by Frank James
An aspect worth considering that's unmentioned in the above video report is that the federal government was warned years ago it didn't have the resources to process all the passport applications that would pour in.
The phase in of the passport requirement was initially scheduled for Dec. 2005. At a Senate subcommittee hearing in June 2005, Paul Ruden of the American Society of Travel Agents told lawmakers in oral and written testimony of the limits of the State Department's abilities to turn out passports.
Yet another dimension of the advance planning impact is the question whether, in the time available, the Department of State can gear up sufficiently to handle a vast increase in passport applications in the normal course, without forcing many travelers to incur still higher costs for passport expediting services. While we have heard anecdotally that passport applications have increased in recent weeks, we have seen nothing that measures that increase against the total need if the new rules are made effective with the year-end 2005 deadline in place. Since the vast majority of Americans do not have passports now and since the markets affected by the WHTI (Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative) are traveled predominantly by persons without passports, we anticipate the demand for passports in the wake of a rule requiring them may well exceed the processing capacity of the State Department.
The State Department wound up getting extra time before the entire program was implemented and still couldn't meet the demand. But they can't say they weren't warned.
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Comments
And we are going to register and investigate twelve million illegals? And we are going to keep track of 200,000 guest workers? Get real.
Posted by: c. perry | June 8, 2007 6:24 PM
The immigration (Amnesty) bill promised a future 24-hour turnaround on security checks, when the government couldn't do passports inside of three months.
Which just shows the whole security-check promise was a sham.
Posted by: Bruce | June 9, 2007 8:43 AM