Elaine Duke

The U.S. government has a sovereign responsibility to vet visitors and potential immigrants to this country. This vetting leverages information received from foreign governments, including identity data, passport integrity and information about criminal and terrorist history.

Generally speaking, foreign governments have the ability to verify the identity of their nationals and alert us to any derogatory information about them. Therefore, it’s important to ensure that foreign governments are sharing information they have that we need to determine whether immigration applicants pose a threat to our country. This is the minimum we ask of all countries.

The good news is that the vast majority of countries meet our new baseline. The State Department worked closely with nearly every foreign government to make sure they understand and comply. Some that were not initially in compliance made important changes. We now receive terrorism information from countries that did not provide it before, and these countries stepped up their travel document security to prevent fraud.

OUR VIEW: Third time's no charm

However, eight countries either have not made enough changes to meet our baseline for information sharing, or have proved unable to effectively and consistently cooperate with the U.S. and mitigate internal terrorist threats. Thus I recommended, and the president approved, restrictions for these countries until they comply or the threat from these nations is lowered.

The restrictions imposed by the president were carefully considered to prevent the entry of foreign nationals for whom the U.S. government lacks sufficient information to assess the risk they pose. In addition, the restrictions were customized, given the unique factors in place in each country.

This is not permanent. As foreign governments agree to enhance cooperation, we will lift restrictions as appropriate. This effort is one of several ways we are raising the bar of U.S. security across the board. We are serious about our responsibility to protect the American people — and to put America’s security first.

Elaine Duke is acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

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