If you search in GOOGLE for 'passport policy Belgium' and when the LA times article comes up, click on CACHED you can read the whole thing. Otherwise you have to buy it from the archives.

My thoughts - while I feel bad for this woman , being detained as long as she was, and separated from her kids, I do feel a portion of this problem rested with her. She did not travel on May 16th - the day after the rule went into affect. She traveled almost 6 weeks later. When I am travelling to a foreign country, especially after 9/11, I am checking everywhere I can think of , to make sure I don't need something new.

Another thing - Her airline is in large part to blame- they are supposed to check for correct paperwork/passports before they get to the US.

from the article:
Passengers have the ultimate responsibility for assuring their travel documents are proper, said Sandro Crivelli, Swiss's LAX station manager. "As an airline, we can't baby-sit everybody," he said.

The airline is, however, fined $3,300 for every traveler flown into the country without proper documents.


It is not like this is a hidden change in the immigration rules - it is published and out there for anyone to see.

My apologies for the sarcasm.

gocats, depending upon which part of the US your sister-in-law is traveling to, entry through Canada might be an option of last resort. Even if they request her passport at the border, which seems unlikely, they may accept a non-scannable passport. If she's traveling to Texas, this probably isn't feasible. If she's traveling to New York, Seattle or Chicago, it might work.

Well at least we're all still entitled to our own opinions which is comforting..even if everyone in the country doesn't agree with them.
The story in The Post indicated that Belgian passports were being singled out already since they are supposedly easily counterfeited. I am not so sure this "new" requirement has been as "widely reported" as was inferred by one of the posts above...otherwise it wouldn't have come as such a surprise to the original poster and probably to others who will subsequently read this string.

This seems as if it's going from the sublime to the ridiculous. One minute you're asking hilarious questions on the visa waiver form -
(i) Have you ever been convicted for a crime involving moral turpitude ("I don't know. What's that?").
(ii) Are you now involved in espionage or were you a Nazi? (obviously the answer is "Doh! You guys are far too clever for me. It's a fair cop").
The next minute you are deporting Belgians.
Whatever happened to the question about communism at immigration? Seems the only one sent home was Charlie Chaplin!

Hi AR,

You must keep in mind that instead of keeping people on the dole we give them jobs preparing government forms.

ira: if that wasn't true it would be funny!

LOL ira :)

My feeling on it is, that I can't see where machine readable passports will really make a tremendous difference, except for catching the most unsophisticated attempts at counterfeiting passports. That should have been happening all along. Machine readable documents, whether by bar code, mag or ocr technology certainly aren't hard to produce. Holographic images, security threaded paper - those are tougher to break.

Anyone with a good printer that can produce a convincing passport can produce it in a machine readable format. That just saves immigration time in entering data. Biometrics would be about the only sure way to match document to person and even then it's only useful info if it's all tied into a database which verifies validity for everyone who hasn't already been identified by law enforcement somewhere.

To me, it just seems like an efficiency thing or less. If the EU countries or Japan decide that a new feature is necessary, like a specific holographic image, is the US then obligated to revise it's system? Or are they just going to toss the visa free agreements out the window at some point? Not sure that this particular step makes long-term sense.

Anyone have an idea where a list of compliant vs non-compliant countries may be found? Not sure what my in-laws will be facing when they visit either.

Hi Ira. I like it!
If someone can really tell me what moral turpitude is, I promise to take my tongue out of my cheek.

Just read in today's NY Times that the new passport regulations are POSTPONED until Oct. 2004 - EXCEPT for Belgium!

It's nice to read some good news for a change... Obviously some people have come to their senses.

Hope this helps,
Andre

Here in Belgium, I have read of several people that could not board a plane to the US because they did not have a new passport (although their old one was still valid for at least 6 months). A visa is now also required for anyone changing planes in the US; so anyone from, lets say, South America, who wants to fly to Europe via the US now needs a visa; since getting a visa to the US when you do not actually plan to visit the country, is too much hassle, those travelers now look for alternative routes. I was wondering if this does not affect US airlines. It probably will.