Visa freedom... and regional ignorance

PEOPLE from the following nations no longer require a visa to visit Guam: Brunei, Burma, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nauru, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Solomons, Un

ited Kingdom (including Hong Kong),

Vanuatu and Western Samoa.

The US Government made up the list by calculating the rate of visa denials by country of origin. Countries where visa denials are high such as the Philip pines and Korea were eliminated no matter how much Guam pressed for their inclusion on the visa-waiver list.

Japanese, for example, only rarely over

stay US visas, hence they were good candidates for the no-visa arrangement.

SOMETIMES Governments in North America need geography lessons, to wit: • For months the Uo Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) showed St Kitts, the former British Caribbean col ony as a South Pacific Island in its statistical reports. • Canada’s instructions to its consular officers say the citizens of the Solomon

Islands do not need a visa to enter Cana da, but people from the ‘British Solomon Islands’ do need such a visa. • Similarly, Canada tells its consuls that citizens of American Samoa need a visa if they want to visit Canada, but that Nationals of the United States do not need visas; however, the only Nationals (as opposed to citizens) of the United States are American Samoans and US National status is the norm for residents of that territory. • Finally, the INS General Counsel felt it necessary to write ‘Western Samoa was and still is an independent country’ when he defined what was and what was not part of the United States for the pur poses of its alien amnesty program. In that program aliens who had been illegal ly on US territory since January 1, 1982, could seek legal status. The General Counsel ruled that the program applied to Guam, but not to American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshalls or the Republic of Palau. □