New US Passport Rule Won’t Affect Travel of Bahamians To US

"I want to clarify that WHTI will only affect American citizens," she said. "It does not change any of the travel arrangements that apply to Bahamian citizens entering the United States. Bahamians have always needed a Bahamian passport to get into the United States. The old laws apply where you can have a visa free travel to the United States."

For visa free travel, Bahamians still need a police record along with their passport to enter the United States.

The US Department of State recently issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). American citizens are allowed to travel in and out of the United States as long as they provide a photo ID and a government issued receipt proving they have applied for a passport.

This will remain the case until September 2007 for air travelers re-entering the United States from the region.

"Starting January 2008 US and Canadian citizens will be required to have a passport. Many persons in the United States did not have a passport," she said.

Ms. Ramadan explained that because of this, there has been a delay in the process of obtaining a passport in the US.

"After the 9/11 Commission in 2004, suggestions were made to improve security in the United States and one of those suggestions was to impose more regulated, comprehensive travel regulations for the United States," she said.

"We attempted to ramp up our production facilities to handle the increase of applicants for passports. Unfortunately, we had no idea as to the number of individuals who would be applying for passports and so what happened is that it created a very long backlog of passport applications due to this increase of demands.

"Although our passport offices have been working literally 24 hours a day and although we have brought back people who have retired to help out and added 300 new employees to help out and even though we have opened up new passport processing centers the demand has still exceeded our production capabilities."

Ms. Ramadan added that although the new delay has facilitated travel for many people, it is only a temporary measure.

"It is ending at the end of September, at which point we hope that we will be able to issue the passports more expeditiously and that our productive capabilities would have increased," she said.

WHTI has been broken down into two parts, Ms. Ramadan noted.

The first part of the initiative applies to air travel while the other applies to land and sea travel.

She said the reason that land was included in the initiative is because there is a high amount of travel that occurs between the US, Canada and Mexico.

"The regulations that were issued in 2005 and amended in 2006 required that our government – the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State – had to put in place new procedures for entering land and sea and those requirements were supposed to be put in place no later than June 2009, but they will be in effect by January 2008," Ms. Ramadan said.

She said that the change in the deadline would not affect The Bahamas except in the case of sea.

"It will not affect The Bahamas except for the sea because a large amount of the tourism from The Bahamas comes by sea," Ms. Ramadan said.

She said the American sea passengers will no longer be able to prove orally that they are American.

"You can’t just show up on a cruise ship and say ‘I am American. Let me in’," she said. "You have to have some kind of proof that you are American and right now that type of proof is a government issued photo ID or some other document saying that you are American."

She also pointed to other changes that will occur for cruise ships.

"Sometime in the near future we will institute new procedures for cruise ships and land passage. They will be instituted in the summer 2008 or shortly thereafter," Ms. Ramadan said.

She said the changes will include American citizens showing a new passport or a new passport card.