promote tourism?
p. 41 · Read in the full issue
Migration
Control migrants or promote tourism?
By David North
SEVERAL Pacific island governments are struggling with the question shall we insist visitors have visas issued in advance (to better control migration) or shall we waive such requirements (to encourage tourism)?
Papua-New Guinea has opted for tighter controls, Guam for easier ones, while New Zealand and American Samoa squabble over who’s eligible for easy passage through
international airports.
PNG’s Foreign Affairs Department has ruled all aliens, including tourists, have to secure a visa before they arrive in the nation. (Visas used to be routinely available at air and seaports.) Further, if a tourist in PNG gets a job offer, he will have to leave the country to apply for an employment visa there will be no more of the adjustment of status (to the work visa) as there was in the past.
Guam has a different set of priorities. Its principal economic activity is tourism, and its principal customers come from the newly prosperous nations of East Asia, all of whom used to have to go to a US consulate to get a visa. And the US does not issue visas casually.
With some prodding from Congressman Ben Blaz (R. Guam) the US Immigration Service has begun to let people from certain nations come to Guam as short-term tourists without visas; in a highly statistical manner, the Immigration Service has calculated which nations had the history of the least abuse of tourist visas, and started letting residents of those nations come to Guam (and elsewhere in the States) without visas.
People from Japan were the first to be allowed to arrive in Guam without visas, then Koreans, and most recently Blaz announced residents of Taiwan were about to obtain the same deal. The announcement came as particularly good news to struggling Continental-Air Micronesia, the only airline with direct service between Taiwan and Guam.
Meanwhile a controversy, or maybe just some confusion, has broken out over tourist visas between the Congressman from American Samoa, Eni F.H.
Faleomavaega (D), and the government of New Zealand, New Zealand, like Japan and Great Britain, has a good record for not abusing US tourist visas, i.e. its people are unlikely to stay illegally after being admitted as tourists. So they can come to the US without a need for a visa. Part of the deal is that Americans wanting to go to New Zealand are treated the same way and there’s the rub.
New Zealand has long figured it had an immigration-control problem, and people from its former mandate, Western Samoa, were at the head of the list of those who settled permanently in New Zealand without getting permission from the local authorities.
The New Zealand government evidently decided residents of American Samoa were more like Western Samoans than they were like other people travelling on US passports, and it decided to make a distinction based on a little-known element in US nationality law Wellington decided no visas were needed by US citizens but they would be needed by US nationals.
It so happens the only US nationals are people from American Samoa a historical accident. Everywhere else under the US flag the native-born and the naturalised are citizens.
The Congressman, in late September, protested the situation to Acting US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and to the New Zealand government.
What the Congressman did not point out is that American Samoa has its own very tight immigration laws; and while it is easy enough for a foreigner to get a tourist visa, it is extremely difficult for the same alien to get permission to settle in American Samoa permanently. And, unlike PNG, there is no provision in the law for that foreigner (unless off Samoan extraction) to convert his or her status to that of a US national.
The government of American Samoa handles its own immigration policy, and it is a tough one. Guam would like to have these powers, but Congress has not agreed.