US Passport Requirements And Tourism

This week a delegation from the Caribbean Tourism Organisation and the Caribbean Hotel Association left the region for Washington DC to meet with US State Department officials to discuss what they perceive to be a new threat to visitor arrivals (and foreign exchange) in the regional islands from the United States. That threat is the requirement for some American citizens to have passports when returning from visits to the Caribbean – not to mention Canada and Mexico – and the damage it will cause to Caribbean economies.

There has been a temporary lifting of the requirements, but the Caribbean officials are contending that the matter needs to be further addressed. Added to that they are saying that a number of regional destinations and hotels have already reported losses in visitor arrivals and income since the passport requirements were put into effect. In other words, they are stating that some damage has so far been done to the Caribbean, that there is the potential for greater harm in the future and that the current lifting of the passport requirements has not gone far enough.

It is not clear why the term “some American citizens” is being used with reference to the requirements for US passports. The connotation appears to suggest that the people being referred to may be predominantly those who have acquired US citizenship by other means than by birth. Yet this may hardly be the case if strict immigration requirements are to be enforced without discrimination or preference.

Here in Anguilla, where the tourism industry caters for the upper end of the market, there have not been any official reports about a downturn in visitor arrivals due to passport difficulties. This is probably because our high-end visitors are frequent travelers with the necessary travel documents and are well in tune with US immigration requirements. Whether there is a problem in destinations where mass tourism is the order of
the day, is a matter to consider. Apart from tourists per se, it is known however that some persons from the Caribbean, residing in the United States and having US citizenship, have not been able to visit their families in the region due to lack of a US passport. In the past, persons having some form of American status were in a position to travel to and from the United States on their birth certificate, driver’s license and other forms of identification.

Unfortunately, with the rise and risks of terrorism, travel has become a great security matter negatively impacting even the citizenry of every country. Every place has the right to protect its borders from criminal elements and America, with all the threats directed against it, is no exception. The US Congress has established June 2009 as the deadline date by which the passport security requirements should be fully implemented. By then, too, Americans will be able to travel everywhere they want on earth with their passports. The Caribbean will need to do more to continue to attract them in droves to the region or lose them to other destinations. There is currently a backlog of passport applications in the US but it will not last forever.

In the meantime, just how successful the Caribbean tourism officials will be in getting the US State Department to go further in relaxing the passport requirements is anybody’s guess.