U.S.: No Visa As Of January 2009?

The U.S. administration MIGHT cancel the visa regime for Czechs during the Bush administration, by January 2009 at the latest, several sources SUGGESTED in Czech Television news broadcast Tuesday.

KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED, IF YOU CARE.

The refusal rate as of now is 6.7 percent.

According to The European Voice the list of the countries who might see the end of the regime includes:

• Greece
• Cyprus
• Malta
• Estonia
• Hungary, and
• the Czech Republic

Big surprise, some political analysts say, that it does not include Poland which is one of the countries to host the missile defense facility.

Nope, it is not a surprise. The governments of both the Czech Republic and Poland have previously said that they will not exchange the radar for cancellation of the visa regime. Both issues are so complex that the politicians can’t treat them as if they were horses for trade. The refusal rate in Poland is HUGE, it is over 25 percent. It means that every fourth visa application is denied. I don’t live in Poland but I have been there many times and I do have decent access to information due to my profession so I dare to say that the financial motifs of Polish citizens to travel to the States are more frequent than in case of Czechs. I think Chicago or Cicero, IL and Polish, well, minorities, speak for themselves.

There is one more reason why we can say that the Polish government is in a huge trouble. U.S. citizens do not need visa to travel to Central European countries. Their citizens who had been pissed off for waiting in lines for U.S. visa suggested to apply visa regime on Americans. The response was: Doing things IN RETURN would not help, and it would not work, either. So if the governments were unable, or unwilling to haggle before, nobody should expect it would start working now.