Obama, Give a “Refreshment” to the US’ Best Customers

To seal the rapprochement between the United States and Brazil, President Barack Obama should receive President Dilma Rousseff at the White House with a present: waiving the visa requirement for Brazilians entering the United States.

Rousseff will be in the United States from April 9–11. She will have a bilateral meeting with Obama in the White House. She will also go to Cambridge, Massachusetts to visit Harvard University and to discuss scholarships for Brazilians in the Science without Borders program.*

Obama has made the sale and exportation of American products in general one of the main points of his economic recovery program. The scholarship plan of President Rousseff is great news for the Americans, because it will bring a lot of revenue to American universities.

Including Brazil in the Visa Waiver Program would be another wise move.

Nowadays Brazilians are the tourists who spend the most in the United States — on average, $5,000 each trip, including travel and expenses. In spite of this, Brazilians are required to submit to lines at the consulate, the pains of interviews with dispatchers, and general bureaucracy to spend their dollars in Miami.

According to the most recent data of the Office of Traveling and Tourism, from January to November last year, 1,500 Brazilian tourists were in the USA, an increase of 28 percent. Brazil is the seventh-largest source of tourist dollars in the USA, the first being Canada, followed by Mexico and Great Britain. Citizens of these countries are not required to have a visa to enter the U.S.

At this time, 36 countries are in the Visa Waiver Program, which allows their citizens to travel for tourism or business for up to 90 days. To be accepted in this program, one of the prerequisites is that the country has an approval rate of 97 percent of its applicants for visas. Today, 95 percent of Brazilians who apply obtain visas.

The obstacle is the lack of security in the Brazil, which might motivate people from other countries to use it as a trampoline to enter the USA. The security of passports and identification cards and the control at the borders are considered insufficient.

The paranoia over the supposed presence of Hezbollah in Brazil seems to have echoes also.

Recently at Disney World, Obama announced that he would be expediting visas for Brazilians, reducing the waiting period for getting them.

But still the bureaucracy of interviews and lines will continue.

A waiver of visas would indeed make a difference.

It would not be the first time a Latin American country would have visas waived — Argentina and Uruguay once managed to be part of the program, but were excluded in 2002 and 2003 after the financial crises hit them.

Some countries in Central and Western Europe, such as Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia and Slovakia, were entered in the Visa Waiver Program. Political considerations contributed greatly to this — it was part of a diplomatic offensive by the U.S. to bring the former satellites of the former Soviet Union closer.

If the United States really wants to make a gesture of rapprochement with Brazil, and elevate it to the position of a strategic partner, as was done with India (for whom Obama openly backed getting a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in Nov. 2010). Washington could begin by including Brazil in its Visa Waiver Program. And maybe, who knows, follow this with support for it having a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

But it is unlikely that this will happen.

Bill Burns, deputy secretary of state and adviser to Hillary Clinton, will come to Brazil on Feb. 29 “to prepare the ground” for Rousseff’s visit to Obama in April.

Beyond the traditional bilateral issues — cotton, ethanol, energy cooperation, elimination of double taxation — the Americans want to discuss the privatization of airports. American businesses that are service providers, such as food providers, are very interested.

But Brazil’s action in multinational forums is another focus: Washington resents what it considers to be “automatic vetoes” to sanctions against Syria and Iran. For the USA, Brazil has an increasingly large role in the international arena and the United States should “make the best use” of this importance. Brazil’s participation as a force for peace as part of MINUSTAH** and in the Libyan intervention are considered examples of this.

*Translator’s note: The Brazilian government’s Science without Borders program will provide scholarships to undergraduate students from Brazil for one year of study at colleges and universities in the United States.

**Translator’s note: MINUSTAH is an acronym for the French Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilization en Haiti, or The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which has been in operation since 2004.