John Shimkus: “I have great respect for Dr. Gingrey. We have talked about this amendment prior to him bringing it up; and I know he is…”

“I have great respect for Dr. Gingrey. We have talked about this amendment prior to him bringing it up; and I know he is very, very sincere. But there is more that has to be told about the visa waiver and the success of not the program itself but in the way in which it is moving to get to an arena where we all want it to be, where we want biometric passports, where we want identification. I chair the Baltic Caucus. The Baltic Caucus has about 45 Members of this body. The Baltic countries are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Some of the newly emerging democracies have only been in existence after the fall of the Soviet Union, and yet they are some of our strongest allies in the war against terror. They have had successful integration into NATO, NATO membership. They are members of the European Union. They have soldiers that have not only fought and died in Afghanistan but also in Iraq. In fact, Lithuania is leading one of the provincial reconstruction teams. These countries are doing everything that we are asking them to do as a nation, as part of the coalition of the willing. How does this relate to visa waiver? Well, we have other allies who aren't part of the coalition of the willing, who already have this venue of visa waiver. So what kind of message are we telling these new emerging democracies, those that are, by percentage of soldiers, committed by far outstripping some of the larger countries that are part of our alliance?…”