Week ahead: Boxer yields on Israel visa waiver
A look at the Middle East issues Congress will be addressing the week of May 19.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has dropped controversial visa waiver language from her US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act, Al-Monitor has learned, paving the way for easy passage in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week.
Boxer is expected to offer an amendment during the May 20 mark-up that would nix language requiring the Department of Homeland Security to offer Israel visa-free travel once it has “made every reasonable effort, without jeopardizing the security of the State of Israel, to ensure that reciprocal travel privileges are extended to all United States citizens.” Also removed: a mandate that the administration exempt Israel from the requirement that its visa refusal rate dip below 3% before it can be admitted (Israel’s current refusal rate is 9.7%).
Instead, the new amendment includes a sense of Congress that Israel should be admitted into the program once it has complied with the program’s requirements. It also authorizes — but doesn’t require — that the country be admitted with a refusal rate as high as 10% as long as it has complied with all other provisions, “including extending reciprocal privileges to all Americans without regard to race, religion, national origin, or ethnicity.”
The original language was modeled after a stalled effort by Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., that has provoked an uproar among Arab-American groups and held up action on Boxer’s bill since it was introduced in March of last year. Groups such as the Arab American Institute argued that this would have institutionalized what they call lsraeli discrimination against visitors of Arab background.
