Some Republicans aren't pleased with the Obama administration's proposed exceptions on new visa rules. | Getty Obama official: Iranian nationality laws won't dictate new visa rules

The Obama administration will not rely solely on the laws of Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan in determining who is a dual national and thus ineligible to travel to the U.S. without a visa, a senior U.S. official told POLITICO on Wednesday.

The official's comments came as members of the administration faced withering criticism from Republicans during a House committee hearing for carving out exceptions for journalists, business leaders and others under a new law covering the Visa Waiver Program.


The visa waiver program has historically let citizens of 38 countries, most of them in Europe, visit the U.S. with relatively minimal security checks but no visa. The law, passed in December and designed to counter terrorists with Western passports, now requires a visa for anyone from those 38 countries who has been in Iran, Iraq, Sudan or Syria since March 1, 2011. It also requires visas for citizens of those 38 countries who are also nationals of Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan.

But because there's no international agreement on how countries recognize citizens of multiple nationalities, the dual nationality provision has led to confusion about how the U.S. will decide if someone is a dual national. For example, a British citizen whose father is an Iranian is, under Iranian law, considered an Iranian national, even if that person has never set foot in the Middle Eastern country.

How the U.S. decides to apply the dual nationality provision could set an international precedent, one reason it has prompted debate within the administration, where officials are loath to admit the possibility their decisions could be dictated by legislative moves in the four targeted countries.

"The U.S. government will make nationality determinations in accordance with U.S. legal standards and practices, not merely by reference to the laws and practices of foreign governments," a senior Obama administration official said. "The specific process for determining dual nationality is something that's still being discussed in the inter-agency [process] to determine how to operationalize, but stressing that we won't be using the laws and practices of foreign government to do so."

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson dated Wednesday, two leading Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee urged the administration to publish formal guidelines to clarify who will qualify as a dual national.

The lawmakers, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Zoe Lofgren of California, also asked the administration to make exceptions for people who visit Iran for academic purposes as well as Iranian dual nationals who left the country in the wake of its 1979 Islamic Revolution but who visit now for personal reasons.

"Individuals undertaking such travel are key to Iran's potential development into a more modern nation," the Democrats wrote.

Wednesday's morning hearing of the Homeland Security Committee, one of two held during the day on the Visa Waiver Program, was focused far more on the administration's decision to carve out some exceptions to the travel provision of the law.

The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, in announcing the law was taking effect on Jan. 21, said that people who fall under certain categories of travelers to Iran, Sudan, Iraq and Syria could be allowed to visit the United States without a visa.

Those people include journalists who work in those four countries, as well as aid workers and people engaged in certain businesses. Also among those who could qualify are nuclear inspectors from Europe who are involved in assessing Iran's adherence to the nuclear deal it reached with the U.S. and other world powers. But, the administration officials stressed, the exceptions would be made only on a case-by-case basis.

Republicans on the committee said the administration had gone too far, while some Democrats also raised concerns. They pointed to email exchanges and other deliberations in which they said lawmakers had warned the White House that they did not want exceptions other than for diplomats or people engaged in military service.

"This really defies the will and express intent of the law that we passed in Congress," Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said. He, like others, was especially worried about how Iran could take advantage: "The president has put the best interest of Iran over the security interest of the American people.”

Hillary Batjer Johnson, a top official in the State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau, stressed that the Visa Waiver Program in general had numerous safeguards designed to weed out people from the 38 countries who pose potential threats, and that the partnerships built with those countries over the years had led to a tremendous amount of intelligence sharing.

When pressed by lawmaker after lawmaker as to whether the administration was breaking the law by issuing exemptions for some travelers, Johnson pointed to a provision in the law that allows U.S. officials to make exceptions if they deem it is in the national security interest of the United States.

Before citizens of the 38 countries can visit the United States, they must fill out what's known as an Electronic System for Travel Authorization Form which tells them if they can simply hop on a plane or if they must first get a visa. That form will be updated later this month with questions aimed at determining if someone is a dual national or if they have traveled to Iran, Iraq, Syria or Sudan.

The administration's insistence that it will not rely on foreign laws to determine how to define dual nationality could offer some comfort to members of the Iranian and Arab diaspora who in many cases have little control over whether or not they are dual nationals.

The American Civil Liberties Union has urged lawmakers to rescind the dual nationality provision, arguing that it amounts to ethnic discrimination and warning that the 38 countries involved in the Visa Waiver Program could respond by imposing similar restrictions on Americans.

On Wednesday, the ACLU circulated a letter in which it pointed to prominent European nationals of Iranian descent who would be targeted under the law. Among them was Marjan Vahdat, a famed vocalist trained in classical Persian music who was kept from boarding her flight to perform in California in January.

"By singling out these dual nationals, the new visa waiver law stigmatizes them as inherently suspect and sends a message of prejudice and intolerance against Iranian, Iraqi, Sudanese, or Syrian communities in the U.S.," the ACLU writes. "The discriminatory treatment of dual nationals creates a wedge of distrust between those minority American communities and domestic U.S. law enforcement."

But supporters of the new restrictions on dual nationals argue that the measure is fair, noting that the governments in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan could try to game the visa system to press their own interests in the United States.

In his written testimony for a hearing of a House Oversight Committee sub-panel Wednesday afternoon, Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, points to the example of Mansour Arbabsiar. Arbabsiar is an Iranian-American dual national convicted of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States under the direction of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

"Clearly, not every dual national is an Iranian agent," Ottolenghi testifies. "But virtually all agents of the Iranian regime who over the past decade were involved in conspiracies to commit acts of terrorism, illicit financial activities, nuclear and ballistic procurement, were dual passport holders."