NATO Invitees Upset Over U.S. Visa Rules

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Maybe it wouldn’t be so awful in nicer weather, but it rained buckets all night long. The sleeping bags were cold and soggy. It was impossible to get a comb through your hair. And there wasn’t a warm cup of coffee to be had.

By sunrise, the dream of visiting America for 70 Czechs recently camped on a narrow sidewalk outside the U.S. Embassy here was fast becoming a nightmare.

“This is humiliating,” said Eva Svozilova, 20, a bleary-eyed computer technician hoping to spend two weeks in Los Angeles next month. “It is crazy having to do this, in the rain and all. But what other choice do we have?”

Spurred by unusually cheap air fares, newfound prosperity and a fascination with things American, a record number of Central Europeans want to vacation in the United States this summer. But because of a highly restrictive U.S. policy on tourist visas, untold numbers are not making it beyond the consular offices of American embassies.

Tough visa requirements are not new for Central Europeans--they have a well-documented habit of overstaying visits, U.S. officials say.

But this summer, there has been an unexpected change in attitude among the transatlantic travelers. Following the decision last month to invite the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, residents of the three countries are demanding to be treated as close family--not the bumbling cousins of yesterday unwelcome at the American dinner table.

People around the world complain about U.S. visa policies, the indignity of waiting in long lines and the seeming arbitrariness of consular officials.

But upcoming NATO membership has transformed the ever-sensitive debate into a simple issue of fairness for many Central Europeans: If we are good enough to risk our lives with you on the battlefield, they say, we should be good enough to share your campgrounds and theme parks.

“You cannot be accepted as military allies and have travel restrictions at the same time--what kind of partnership can that be?” asked Jerzy Borowczak, 40, the Solidarity union leader at the bankrupt Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. “If they had to choose, I think Poles would prefer if the Americans changed their visa policy rather than invited us to join NATO.”

Outside the U.S. Embassy in Prague, a chorus of groans erupted from the soaked crowd when the issue of fairness was raised.

“Americans can come here without a visa, and there are thousands of them in Prague,” said Jana Zajicova, 28, a philosophy student from the Czech capital. “But we have to sleep on the ground. It is degrading. I don’t know if I still want to go to the United States after this--NATO allies or not.”

Zajicova, like many first-time U.S. visa applicants here, is young, relatively well-off and an experienced traveler. Unlike the generations of Iron Curtain vacationers before them, a growing number of Central Europeans are enjoying the benefits of the economic changes, having already toured the Roman ruins, swum the Spanish beaches and hiked the Swiss Alps. America is the next great adventure--and if it is slightly beyond their means, there is always a bank loan or a generous employer, they say.

“I have an invitation here from the branch of our computer firm in Sunnyvale,” said Svozilova, who was awarded a company-paid excursion to Los Angeles with several fellow employees. “But still, I’ve been here since 10 o’clock last night.”

An American diplomat in Central Europe said there has been a “hysterical reaction” to the visa requirement among recent travelers, some of whom have complained to consular officials that it violates their basic human rights, an appeal commonly invoked in the past against Communist travel restrictions.

Although more tourist visas are being issued than ever, the volume of would-be visitors to the United States--about 30% higher than last year here in the Czech Republic--has inevitably led to more refusals, according to U.S. officials.

In the past few months, about 5% of Czech visa applicants have been rejected; the rate typically fluctuates between 2% and 10%.

“If our consul general was in private business, he would be up for a very big bonus,” said an official at the U.S. Embassy in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, referring to the massive influx of tourist visa applications.

Michael Zantovsky, until recently the Czech ambassador in Washington, said the visa quandary is among the most vexing issues in relations between the NATO invitees and their new ally.

“I am one of the biggest proponents of Czech-American relations and a real fan of America, but in this particular case we are not being treated fairly,” Zantovsky said. “After we sign the NATO treaty, we will be good enough to travel armed to the teeth to defend the West Coast of the United States, if that should ever be required, but I suppose only then there will be no visa requirement.”

U.S. officials say they understand the frustration among law-abiding foreign visitors.

But a country’s membership in NATO has no effect on U.S. immigration policies. Until the 1980s, all foreigners (except Canadians and Bermudans) required a visa to enter the United States, and even today, residents of three longtime NATO members--Turkey, Greece and Portugal--must still obtain them.

Under the 10-year-old Visa Waiver Pilot Program, tourists and business travelers from 25 countries are allowed visa-free entrance to the United States. But U.S. officials said none of the Central European countries meet the program’s strict criteria, which include low rates for both visa refusals and visa violations.

“We are grateful for the NATO alliance, and heartened by the will of those people joining it, but we still have immigration laws,” said Brian Jordan of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which must approve countries admitted to the waiver program.

“These [Central European] countries are part of a general problem of visa ‘overstayers’--people who choose to stay longer in the United States without extending their visas,” he said. “People who overstay their visas only hurt their fellow countrymen.”

The INS estimates that there are about 70,000 undocumented Poles in the United States, about 40,000 of whom have overstayed their tourist visas; last year, more than 44,000 of the 117,500 non-immigrant visa applicants from Poland were refused. Although numbers are much lower for the Czech Republic and Hungary, U.S. officials say residents of all three countries fit the general pattern of high-risk travelers: They come from places where salaries are a fraction of those in America.

“The relative economic parity between the United States and countries like Germany makes it clear the average German isn’t going to drive a taxi in New York City,” said a U.S. Embassy official. “That changes dramatically when the taxi driver earns more than a doctor or lawyer back home. If you are only making $3,000 a year and you say you are going to the United States for vacation, we have to ask, ‘How are you going to pay for Disneyland?’ ”

But critics say U.S. immigration practices are not always so clear-cut. Central European violations are meaningless, they say, when compared with the 2.7 million undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Even among Europeans, disparities can be inexplicable.

According to the INS, Ireland is second only to Poland in the number of undocumented U.S. residents, yet Ireland was admitted to the waiver program in 1995. “I don’t know why,” Jordan said.

Zantovsky, the former Czech ambassador, said politics and bureaucracy have helped to undermine confidence in the program. The Czech Republic has no great tradition of immigration--legal or illegal--to the United States and actually met the visa waiver criteria in 1996, he said. But since then, the refusal rate for Czech visa applicants “has gone up quite mysteriously,” he said.

Kazimierz Dziewanowski, Polish ambassador in Washington in the early 1990s, says he has explained countless times to Poles that they need Americans more than Americans need them. And having lived in the United States, he said, he has seen the situation up close.

“I was once approached by the Polish community in America to meet with some young Poles living in the region of Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia,” he said. “So I invited them, and we had a great gathering at our embassy, until I realized that at least half of the audience was illegally in the country. So I had to make it short.”