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The Department of Homeland Security has announced that visitors entering the United States under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) must have machine-readable passports by October 26, or the traveler must apply for a visa to enter the country, according to the U.S. Department of State. Citizens of Trinidad and Tobago and other persons traveling from countries where obtaining a visa is standard practice will not be required to have machine-readable passports.
This new requirement means that if you are from one of the 27 countries in the Visa Waiver Program and want to travel to the United States for basic tourism or business without a visa, you must have a passport that has two typeface lines at the bottom of the passport that contains, in a machine readable form, the information on your biographic page, that is, the photo page of your passport.
Citizens of VWP countries have been able to travel to the United States without visas.
The U.S. government first issued a machine-readable passport in 1981. Machine-readable passports enhance security on several fronts. They are scanned at entry and exit points to verify integrity of the data. Lost or stolen machine-readable passports are easier to track. They also enable faster processing of travelers at ports of entry.
In addition to the October 26 deadline for the machine-readable travel documents, by September 30, 2004, all VWP travelers arriving at a U.S. port of entry will be required to enroll in US-VISIT, a program in which the traveler is photographed and digitally fingerprinted at the immigration checkpoint.
Countries currently participating in the Visa Waiver Program are: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
More information about machine-readable passports is available at:
http://travel.state.gov/visa/tempvisitors_novisa_waiver.html
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