, an al Qaeda operative suspected of being primed as a possible pilot in the 9/11 plot, entered the United States February 23, 2001, from London England using a French, ‘visa waiver’ passport.”[4]
Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001 for staying longer than the 90 days he was routinely granted when he arrived in Chicago with this French passport. As Moussaoui later admitted in court, he sat in jail for three weeks declining to warn U.S. authorities of the attacks that were about to happen.[5]
Congress started VWP as a pilot program in 1986. It was designed to facilitate tourism and reduce the workload of State Department consular officers who vet foreign nationals applying for visas. Originally, it applied to only 8 countries, but was eventually expanded to 27. In 2000, Congress made VWP permanent.[6]
Even though VWP aided al Qaeda terrorists Reid and Moussaoui, President Bush announced last fall that he wanted to expand the program and use it to reward our allies in the war on terror with visa-free travel to the United States. Not surprisingly, that decision flabbergasted former Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin. “We ought to be ending this visa-waiver program not expanding it,” he told USA Today. “There’s a reason why terrorists are keen to obtain passports from visa-waiver countries: They don’t have to undergo extensive background checks.”[7]
Last week, Congress sided with Bush. It sent him a bill, ostensibly designed to fulfill the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which includes provisions making it easier for countries to join the visa-waiver list.
In typical Washington fashion, congressional backers of expanding the Shoe-Bomber Loophole say it will “strengthen” security. The bill, they point out, says VWP expansion cannot happen until DHS establishes an electronic system for tracking when aliens leave the country at airports and that countries cannot be added to the visa-waiver list unless they are helping the U.S. on counterterrorism matters and meet certain minimal standards for the rate of overstays by their nationals, the rate at which visas have been refused to their nationals, the security of their passports and their willingness to promptly accept repatriation of their nationals ordered removed from the United States.
Even some of these provisions have loopholes, however. DHS, for example, has already abandoned plans to electronically monitor the exit of foreign nationals at land borders (as opposed to airports), so the bill will not create a system that allows the government to really know which aliens have left the country and which have not. The bill also vastly increases the acceptable “visa-refusal” rate for countries added to the visa-waiver list. Under current law, a country cannot have had 2% or more of its nationals refused U.S. visas if it wants to be added to the list. That jumps to 10% under this bill.[8]
In other words, if 9 out of 100 applicants from country “X” were denied visas because they were suspected terrorists, country “X” would still qualify for visa-waiver listing.
That’s nuts. If Congress is serious about protecting American against terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the Shoe Bomber Loophole should be closed.

By Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA,
an immigration reduction organization whose intent is to reduce United States' annual immigration to pre-1965 levels.