Posted on 08/12/2007 9:47:54 AM PDT by vahet pole
Prague (dpa) - Daniel Novy, a spokesman for the Czech embassy in Washington, did not celebrate when US President George W Bush signed into law a bill that introduces new rules for visa-free travel to the United States.
"It is the way it is," Novy tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa matter-of-factly. "It is neither a complete victory nor a complete defeat."
That is the gist of what the Czech Republic and five other former communist nations - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia - said in a recent statement.
They billed the new US visa rules a step in the right direction but also a step that failed to meet their expectations.
Former communist states, which are now close US allies and members of the European Union, have long been persuading the US Congress to lift the visas for their citizens.
"It is a relict of the Cold War," Novy says.
But the long-awaited new rules for visa-free travel to the US are, at least for now, leaving behind most of those Eastern European allies who have fought hard for being included in the visa-free club.
According to the new rules, countries may get into the US visa waiver programme if US embassies reject fewer than 10 per cent of their citizens' applications. At this point only the Czech Republic, at 9 per cent, and Estonia, at 7 per cent, would meet the condition.
For Eastern European diplomats the rejection rate criterion is an eyesore, no matter how generous it would be. "It's a subjective criterion that is impossible to influence," Novy says.
The criteria for granting visas are arbitrary and entirely subject to the whims of US consulate employees, Eastern Europeans have long complained.
Anecdotal reports in Poland for example suggest applicants should visit US consulates on Fridays, when employees are in good spirits ahead of the weekend and tend to approve more applications.
And while Eastern European diplomats in Washington are identifying draft laws soon to hit Congress that could result in visa-free travel faster, Novy says the visas continue to turn Eastern Europeans away from the US.
"We've become spoiled," says 27-year-old Latvian Marina Jegorova. "While getting a US visa may not be complicated, you have to go, get all paperwork, wait. Everyone's used to travelling without visas since we've joined the European Union."
Since the former communist states entered the EU and the US dollar has been tanking, Eastern Europeans have not been so keen to travel oversees to look for illegal jobs.
Some 2 million Poles (rejection rate of 26 per cent) are estimated to have found jobs in Western Europe, particularly Great Britain and Ireland.
Costly trans-Altantic flights to jobs in Chicago or New York have become far less attractive than inexpensive bus trips or quick budget flights to relatively close London or Dublin.
"Everyone goes to Ireland to work," says Jegorova' boyfriend Vitalijs Solovjovs, a 26-year-old transportation company employee. "Going to the US has become unfashionable and expensive."
The couple says if Latvia (rejection rate of 21.6 per cent) had a visa-free travel to the US, they would have travelled there, but probably wouldn't have stayed.
"The idea that someone will think about me that I want to stay there is absurd," says Veronika Hamsikova, a 31-year-old Czech architect with a job in Vienna.
She says that her profile - young, self-employed, unmarried and childless - would certainly land her in trouble during her visa interview.
But she is not angry, at least not like her mother, a virologist who has been to the US on a number of research gigs for several months at a time. "She told us, unless they abolish it I am not going there," Hamsikova says.
Well, at least for Czechs, that could finally happen within 18 months, Novy estimates.
Meanwhile, any number of Saudis can come here to study at flight schools...
Yeah : )
Sounds like they want to come here to work (illegally).
Or take any course in our universities!
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